In this lesson, we'll outline why it is worthwhile building relationships with influencers. And as I go through this, continue to bear in mind that you shouldn't think of influencers as targets or goals. Because during the entire process, we always want to see the potential relationships as mutually beneficial, where you bring a lot of value to them. That said, let's start with a close look at just what the scope of their impact can be. Now first of all, I'm showing you a Google Trends chart on the search phrase influencer marketing, and this shows how search volume on this concept has gone up dramatically over time. So this is just a market indicator as to how important this concept has begun to be because so many people are thinking about it. And then here's a study from Burst Media where they did an analysis of the power of really targeting influencers. And they showed a nearly 7:1 ROI in terms of the time invested, in building those relationships and what you get back out of it. As I've shown you before in one of the earlier modules, Influencers have large audiences and this is a really important thing because we want to be able to build our own audience and we want to have access to other people's audiences, and influencers can give you that. And they give you that in spades in terms of media people, influencers, and of course, your target demographic audience as well. And so one of the things that's cool too is that the audience of an influencer is often larger than yours. Their reach just may be plain bigger, and that's valuable. But that's not the only thing that you should think about here. We call them influencers for a reason, and as I like to say, it's because they have, well, Influence. And, what that means is, and what I'm trying to show here in this top chart, you see a group of people with an arrow to 20,000 connections. So imagine those people cumulatively have 20,000 connections on social media, and let's say they all share your content. And maybe you'll get 20 shares and ten links out of that. It's better than a sharp stick in the eye. However, in the bottom I'm showing an influencer, who by herself has 20,000 connections, and because she's an influencer, she gets more shares and more links out of the same size audience. And that's what gets back to the key here. People listen to influencers more than they listen to other people. And as I've shown you in a prior chart in the earlier modules, influencers can help you build your audience when they share content. And here I'm showing a share on Twitter in this case the influencer is Suzy Powers as I like to call her. And she shares it on Twitter, gets in front of her audience. And then in her audience, there are other people there who see it, some of whom might start to become your direct audience. Some of them will retweet it and that will get in front of their audiences as well. And then some of the people, even if they don't retweet it, will just start following your content because they saw the influencer share it. That's a great thing. The other thing that's nice too is that influencers can write about you. Here I'm showing an article from Wall Street Journal's Alistair Barr in which he actually wrote about the study of the, I was involved in driving for my company about Google's Mobilegeddon update and this is gold when they write about you. You get the links that you're looking for. You get the visibility which is great stuff. But to make this work, you have to give them a reason to share your content or to write about it. And to do that, let's think about what are the key elements that make that work. Well, first of all it has to be relevant for them, if it's not relevant for them, ain't happening. And then it has to be really good quality content. And, if I haven't got another cross yet, so far in this course. What I want you think about is good is not good enough. You have to be thinking beyond good to excellent content and then also they have to have a certain amount of trust in you, right? If they don't have some level of trust with you and probably some familiarity, your chances of getting that share go way down. And of course they have to see it. The reason why I mention this is, a lot of times people share content on Twitter and say okay, I promoted my content, well here's the problem. That tweet is gone from somebody's tweet stream in 15 seconds, and not everybody has the discipline to go back through their entire Twitter stream to find things that were tweeted many hours ago. So, you might have to do more than just a single tweet to get that visibility. Then, last but not least, if the content isn't unique and distinct in some fashion, it isn't going to attract their attention enough in order to get a share out of them. And so, influencer shares can also lead to links from others. So here I'm showing perhaps this is you in the top left out doing some direct outreach to influencers, or maybe influencers use it in your social media feed. And one of the influencers that you reach out to might let a potential linker know about it or maybe they share it in their social media feed. And what happens is that over time, if you're successful, that potential linker might actually learn about your article or your story from multiple sources. This is really cool. Because like in all advertising, and you can think of this in some sense as a form of advertising, even though we're not paying for it. The multiple impressions actually matter. And if that potential linker hears about it from two different influencers and sees it in other social shares, suddenly they start thinking, wait a minute, something's going on here, maybe I ought to pay attention. So just make sure you get this mechanic with multiple paths to reaching that link are working for you. And then, as I've said in one of the earlier modules, remember that influencers ultimately are an accelerant. We have the virtual circle that I showed you in the very first module in this course, where you have somebody producing great content, as I'm showing in the top left. They share it, it's good for their social media feeds, it helps those social media feeds grow. And in return, your traffic, and links, and potentially new subscribers to your content. That's great all by itself but influencers accelerate that entire process because now they're putting in front of their audience which is probably bigger and they have more influence over that audience than maybe you do over yours, this just makes everything go faster. We've just been through a review of why it's beneficial to have relationships with influencers. Suffice it to say, the potential impact on your content marketing efforts is large, and that makes pursuing this relationship worthwhile. In the next lesson, I'll start to show you some initial steps to building a relationship with them.
