Types Of Blog Posts That Are Easy To Market

Sunday, November 12, 2017

Types Of Blog Posts That Are Easy To Market

In Chapter 1, you did a lot of work to develop a profile of your target audience member. From there, you determined the best social networks and other online areas where you can build a community. Combined, these mini-communities will build the foundation of a group of people that will let you market to them over and over again. It’s a major stepping point to building a blog that is successful through blog marketing.

But now that you have the foundation of building a blog marketing community it’s time to discuss the type of blog posts that are easy to market. There are a number of different types of posts you can create that will be valuable to readers, but being valuable doesn’t make a post marketable on its own.

The types of posts that are easy to market are ones that others have a vested interest in helping you market. To make sure you’re creating content that will make blog marketing easier, this chapter has instructions for creating a system to create these types of posts.

Create A Spreadsheet Of

Industry Bloggers, Brands & Influencers

Your community and connections are huge when it comes to marketing you blog. You need people on your side that will help you promote your blog posts. In the last chapter we discussed how to build a community of your audience members, but we also discussed creating a list of blogs, forums and communities that currently hold members of your target audience.

Step 1 Open The Spreadsheet You Built In Chapter 1 Called Blog Marketing

Keep your blog marketing items together in the same Google Drive spreadsheet to make it easier to reference every time you publish a new blog post.

Step 2 Create a Second Tab And Name It “Influencers”

The term “Influencers” will include the bloggers, brands and other people and organizations you will potentially write about in your blog posts.

Step 3 In Cell A1, Type The Page’s Title, “Influencers”

That's the whole step.

Step 4 Create Your Column Headings Starting in Cell B:2

Column B: Influencer

Column C: About

Column D: Website

Column E: Blog

Column F: Email Address

Column G: Twitter Handle

Column H: LinkedIn URL

Step 5 Freeze Rows

Freeze the panes below Row 3 so that as you scroll you’ll be able to see the page title and row titles.

Step 6 Sort The Range From A To Z Using Column A

Or Your “Influencers” Column

That's the whole step.

Step 7 Begin Adding Influencers To Your List

You can use your list of blogs, forums and other communities from the last chapter to star the list. Those communities, blogs and websites are places where your target audience is spending time.

Add to the list whenever you think of another influencer to add. You will probably think of some as you go through this guide. You’ll also likely come across influencers as you go about your regular blogging research.

Any blogger, brand or organization that shares your target audience is a potential influencer. Add them to the list and keep the list sorted in alphabetical order to make it easy to reference with each post you create.

The topic of this chapter is to create posts that are easy to market. The key point of this chapter is to write about the influencers in your industry or niche so that they may share the content you create with their communities.

You have to make it worth the while of the person, brand or organization to share your content. The next sections in this chapter provide a few of the best ways to write about and include influencers in your blog posts.

The list of influencers you just started will be your key resource while you blog. Whenever you need to conduct an interview, create a top list or do a feature story you’ll be able to reference your list of influencers. It will save you time and will also ensure that you’re writing about and including people that are likely to share your blog posts with your target audience members.

Interviews

To repeat, the types of posts that are easy to market are ones that others have a vested interesting in helping you market.

Interviews often make for interesting, engaging and useful blog posts, but they also serve the purpose of getting others vested in the success of the post.

When you interview one of the influencers on your list you’re opening up their knowledge and sharing it with your readers. It’s a benefit for the person you’re interviewing because you’re exposing them to your audience and giving them a platform to share their story, knowledge and experience.

The interviewee will want the post to do well so they’ll do what they can to promote the post in their communities and networks.

Here is the process for conducting an interview on your blog and promoting it to it is exposed to as many people as possible.

Step 1 Choose An Influencer To Approach

Go to your blog marketing spreadsheet and open up the Influencers tab. Scroll through the list of influencers and choose one that will make a good candidate for an interview.

To increase your odds, find 3 or 5 good candidates. You can reach out to them all increasing your odds of hearing back. If you hear back from more than one you can still carry out the interviews and publish the interviews at different times.

Step 2 Contact The Influencer

There are a few ways to reach out to your influencers.

The most obvious and effective way to reach influencers is via email, but as you might guess, it’s not always possible to get the email address of the influencers on your list.

But if you do have an email address feel free to reach out with an initial email message and one follow up message if you don’t hear back from the person within seven days.

Here is the message template to write:

Hi [Influencer Name],

My name is [Your Name].

I have a blog, [Blog Name], where we interview industry experts. These interviews are some of the most popular posts on the blog.

Would you be interested in participating in an interview?

If you are up for it I will send you a list of questions.

Some questions will give you the chance to share information about your business or organization.

After getting your responses we’ll get the post ready to publish, but before publishing we’ll send it to you for final approval.

Would you be interested in doing an interview?

Take care,

[Your Name]

[Your Business]

The key to this type of outreach is communicating the benefits for the influencer.

This is not all about you. The message communicates the fact that the influencer will get exposure to your audience. They’ll have a chance to discuss themselves and their business and they wont’ have to do a lot of the work to finalize the post.

It also helps to stroke their ego by telling them that you feel they are an industry leader.

In the last chapter we talked about how you can build your blog marketing community using LinkedIn. It’s a great tool for building a community of your target audience, but it’s also a great tool for connecting with the people that influence your target audience members.

On your Influencer spreadsheet there is a column for LinkedIn URL. You can use LinkedIn to identify influencers and you can use it to get contact information for influencers.

Use the search function on LinkedIn to find the influencer you’re targeting. You can also use Google to search for the influencer by searching for [Influencer Name] LinkedIn.

If there are multiple people with the same name use the business or organization name to narrow results.

Once you’ve identified the influencer on LinkedIn see if you can connect with them. If they’re a third degree connection you won’t be able to connect without a premium account in some cases depending on how the person has setup their privacy settings.

Once connected, send a message to the person using the message template that you would use if you had the influencer’s email address.

If you have a premium account you can ask to connect with the person or you can send a message without connecting.

TWITTER

Twitter is another channel where people can connect. Some, not all, influencers are open to connecting via Twitter whether it’s through mention conversations or through direct message.

Identify your target influencer on Twitter. Follow them. Wait for a day or two to see if they follow you back. If they do then you can send them a direct message.

With either a direct message or with a message via mention, you’ll have to make your pitch short and to the point. There is not a lot of time for ego stroking on Twitter.

Use this template:

@Influencer Would you be interested in an interview to be published on [Blog Name]?

That’s it. Make it easy for the person to say “Yes” to your initial question. They might respond asking how they can contact you or they might follow you and send you a direct message.

Once you hear back from an influencer in this way you can send the full message that will get the ball rolling toward a full interview.

WEBSITE CONTACT FORM

Another way to contact influencer is through their website or blog. Many people today have personal websites where they might even have their own blog. Others will usually have business websites, which usually have contact forms or contact information.

When using a contact form, use the format of the message above in the email section, but since you won’t know if the message will be first seen by the influencer provide an initial sentence that states:

This message is for [Influencer Name].

OTHER WAYS TO CONTACT INFLUENCERS WITH INTERVIEW REQUESTS

The above contact methods are some of the best and most common ways for reaching out to influencers for interview posts, but there are additional methods.

You can reach out to people via phone. You can reach them on other social networks and you could even try leaving a comment on their blog as a way to get their attention.

Be courteous. You want the person to respond, but you don’t want to make them angry by badgering them with an influx of messages on every channel at once.

Sunday, November 12, 2017