Before we talk about influencer marketing campaigns, here’s a bit of background. If you’re familiar with my blog, you’ll know that I recently talked about how to get “natural” backlinks to your website, by writing high quality content that people feel compelled to share with their own audience. That’s a great strategy, but of course it does take time to get that snowball effect – for your post to reach the right audience, and for that audience to write about, and reference, your original post.
Note: This is a sponsored post. For more information on this, please see my disclosure.
That’s great if you have the time and patience to let your blog naturally grow in traffic numbers month-on-month. But that’s not always the case. What if you have a big high profile launch for your startup or you are going to be launching a new product soon? If you have a timescale in mind, and you want to start generating high quality links to your blog now, there’s another great strategy that’s working wonders at the moment: influencer marketing, using a micro blogger.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
When most people think of influencer marketing, they think about glamorous Instagram influencers showcasing a picture of a new sunglasses range on their latest tour around European capital cities. But there are other influencers who are just as important and valuable for startups, and that’s bloggers – micro bloggers, to be exact.
What Is Micro Blogging?
Blogging has always been an upward trend, but it’s really shot up in the past few years, thanks in part to the tools available now which means even those with zero technical knowledge can set up and run their own blog. With hundreds of new blogs popping up daily, each with a dedicated writer with a passion, and a tiny but loyal audience (both on their blog and social media) micro bloggers have a huge potential to any smart startup out there wanting to generate some buzz before a launch. In fact, because they have such a loyal following, you’ll often get far better engagement than if you went with a bigger celebrity-level influencer.
Micro bloggers tend to have between 1000 to 10000 followers across their online platforms, and you can work with them for budgets in the $100s.
How Can You Use Micro Bloggers To Grow Your Startup
The answer lies in link building. Right at the start of this article I mentioned that you can build backlinks to your website just by writing great content that people want to reference. I have a blog post all about generating traffic from it – you can read it here. But many new startups and small business don’t have the time to write that sort of content, or the time to wait for it to get noticed. And that’s where micro bloggers come in.
You can simply reach out to these bloggers for a sponsored post that will link back to your website. And with so many bloggers to choose from, you can really narrow this down to people who have the right audience and right content matter (so long gone are the days where these posts just look like filler – they are high quality, relevant and Google loves them).
How To Find These Micro Bloggers
The easiest way to reach these micro bloggers is through an existing third party influencer network like Get Blogged, who match up influencers with brands. But you’ll also find some hidden gems if you can contact people directly rather than via a third party (which is also helpful when negotiating a fee). If you have the opportunity to do that, look on social media to discover the right influencer for your brand; start with Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest (I’d ignore Facebook because the number of likes a page has often doesn’t tell you much about that influencer, as it’s so easy to pay for likes via Facebook ads).
And that’s pretty much all you need to do. Once the sponsored post is up, you’ll have a high quality link back to your website. And remember: Ask the blogger to give a shout out to your brand on social media. You can negotiate that into your fee.
This has two huge benefits. First, the immediate buzz about your brand to a small, highly targeted audience. Second, the long term quality backlink that will get seen by Google and improve your search engine rankings.
The beauty with this approach is you can make it as big or small as you want, depending on your budget. So it really is a great option – even for those startups on the tightest of budgets.
What To Read Next
Organic Google Traffic Sent Me 4562 Page Views To A Single Post Last Month. Here’s Why
Catherine Teves
November 16, 2020 at 8:25 am (3 years ago)Awesome Blog! Enjoyed reading about the flow of infliuners marketing & specially like about “How to find micro-influncers blogger”