In the last lesson, I spoke about viewing the process of building a relationship with an influencer as one of building a mutually beneficial relationship. In fact, I suggested that you try to add more value than you receive. In this lesson. We'll take that process a step forward and go through some specific tactics and how you can begin to collaborate with influencers. The first thing is, don't be too forward. If you try to get too pushy about it, what happens you get out in front of yourself and you're going to put the person off and you're not going to get the desired outcome. This is really important to be careful about. You got to understand the timing and how the relationship is developing and let it take the time it takes. I've had influencer relationships. I've spent more than a year building it before it ever got to a point where there's any form of collaboration with them. Of course, it's wonderful if you can get an introduction. It's a great way to get started. Because when you get that introduction from someone that the influencer trusts, some of that trust passes on to you and the influencer now will be willing to chat with you. This is a really important point. Also, just to get more mechanical about it. Now let's assume you don't get the introduction. Resharing their content on social media is a good thing to do. It's the beginning of showing your willingness to give. You can do a lot of this but don't get obsessive about it because then it looks like you're obsessing over them. Just share things that you think are particularly valuable and focus on doing that. And of course, if you can engage them in dialogue, try to go to places where they've written a blog post or something like that. If comments are allowed, then jump in and actually make some useful comments on the post. Engage them in a dialogue. If they respond to you, respond back and actually get some conversation going. This particular slide I'm actually showing the first conversation I ever had with Mark Schaefer, who I've been aware of as an influencer in the marketing space for a while. I had the opportunity to comment on his post and say, how to go do that. As you can see, he responded to me, we have just at least to initial interaction. So now I'm actually going to walk you through a few what I call hacks, ways of getting started with collaboration. The first of these is what I call the roundup hack. Imagine that you want to write a post about, 10 most important things that will happen in digital marketing this year. One thing you could do is you could actually go contact 10 different influencers and say, hey, would you be willing to contribute one tip? What's nice about this is that this is actually really easy for them because they don't have to, write a 700-word article. They can probably throw together two or three sentences with something they're passionate about, that they want the world to know about, and that they think's important. It takes them a few minutes and they're done. That's what's nice about a roundup. I'm actually showing you an example post here that was done on bruceclay.com. The first three people are actually from their own internal team started providing tips. Then below that are other people that they got tips from, related to this. One of the things that's really cool about this, guess what happens when they go out and publish this post? All the influencers in that list, they share it in their social media. Presto, you've got some immediate visibility for what you've done. You'll be surprised. You don't have to be the most authoritative site in the world or even in your market space to get influencers to participate in something like this, because it is so easy for them. You do have to have at least a basic level of credibility, of course. The second hack I want you to think about is watching for opportunities on social media. Watch what an influencer is posting online and see when they put up questions or places, things, or they're asking for help. Here's a tweet that was done by Jay Baer where he was on the road and he asks, what's the best barbecue place in Memphis that's open on Sundays. There's an opportunity to answer his question if you happen to know and actually, you get a little bit of interaction going with him. That would be pretty cool. Now, this is an example of something which is not specific to what Jay Baer does for a living on me. By the way, I wasn't the one that knew the answer to that question. But that's beside the point. The thing here is, you can also see these kinds of opportunities related to your market space. I'll share an example of that that I participated in a little later on in this module. Just keep in mind though, as you're doing all this, It's not about what you want. Yes. I know you want a relationship with the influencer you want them to share your stuff, you want links. But in conducting these dialogues, that doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the value that you can offer to them. Study what they publish, learn what they value, determine what you can do for them, then find the right time and place to make them aware of it. Remember, in this entire process you have to be patient. I said it earlier, but I'll say it again. You can spend more than a year, even two years building a relationship before anything of value ever comes out of it. Few more hacks that I want to go through. There's what I call the low lying fruit hack. Look, it's just a fact. There are some people that are more approachable than others. There may be some influencers that won't give you the time of day this year or next year or the year after that. It may be because they're too busy. It may be that they got some initial negative impression about you or whatever. It doesn't matter. You might initiate some attempts to have some interaction with 10 different influencers and maybe only two of them will actually give you the time of day. That's okay. You going to start with what's given to you and what opportunities become more available for you. Make the best of those. As you do that, you'll get into situations where you get more visibility that will raise your credibility with the other eight. Don't be afraid to run with the ones that are willing to interact with you and work with you early on. Next up. This is an extension of the roundup hack, and that's the interview hack. Imagine that you did a one-on-one interview with a major influencer. There's one I'm showing at the top of this screenshot here from Tech wyse.com where they interviewed Rand Fishkin of MOZ, who's surely a major influencer in the digital marketing space. If you do it the right way, this can also be not so much work for the influencer. You can get them on the phone and just do a phone call with them and transcribe it, send it back to them by the way, if you do that, so they'll take and edit the transcript to make sure they're comfortable with the output. Or if they prefer, you can email them the questions and they can send you back the response. It's a little bit of work, but you can tailor it to them and, nobody's ever going to be mad at you, if you ask them for an interview, they might say no if they're too busy, but, it is a little bit flattering to be asked. This is a great way to get a relationship started as well. Great thing as I said, they're not much work for them, helps them grow their own visibility too. They're working their own audience too. You'll remember earlier in this module, I talked about the importance of playing not only to influencers but to your entire audience. While if they do an interview with you, that helps them for the process of working their entire audience because, you're part of that audience. Then next up, and I already alluded to this is the conference presentation hack. Many years back, I flew out to, New York where this conference was, just so that I could meet with Matt Cutts, prominent software engineer at Google. I sat in the front row. I was the first to speak with them when the pannel was over. Then I had a plan to make an impression on him. I didn't just do this, willy nilly, I'd actually thought through, here are the points I'm going to make in the conversation with him. I did some things, so I knew that I would make an impression on him. To do that, I had to study first to what his mindset was, and learn all about them as I've outlined in this module. I did this to every presentation he did for several years. The output of that, I've actually interviewed him five different times. You can see some of these interviews have gotten huge number of social shares. They've all gotten tons of links, with awesome from my own personal reputation and visibility. It's not bad, I told you in an earlier module, like the most important influencers, it might be worth it to fly out to meet them. While in this case it was definitely that. Then of course, you have to be opportunistic. You have to look for those opportunities as they materialize. I talked earlier about watching their tweets and things like that. But you have to have the willingness to make the leap with the opportunity that rises. It might not be as simple as telling them the best barbecue place in Memphis, it might be more complicated than that. Now I'm going to walk you through an example. Rand Fishkin many years back, did a post on a free link bait idea on web analytics. He said, someone surely must want the idea, you get 50 thousand visitors and 10 thousand links, if you do this article. He wrote this post, I was the first person to volunteer. In fact, I was the first comment from the post. This is a very popular blog soon. Understand, I had to make this decision in like 60 seconds. I knew I was signing up for hundreds of hours of work. The result a little bit over a year later, is I published a thing called the Web Analytics Shootout Report, which got tremendous visibility in press. I'm not sure it was 10 thousand links, but it did get a lot of links along the way. It also led to my first speaking engagement in the digital marketing industry at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose that year. Then falling on that, it eventually led to this happening guy, Stephan Spencer I'm showing here. Coming to me a year after that. Basically asking me whether I consider being a co-author for the Art of SEO with Rand Fishkin, Jessie Stricchiolaj Stephan. That first opportunistic moment about the free link bait idea was definitely involved in leading to this one. Then this gave me a second thing to think about, because this is going to be even more work than that Web Analytics Shootout. Yet, how could I turn this down? Chance to be co-author of a book with these guys. That's the importance of opportunism. You have to be willing to make the decisions fast when they're important enough. Here's the first edition of The Art of SEO, that published in November 2009. Since then it's been through multiple editions, published by O'Reilly Media, very successful in helping me with my own personal reputation and visibility and a really authority online. But after all this, this is what you get, if you don't add value, you get nothing. You can't ever get away from that. I know I've said it over and over again, but, it's something that can't be said too much in my opinion. In this lesson, we reviewed many different ways to get started in building relationships and to get started working together with influencers. Never lose sight of the fact that you should always be trying to add lots of value to them at each stage in the process. In the next lesson, I plan to show you one more hack, which is how to use Facebook advertising to accelerate your visibility with targeted influencers.
