Getting Started with Influencer Marketing: Tips and Strategies for the “Unfluential”

Influencer marketing is all the rage. People are realizing that lots of individual folks have a lot of trust and attention with valuable audiences (sometimes big, and sometimes just very specific). Getting these people to share and vouch for your content or product can be extremely valuable.

But how do you actually do that? How do you get those influencers to pay attention to you and share your stuff?

In general, much of the advice you’ll get here will be around “adding value” and “being of use”.

But what if you’re a new company or just a company (or individual) without much of a brand or audience in a niche? How can you “add value” for influential bloggers and social sharers when you don’t have your own influence and distribution?

Personally,  I’m always interested in “zero to one” progressions like this. I’ve been interviewing some of the people behind successful blogs to get at these very kinds of “origin stories” for now impressive platforms, and unearthed some interesting stuff, like the series I did for SEJ a few months ago:

• How Pescetarian Kitchen Drives 50K Blog Visits Per Month
• How KISSmetrics Built a Reputation for Putting Out Great Content
• How Help Scout Went from Zero to 250K Visitors Per Month
• How WordStream Moves the Needle on Traffic, Leads, & Awesomeness

I think a lot of people are interested in these kinds of early inflection points: how did that site or show or person go from start to where they are now? Frequently when you hear a tip from an accomplished person (about anything, really, but particularly in marketing and content distribution) you get some percentage of readers / viewers / listeners who respond:

“Sure, that’s easy for you, you already have an audience! That would never work for me!”

The reality, of course, is that in almost every such instance, there was a time when that “internet famous” writer or podcaster had zero followers or listeners. They had to build their audience.

So where can you start?

In this post I’ll walk through nine ways you can unlock influence you didn’t realize you had and help the “influencers” in your niche.

First Thing’s First: KnowTheir Audience

The foundational element behind any successful effort to “help” or “add value” is to understand what’s valuable and helpful to the specific person you’re trying to help.

If you identify a smart, relatively new blogger who is actively trying to build an audience, they might be intensely grateful for an opportunity to be interviewed on your blog – even if it’s not hugely popular – and introduced to your audience.

If a blogger already has a massive audience, though, there’s a strong chance they also have significant time commitments, so that same interview opportunity would not only not be something they appreciate, but something that’s an inefficient use of their time (and subsequently something that’s either a burden that they view as more of a favor to you than something you’re doing for them, or something that they have to spend their limited time considering and turning down).

Ask yourself some questions before you look to implement any of the below tactics:

• Where does this person seem to be spending their time?
• What are they working on that seems like it could use the most help?
• What are they working on that you could most and best help with?
• What are you asking of them in doing this “favor” for them? Are they getting more than they’re giving in the transaction?
• Is there a better way for them that you can deliver this same favor / value? Can you provide the same basic value without them having to give up any of their time or effort?

Think in terms of what will actually be valuable and of use for these people, not just what’s most convenient and useful for you. As I’ll outline below, there are a lot of different ways to use your influence to help influencers, even if you didn’t realize you had much to share before reading this post.

1. Share Work You Love on Social Media

I have a couple thousand Twitter followers. You may have more or less, but either way most people would probably agree that I’m not a top-tier Twitter influencer. Despite that, by sharing work and content I’ve found valuable on social media I’ve gotten the attention of extremely smart people who I’m sure are very busy. Here are my “Top Tweets” for two different months according to Twitter Analytics:

Source:http://www.searchenginejournal.com/getting-started-influencer-marketing-tips-strategies-unfluential/139052/