If you’re marketing your company to the world at large, you need to have a strategy for your blog. Furthermore, you need a blog to give a feeling of humanity to your company and product. One goes with the other because it helps with SEO and ranking on search engines, but you can’t rely on creating keyword-laden blogs alone to increase your ranking.
You need to include variation into your blog strategy and bring in posts from outsiders, but not just any outsiders. You don’t know if they’ll bring you value. You want to bring in an influencer to write blog posts for you and get the attention of his or her audience. Here’s how you do it.
Find the Right Influencer
Image via Flickr by Free For Commercial Use (FFC)
Influencers typically get their start doing something they love, whether it be video games, makeup, technology, even DIY projects. Their followers are like-minded people who want to see someone do it better than they can for the purposes of learning, entertainment, or just to see how someone else handles a problem. This generates a level of trust between the influencer and his or her audience because the influencer shows that things work.
You want an influencer who focuses on a field that matches with the product your company is selling. While you should think outside of the box when it comes to influencers, you don’t want to approach someone who’s sharing his or her passion about bonsai when you’re selling a weed-killing product. Look for someone who aligns with your product fully or partly to get the best result.
Determine How Many Posts You Want Created
This is part of the negotiation process, but an important one. You might want them to do a one-off post to help promote a new product or to write a series of posts that go up once a week for a month as they review multiple products. The more posts they write for you, the better it can be for your business, as it keeps increasing your exposure to the influencer’s audience, along with having a “big name” writing blogs for you.
Agree to Generate Backlinks
An influencer that backlinks to your blog helps with your search engine rankings and general visibility. Influencer audiences want to learn as much as they can about their favorite influencers. To that end, they follow them across social media platforms, personal websites, and their blogs. Their personal websites and blogs generate ample traffic, something that search engines look for.
A highly trafficked blog or website gets ranked higher because algorithms suggest people most likely want to go to that site when they search. A backlink to your blog on a popular site increases your ranking along with higher visibility to a desired audience.
A solid blog strategy generates results, but you can’t rely on the SEO practice of keywords alone to get your site to rank. Influencer marketing is something that is going to be around for the foreseeable future, and you should consider hitching your wagon to them as part of your strategy.