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 in how you can begin to collaborate with influencers. So the first thing is don't be too forward, right? If you try to get too pushy about it, what happens is 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 gotta 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, 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, really important point. Also just to get more mechanical about it, now let's assume you don't get the introduction, re-sharing their content in social media is a good thing to do. It's the beginning of showing your willingness to give. And 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. And if comments are allowed, then jump in and actually makes some useful comment on the post. Engage them in the dialogue and if they respond to you, respond back and actually get some sort of a conversation going. This particular slide, I'm actually showing the first conversation I ever had with Mark Shaffer, who I've been aware of as an influencer in the marketing space for a while. And I had the opportunity to comment on his post, and I said gosh, I ought to go do that. And as you can see he responded, and we had just at least an initial interaction. So now I am actually walking through what I called hacks, ways of kind of getting started with collaboration. The first of these is what I called the roundup hack. So imagine that you want to write a post to about I don't know, ten most important things that will happen in digital marketing this year. So one thing you could do is you could actually go contact ten different influencers and say hey, would you be willing to contribute one tip? What's kind of nice about this, 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 is important, and it takes them a few minutes and they're done. So that's what's nice about a round-up. I'm actually showing an example post here that was done on bruceclay.com. And the first three people are actually from their own internal team in terms of providing tips, and then below that are other people that they got tips from relating to this. And 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 immediate visibility for what you've done. And 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. So 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 things where they're asking for help. So 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? Gosh, there's an opportunity to answer his question if you happen to know, and actually get a little bit 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 or me. And 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. And I'll share an example of 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 the 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. Okay, few more hacks that I want to go through is what I call the low lying fruit hack. Look it's just a fact, there's some people that are more approachable than others. There may be some influencers that won't give you the time of day this year, 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 sort of interaction with ten different influencers, and maybe only two of them will actually give you the time of day, that's okay. You gotta start with what's given to you and what opportunities become more available for you, make the best of those. By the way, if you do that, you'll get into situations where you get more visibility, that will raise your credibility with the other eight. So don't be afraid to run with the ones that are willing to interact with you and work with you early on. Next up, and this is sort of an extension of the roundup hack that's the interview hack. So imagine that you did a one-on-one interview with the major influencer. There is one I'm showing at the top of this screenshot here, from Techwyse.com when they interviewed Rand Fishkin of MOZ, who's surely a major influencer in the digital marketing space. So if you do it the right way, this can also be not so much work for the influencer. So 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 that they can 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. So it's a little bit of work, but you can tailor it to them, and guess what? 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, so this is a great way to get a relationship started as well. So great thing, as I've said, they're not much for them helps them grow their own visibility too. And by the way, 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. Well, if they do an interview with you, sorry that helps them through the process of working their entire audience. Because guess what, 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 I think it was New York where this conference was. Just so that I could meet with Matt Cutts, prominent software engineer at Google. Just like I said, I sat in the front row, I was the first to speak with him when the panel was over. And 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. And I did something so I knew that I would make an impression on him. And to do that I had to study first what his mindset was and learn about him as I've outlined in this module. And 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 a huge number of social shares, they have all gotten tons links. Was awesome for my own personal reputation and visibility, so it's not bad. I've told you in an earlier module the most important influencers, it might be worth it to fly out to meet them, while in this case it was definitely that. And in this 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 when the opportunity arises. 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 from my own personal story. Rand Fiskin, many years back, did a post on a free Linkbait idea on Web Analytics. And he said, someone surely must want the idea, you get 50,000 visitors and 10,000 links if you do this article. And he wrote this post, I was the first person to volunteer, in fact I was the first comment on the post. And this is very popular blog, so you understand I had to make this decision in like 60 seconds and I knew I was signing up for hundreds of hours of work. This gives you an idea of how far you might want to go to try and add value and build that relationship. The result, the little bit over a year later is I published a thing called the Web Analytics Shootout Report, which got tremendous visibility and press. I'm not sure it was 10,000 links, but it did get a lot of links [LAUGH] along the way. And it also led to my first speaking engagement in the digital marketing industry, at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose that year. An event that I remember, actually quite well. And then following on that, eventually led to this happening Stephan Spencer shown here, coming to me a year after that. And basically I asking me, whether I'd considered being a co-author for the Art of SEO with Rand Fiskin, Jessie Stricciola, and Stephan. And it's like, my goodness, at that first opportunistic moment about the free Linkbait idea was definitely involved in leading to this one. And then this gave me a second thing to think about, because this is going to be even more work that the 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 decisions fast when they're important enough. And here you go, 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 really authority online. But remember, after all this, this is what you get if you don't add value, you get nothing. And 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. So 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.
