Reaching influencers and getting in front of their audience can appear to be extremely challenging. However, if you approach it correctly, you can finesse your way in front of their audience. The strategy I want to talk about is the “roundup post”.
The general idea of the “roundup post” is you’re going to ask a bunch of influencers, and experts in your niche to contribute to a blog post you’re putting together. They could be on YouTube, host a podcast or run a blog. As long as they have an audience that you can reach through their social media.
How to Roundup: Finding and Contacting Influencers
Here’s how to put together a roundup post that will get influencers to contribute, and in turn, share with their audience when you publish the post.
First, you want to find the influencers in your niche that share your audience. You might wish to start with influencers with small to medium sized audiences, but this method can work really well with more popular influencers.
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The trick is to reach out to as many of them as possible. Most influencers especially if they are big enough, are going to be too busy to do this, but at the same time you don’t want to limit yourself. So don’t be afraid to send an email out to even the biggest person in your industry or niche, because you’d be surprised how many of them respond, especially if it’s a very short answer that’s required from them.
One tool I like to use to find influencers in my niche is Ninja Outreach.
Ninja Outreach is a tool that will allow you to find influencers based on keywords that you search, and collect them to reach out to them all at once.
However, Ninja Outreach isn’t required for you to do this. You can use Twitter search or Google to find them and put them in a spreadsheet, and then contact them all.
I’m going to recommend contacting at least 50 people. I know it sounds like a lot, but you’re going to want to reach out to as many as possible, and then hopefully get back maybe 10-20 responses to include in a roundup post.
Contacting Influencers
Next, you’re going to send them an email with a very detailed question, to add their answer in a roundup post.
First, you need to collect all the contact information or the links to the contact pages of your shortlist of influencers.
I like putting this all into a spreadsheet to see who I contacted, who responded and who I need to follow up with. Ninja Outreach also takes care of all this for you.
Now it’s time to contact and pitch your list of influencers.
When you pitch them, you should first introduce yourself and make it short.
For example:
Hey,
My name is John Doe. I run a blog called John Doe's Blog, and this blog reaches X amount of people month.
Even if you’re small, don’t be shy. Just let them know you’re starting out, and you’re a big fan of their work.
Next, ask for their opinion or advice as part of your roundup.
The question you ask them should be very specific. You don’t want to ask a very general question because you want to make it as easy for them as possible to answer your question, to encourage a response.
Ideally, you are going to tell them to “keep it short, don’t worry if it’s just a sentence or two or keep under 50 words”.
As an example, with my blog, I might reach out to 50 people in the online business space, and I might say
Hey, I’m doing a roundup post of all the experts in the online marketing niche, and I’m asking them what’s the ONE tip that you can recommend to any new marketer who’s looking to buy Facebook ads.
After you contact a bunch of influencers, give it some time, at least, a day or two, and then follow up. If you don’t get an answer from a few people, follow up with them.
Use a plugin like Boomerang to help with this. Boomerang is a Gmail extension that will allow you to get notified if you don’t get a response back from the person you emailed.
Creating the Roundup Post
Now that you’re getting some answers, it’s time for your roundup post. For example, my post earlier might be called “23 marketing experts share their best Facebook ad tip”.
Once the post is published, it’s time to email all the influencers that participated, and let them know the post has been published.
Give them a link to the post, and tell them “thanks”. I think the trick is you don’t want to ask blatantly for the share. Now this is a little bit counter-intuitive. Some people might say you should, and some people might say you shouldn’t.
If you don’t want to take my word for it, I would, at least, recommend you test it. Assuming you got 12 influencers to participate, email 6 of them and ask for the share, and the other 6 don’t ask for the share.
Try it out. It’s not that hard to do, especially since you’re not writing the content yourself! You’re getting the content from the influencers. The more people you reach, the better. Plus, people love this stuff! Most influencers have egos and who doesn’t enjoy contributing their knowledge and expertise?
If you found this helpful or have any suggestions and comments, leave them below!
