See an updated version of this post: How To Do Influencer Marketing For Free.
What’s one of the quickest ways to visibility? When an influencer promotes your content or business.
This is typically called “influencer marketing” and the way it’s usually done is to pay an influencer (such as a Instagram star who is popular) to post about your product, service, or your message.
This can work if your product is proven to sell, and your budget for an Ad can be several hundred dollars (or thousands) to experiment with.
There’s another way that costs much less money, but requires a bit more time:
To create content that makes the influencer want to share it with their audience.
Why would they? When you create content that paints them in a positive light!
Use your content strength.
If you are a good writer, then write a quality article that features them and highlights their strengths and the good work they’re doing.
This is what one of my regular readers did recently. Not surprisingly, I promoted it:
If you have a podcast or video channel that you enjoy speaking on, then create a quality episode that is all about that influencer.
If you’re a good interviewer, or are willing to carefully edit an interview to help the influencer shine, then invite them to the interview.
Some examples of my own clients interviewing me:
Get the influencer’s feedback.
Before you promote it, you may want to send a draft to the influencer, to see if they want to make any changes.
They might be too busy to respond. If that’s the case, then send them another message letting them know that if you don’t hear back from them with any suggested changes you’ll be promoting it starting a specific date (give them 1–2 weeks.)
Promote the content.
Be sure to put that influencer’s name in the first few words of the content’s title, so that it clearly signals to the search engines that this content is about them.
Post this piece of content everywhere that you use social media. Post it more than once if possible. Show the influencer that you are proud to promote it.
If you can, even put do some paid advertising to promote that piece of content.
Tell the influencer.
Once you’ve promoted the content, tell the influencer.
The simplest way is to post to their social media, e.g. Tweet to them, Post on their FB Page, and tag their name on Linkedin.
Make it an uplifting post that they might enjoy re-sharing forward with their audience.
Also privately message them that you’ve promoted it, with the link(s) to where you did so.
Don’t pressure them to re-share it, but say that you’d be honored if they did.
Become a case study.
Another way to get an influencer’s attention is to either become their client, or join their program.
Or if you cannot financially, then diligently apply their free advice.
Either way, the key is to show that their advice really works!
The influencer will likely want to promote a piece of content that demonstrates the effectiveness of their advice. It builds their credibility, and it introduces their audience to you!
As an example, I feature my own clients on a regular basis, and some of them go the extra mile to mention how my offerings has positively impacted them.
Here’s an example. In the interview below, I was intending to only talk about Scott’s work… but then he took the initiative, without my prompting, to talk about how my program impacts him—
Reaching out to influencers is one of the main ways I built my audience in the beginning. Consider how you might use the same strategies, in your own industry, to grow your audience, by connecting thoughtfully and caringly with influencers.
Find influencers with audiences larger than yours — but not too large.
Choose influencers that have a larger audience than you, but not a huge audience (because the famous people will have too many reaching out to them.) If you have a couple hundred Facebook fans, reach out to someone with a couple thousand fans, for example.
Step by step you can build a network of mutual benefit with people you genuinely respect.
