Influencer Marketing: 4 Ways To Get Influencers To Influence For You

Successful content marketers establish their authority online and, as a result, influence the behaviors of their audience.

If you have yet to establish your authority or influence online, you can team up with an influencer in your industry to help, if you know how.

4 Ways to Get Influencers to Influence for You

The same rules of content marketing apply to influencer marketing. If you want influencer help, you need to provide value for the influencer and his

or her audience.

Gifting Goods and Services

Provide value directly by sending an influencer a free product or service. If the influencer likes the product and believes the product will help her audience, she could publicize it to her audience or even write a nice review of the product on her blog.

For example, you create an app that keeps track of business expenses for tax purposes, but not many people know about it. You find a website run by an accountant with a huge following. You grant him free access to your app. He loves it. It helps him help his customers. He writes a review on his blog. Now, you have a huge audience.

It doesn't, however, always work out this great. Just because you send a free product doesn't mean it will get reviewed.

Sponsored Post

With a sponsored post, you're hiring an influencer to advertise your products or services in a blog post or video post. It's better than a standard online ad, insomuch that the post is written in the authority's voice to a specific, targeted audience. As a bonus, you get an authoritative backlink to your site for SEO improvement.

The influencer must make it known that he or she is being paid to write or talk about the product or service within the post.

Guest Post

Instead of paying an influencer to write a post, you can create a valuable post for the influencer's audience in return for exposure. When asking about a guest post, do research first. Find out if the influencer accepts guest posts and what the editorial guidelines are.

Influencers are busy. You don't want to waste their time.

Contests

This is similar to gifting free items, but with the added bonus of giving these items away to the influencer's audience as part of a contest.

You sell dog-grooming kits, for example. You give one to PetPoodles.com as part of a contest. To enter the contest, PetPoodles.com visitors must share a post on Facebook. As a result, the influencer gets exposure and you get exposure. Everybody wins.

Contact us if you want to know more about how to become an influencer in your industry through successful inbound marketing