In every niche, there are experts and thought leaders who have a great deal of influence over their peers. Whenever they post content, it’s read and widely shared.
Getting an “influencer” in your niche to share your content is an excellent way to reach many potential clients.
BuzzSumo conducted a study of over 100 million articles and found that when one influencer shares content, that content receives 31.8% more social shares; three influencers sharing doubled the social shares; and five influencers quadrupled it.
Many successful influencers said getting niche influencers to share their content, when they first started, was slow at first. The influencers ahead of them simply ignored them, but as they persisted, they were noticed, and their content was shared.
After a while, influencers they were following started linking back to them. This led to lots of traffic at their sites that was well-qualified.
As their influence grew, they were included in expert roundups, mentioned in podcasts, and even referenced as a resource. In short, they were now influencers.
You can find niche influencers with BuzzStream, NinjaOutreach, or Followerwonk. Use niche keywords and get contact information for experts in your niche. Then use the strategies below to connect with them.
The following six strategies will help you get your content before the large audiences of your niche influencers.
What you need to do to get influencers to share your content:
1. Comment on Their Blogs and Share Their Posts
Make friends with your niche influencers by commenting on their blogs and sharing their posts on social media.
Show up at the places your niche influencers frequent. Be helpful. Provide useful responses to questions by others. Start informed conversations. Thank them for their help. This will cement the relationship and elevate your status.
After you share significant information and helpful comments, they will recognize you when you ask them to give you a Tweet, quote, or consider your guest post for their website.
2. Provide Influencers with Free Publicity
People love to share posts that cast them in a good light. Highlight the influencer’s positive contribution to the industry, the best new product they created, or sponsorship of a worthy cause.
Any time you mention an influencer, interview them, include a link to their article, mention their Twitter handle in a tweet… email that expert to let them know. They or their people will share the article far and wide.
When influencers don’t answer your emails, send a message letting them know you’ve mentioned them through their website or social media site—LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google+.
Alternatively, you can ask them for a very short quote on Twitter about the article subject. Responding to your tweet is quick and easy, so they’ll likely do it. Now you’ll have “tweetable quotes” to put into your article, which will significantly boost your shares.
You can produce a number of tweets mentioning each influencer you quoted and link to the article. Many of them will re-tweet the tweet, sharing it and the article to their social audience.
3. Guest Post on the Site of an Influencer
You can create a large audience by guest posting on the site of a niche influencer. When you offer to guest post, they don’t need to publish an article. You’re doing it for them.
As long as it’s a quality piece targeting the influencer’s audience (which should also be your audience, too), you’ll be able to guest post on the blogs of some really big influencers in your industry. Being a follower for some time will help you.
When you’re unknown, write the entire article first. Then email five of the top influencers in your niche market and tell them, “I just wrote this article about X from a fascinating new angle. Would you consider using it for a guest post?” They’ll answer if the quality meets their standard.
All you need is one influencer responding with a “yes” to use that post as part of your pitch. Since the article is high-quality, other influencers think, “I’d better get him/her to write for me, too, so I can get valuable content before he/she hasn’t got time.”
Landing your first big guest post is the key to landing more.
4. Ask an Influencer to Share the Content on Your Site
When your web content is good—good quality, relevant to your industry, shareable to their audience—you can confidently reach out and ask influencers to share your website blogs or guest articles published elsewhere.
They’ll be happy to do so if it benefits them and their audience. They may even mention your content in a related article or in their newsletter with a link.
Take a few minutes to write a personal email, provide the link to your best content piece, and send it to a number of influencers. You could even share a tweetable quote teaser from an article (along with the link, of course).
5. Invite an Influencer to Provide a Quote, Comment, or Guest Post
Contact influencers in your industry and ask them to participate. Tell them the topic of your content and ask if they would be willing to provide a point of view.
And, when you get several influencers to provide their ideas for a roundup article, you’ll have that many more people promoting it to their large audience of followers.
Put the influencer’s quote in your article and add a link to the influencer’s website and social media accounts. Then email the influencer and share where the content is published and ask them to share it on social media and include it in their email newsletter.
6. Interview an Influencer
Interviewing influencers is a great way to get new eyes on your own brand. You can feature them in the entire article and show how their comments are echoed in your own content.
Write out the interview questions you want to ask. Answer them yourself to give you reference points to ask follow-up questions. Write those follow-up questions for the interview. Then arrange a time for the actual interview. You can use WebEx, Hangouts, or Skype to interview.
When you finish the article, let him review it, and provide a link so he can inform his audience.
Be sure your writing is your best. Create objective, exceptional content that’s well-researched, carefully edited, and thoroughly fact-checked.
And, consider outside-the-box solutions—ones that are unique and amazingly effective in addressing the problems in your niche industry as you write your articles.
Remember, influencers with lots of followers share content written by others, so why wouldn’t they share your best content that focuses on their audience concerns?
Write it and ask them to share it. You have everything to gain by following through.
Do you have any experiences getting content shared by influencers? I’d love to hear your results. Share them in the comments below.
