One Simple Method To Finding Influencers You Can Actually Connect With -

One Simple Method To Finding Influencers You Can Actually Connect With

You are a blogger.

After a few months of blogging you probably realized something.

In order to succeed as a blogger,..

you need to build relationships with other bloggers in your niche.

Without the help of bloggers in your niche, it’s going to be very hard (unnecessarily hard) to get anywhere. But how can you connect with influencers in your niche when you are just starting out?

Why would they take the time to check out who you are and take the time to develop a relationship with you, if you’re not already a well known figure in your niche?

Well, they will. The trick is to find the right influencers and get in touch the right way.

So how do you find the right influencers?

Well, let’s first take a look at how influencers can help you in the first place.

And at the end, we’ll take a look at a bonus method that can help you find bloggers that a lot of influencers follow.

A Single Like By An Influencer Can Send You Over 200 Readers.

You can succeed without the help of other bloggers. Don’t get me wrong. It’s completely possible.

But why would you try to?

Sure you can get traffic solely through SEO, guest posting, or plenty of other ways, but having influencers that like what you write can make things a lot easier.

Here are a few heavy influencers from this niche that ZenSpill has been shared by:

Let’s take a look at what it means to your blog when one of these influencers share your content.

When Lisa Irby shared my post on 9 Ways To Get Traffic Without Social Media Or SEO. I received over 150 readers in the first day, from Facebook alone. Over the course of the next three days Lisa’s Facebook like sent over 200 readers from Facebook.

Sure, you can spend a year on SEO and completely ignoring other bloggers and you will probably start getting a few hundred visitors from Google a day. But wouldn’t you rather have your posts be shared to thousands of potential readers today? You by no means have to give up on SEO or any other methods, but having a few influencers like you as well will help you get a lot more visitors a lot faster.

Use Topsy To Find Influencers That You Can Connect With

Now, I’ve talked about Topsy before and that’s because it’s very good at helping you find any particular kind of people you are looking for. Right now you’re looking for other bloggers in your niche that have strong followings. This may not be as fun as the bonus method we’ll get into later, but it’s still very useful.

Topsy works like Google, except instead of searching through pages, it searches through Tweets. Because it directly searches Twitter, it can be very useful for finding people who have a lot of pull on Twitter.

Step 1. Go to Topsy and search for a generic term in your niche. For ex. “Content Marketing”.

Step 2. You want Topsy to show you results from this week or earlier. This way you will only find people who are still active and influential. Set this by choosing the time restraint in the bar on the left.

Step 3. With generic terms you will generally get a lot of results. Topsy will display a small orange number below each result next to a symbol of a chat box. This number shows the number of people who have tweeted the same post. Find a really big number and click on it. The higher the number the better.

This will take you to a page that will start with showing you similar tweets and if you scroll down, will show you all the people who have tweeted this link or have re-tweeted it. You will notice that some of the people have the words influential orhighly influential next to their tweets.

Step 4. On the grey bar check the box next to show influential people only. This will help further narrow down your results.

Good job! You just got yourself a primitive list of some of the most influential people in you niche. As it is to be expected there will be a bit of noise and not everyone on this list will be that influential. You can stick to only the Highly Influential people to lower chance of running into someone who has no real pull.

Further Narrow Down The List To Real Influencers

Topsy saying that these people are influential and them being actually influential are not always the same thing. Lets first further narrow down the list to people who actually have a sway in your community and then approach the problem of getting in their line of sight.

Step 5. Click on the name of a person who has the words Influential next to their name and this will take you to a page about them.

You can just click their name to be taken to their twitter page. This is where things get interesting. There’re a few things here to take note of. A large number of followers doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Here are a few signs that will show you that an article shared by this person will send a lot of traffic:

• A Large Followers to Following Ratio – This indicates that they didn’t get followers by following other people and waiting for them to follow back. This shows that people actually went out of their way to follow this user, which is always a good sign. I should just point out though that having a small ratio doesn’t necessarily mean that their following is inactive.
• Their Tweets – Click on a tweet box, not the link in the tweet, and this will show you the amount of re-tweets and favorites that particular tweet got. See the number of RTs and Favorites their last few ten or so tweets have gotten. If they get at least a couple of RTs in general, you can bet people are actually following them and they don’t just have a huge dead weight number of so called “followers”.
• Engagement – Are they talking to a lot of other users on Twitter? Having a lot of conversations? This is generally a good indicator that there is an active community around them.

Ok. So you narrowed down your list even more. What now?

We narrow down this list one more time. To people that you can actually connect with. This is what differentiates you from all the other bloggers who just spend a lot of time trying to get noticed by someone who is never going to connect with you.

How To Bring Influencers Back To Your Blog

Step 6. Most influencers have their blog in their Twitter bio. Click through to their blog.

Step 7. Take a look at the comment section of their posts. A good portion of bloggers like to reply to each and every single one of the comments on their blog. Look for bloggers that get a good amount of comments on their posts but still manage to reply thoughtfully them.

What’s the point of all this? Why bother finding bloggers that actually take the time to reply to your comments?

This shows that these bloggers actually take notice of their commentators. Which for you, is a good thing.

Step 8. So get noticed. Comment on their blog. I find that most of these bloggers will click through to find out who you are after they see you somewhere between 1 – 3 times in the comments. More than half of these kinds of bloggers will click through to find out more about you in your first comment alone, if its insightful enough.

What makes a good comment? Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Longer than a Tweet. Shorter than a post – I don’t remember where I read this (SeoMoz?) but it’s very true. You’re not going to compel the blogger to find out more about you from a simple “Great Post“. But he or she also doesn’t have the time to read an essay. Try to keep it around 100 to 200 words. Maybe 300 if you got really passionate about it.
• What did you think? – Simply writing a few sentences about the things that crossed your mind while reading the post is good enough. Write about your experiences relating to the post. Write about why you agree or why you disagree. Comment about a particular point that was brought up in the post.
• End with what you liked about the post – Don’t start with this. It seems less genuine, when you start off saying “Great Post“. It seems like you’re saying it just to say it. Save it till the end. End with what you liked most about the post. Did you enjoy how detailed the blogger was about a certain aspect of the post? Did you like the pictures used? Was something funny?

In the end it should look a little like this:

Hey Mark,

I’m pretty new to this niche and don’t know too many bloggers here so connecting with other bloggers is quite important to me. In my experience, connecting with people is much harder than actually finding them.

I like that you broke down how to write a comment into actionable parts, my biggest problem when writing a comment is that I usually have no idea what to say or talk about even if I really liked the post.

Great post. Really liked the break down.

- SomeGuy

When you write the comment use your real name, they are less likely to think of you as a spammer this way. Most commentators make the mistake of linking their name to the homepage of their blog. The problem with doing this is that you are asking them to take a few extra steps to actually read a whole post, and they might not even read one of your best posts.

There is nothing to gain from this. The more steps they have to take, the more likely they are to leave without ever reading your content. Your goal is to get them to read what you write and convince them that you are someone worth reaching out to.

So instead link directly to one of your posts. Whatever post you feel will be most liked by this particular blogger. If they like what they see, they will most likely comment on your blog and start a conversation there.

That’s it. Your done. You now have a way to find influential bloggers in your niche and a way to get them to your blog and start a conversation. Once you establish contact you can keep developing the relationship by continuing to comment on and sharing their posts. If they like what they read on your blog, most of them will at the very least tweet it out.

Bonus: How To find Bloggers Who Influence The Influencers.

Finally!

The bonus.

This is the process for finding influential bloggers that also happen to be followed by a lot of other influential bloggers. Getting shared or linked to by one of these bloggers will have the domino effect of potentially getting shared by a lot of other influential bloggers.

This part is for all the people who subscribed to get simple updates. You can get the bonus by entering your email below and clicking “Get Updates”.