Social media can be just as powerful as search engines when it comes to driving traffic to your blog. However, if you don’t have a large following yet, it can be hard to get the attention you deserve. Building a social media presence takes time. While you’re working on that, you can leverage influencers to promote your blog.
Most influencers won’t promote your content for free, though. That means if you want to try this approach, you’ll need a budget. A sponsored post here and there can drive a significant number of visitors towards your blog, which can make the investment worth it.
In this article, we’ll talk about influencer marketing, how it works, and what makes it such a compelling strategy. Then we’ll teach you how to use influencer marketing to promote your content. Let’s get to it!
What Is Influencer Marketing?
The concept of influencer marketing is simple – if someone has a large following on social media, they can capitalize on it by promoting third-party products. Businesses pay them for those advertisements and both reap the rewards.
Since you have a blog, your goal should be to get more visitors to read your content. You can also use influencer marketing to promote specific products on your website, such as e-books.
Traditionally, influencers engage in sponsored posting to promote products, companies, and other social media accounts:
As long as your blog’s content is relevant to an influencer’s audience, you can also take advantage of this marketing strategy.
How to Use Influencer Marketing to Drive Traffic to Your Blog (3 Steps)
The first step in an influencer marketing strategy is to find the people you can rely on to get the word out about your blog. Let’s start by identifying key influencers.
Step 1: Identify Influencers in Your Niche
There’s no hard and fast rule for what makes an influencer. In my experience, you can get the best marketing results from social media accounts with a sizable but not massive following.
In other words, don’t bother reaching out to Kanye West to see if he’s interested in promoting your blog. Stick to accounts that have anywhere between 5,000-10,000 followers for starters. Usually, at that size, influencers don’t charge as much for sponsored posts and you get a decent return on your investment.
Your best bet to find those influencers is to use social media research tools. To promote your blog, you should focus on Twitter and Instagram accounts.
For Instagram research, I like using GroupHigh. It’s an expensive tool, but they offer a free trial you can use to look up hundreds of Instagram influencers in your niche, make a list, and contact them later:
For Twitter, you can use Followerwonk. It’s also a premium tool, but it includes a free search feature you can use to look up accounts according to keywords within their bios:
You can filter users using minimum and maximum values for their follower count, which makes it easy to create a shortlist of accounts to reach out to.
For each account you add to your list, make sure you check out their content. If you want influencer marketing to succeed, the audience for each account you target needs to overlap with yours.
Step 2: Figure Out What Content You Want to Promote
Usually, influencers don’t promote websites outright. It’s more natural instead to point their followers towards specific products, content, and/or other accounts.
That means you have a lot of options when it comes to deciding what content you want to promote, such as:
- Paid products or services you sell directly through your blog (i.e. e-books, courses, etc.)
- Your blog’s (or your own) social media accounts
- Popular posts within your blog archives
Usually, you get the best results by promoting other social media accounts you own. With that approach, you get to build up your own follower count, which gives you an audience you can market to at any time you want.
In practice, the smart move is to test different types of sponsored posts with multiple influencers until you find something that works. For the best possible results, it’s important to rotate between influencers so as not to bombard their audience too often.
Step 3: Reach Out to Influencers to Discuss Prices and Placement
At this stage you should have a list of influencers that can help promote your blog and know what content you want them to focus on. Now, it’s time to reach out to them.
There are two ways you can go about this. Depending on how large a following an account has, they may have an email set up specifically for business inquiries:
If you can’t find any such address, then you’ll have to connect with them the old-fashioned way – by sliding into their DMs. You don’t want to spend too much time crafting a message that might get ignored, so stick to something simple such as:
Hey John Doe, I run a blog about health and fitness and I wanted to talk to you about running a sponsored post on your account. If you have standard rates for different types of sponsored posts, let me know so we can get the ball rolling!
Your goal here is to let influencers know you’re not looking for a free shout-out. That only works in some cases if you also have a massive social media following.
In my experience, your message might get lost in a lot of inboxes. If you don’t get an answer after a day or two, check if they’ve seen your message. For those accounts that ignore you, feel free to chase up once after a week or two. If you still don’t get a response, take them off your list.
Since you’re new to influencer marketing, I recommend you stick with influencers that charge moderate fees relative to your budget. That way, you won’t blow all your money on one post or two and you’ll have room to experiment.
If you haven’t done so yet, set up Google Analytics for your blog so you can track where your traffic is coming from. That way, you’ll be able to gauge the success of your influencer marketing efforts.
Conclusion
Depending on what influencers you court, you can get a lot of clicks for a modest fee. Even accounts with only a few thousand followers can drive a lot of users towards your content. If you look hard enough – and in the right platforms – influencer marketing can be a lot cheaper than traditional online advertising.
Here’s what you have to do if you want to promote your blog using influencers:
- Indentify influencers in your niche.
- Figure out what content you want to promote.
- Reach out to influencers to discuss prices and placement.
Do you have any questions about how to leverage influencer marketing for your blog? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!
Image credit: Pixabay.