Best Practices in Blogger Outreach

Neal Schaffer: 0:01

Welcome to maximize your social actionable advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social, social media author, speaker, consultant, and founder of maximize social business, Neal Schaffer. Hey, this is Neal Schaffer, welcome to another episode of maximize your social. I'm here in beautiful Orlando, Florida. It's, you know, Orange County, Florida, and I'm from Orange County, California. So I don't find that much of a difference being here. But if you're up in the northeast, or in many parts of the United States or North America, it's probably really cold. We are in a lot warmer here, obviously. So I'm here in Orlando, actually, I just presented for a client in the legal industry on social selling primarily using LinkedIn. But I also covered Facebook and some of the other platforms. And I look forward to recording a podcast on that in the hopefully not so distant future. But if you just heard, and I just posted this on social media, and I don't expect you all saw it. But I finally I got a lot of requests Neo, can you create a page that has all of your podcasts on it. And it's actually a best practice, right? If you have content, why not promote that content outside of iTunes or Stitcher or SoundCloud where you may be hearing and so I actually do now have a dedicated page to this maximize your social podcast on maximize your social.com. If you go to maximize your social.com, you'll see a header that says blog and podcast. If you hover over it, you'll see the podcast click on it, you'll be able to listen to every single one of these episodes and download them so that you can hear me talk literally for several hours, because that's how much content I've shared. In fact, as of today, and today, as I'm recording this on January 22 2014. I've already recorded 44 episodes started just over a year ago. So pretty amazing when you look back at all the content you acquire if you stick to a fairly regular schedule. So today I want to talk about and I've been asked about this, by actually one of my maximize social business bloggers, Kristen Matthews reached out to me and said, Hey, Mio put together an e book. She works at grouphigh, which is a platform that brands use for blogger outreach said, Hey, Neil, can you give me some advice. And so as I often do, before I publish this content on the web, I like to give it to my podcast listeners first, so that you have the edge on everybody else, so to speak. You know, I really haven't blogged that much about blogger outreach. I've been part of campaigns been the brand ambassador for All Nippon Airways on multiple occasions. Virgin air back in the old days, when they started this Los Angeles Toronto route reached out to me, I've obviously received a lot of swag from a lot of companies that I've put on my Instagram, Facebook. So I have experienced both from that perspective, as well as on the reaching out to other bloggers, but by myself, as well as consulting and advising other companies. So I wanted to give you just very, very, hopefully brief but concise and to the point advice on what I advise you to do. If you're thinking of doing some blogger outreach, you know, there's many ways to reach out to influential bloggers or quote unquote, influential you really don't know how influential they are, unless they can really help you. Right? So let me share my experience. And I guess I look at best practices for blogger outreach, which will be the name of this podcast, I look at as three things number one, identifying the right bloggers. Now, if you've read maximize your social, which hopefully after 44 episodes you have, if you haven't no problem. But I'm going to talk about a similar concept when I talked about doing these social media audits, and comparing yourself to the competition, which is using publicly available data. Now you can use platforms like grouphigh in. And there's a lot of unique platforms that help measure things with unique algorithms and getting information from all the API's that exist out there and social media. But just a down and dirty thing you can do is to research their platform. There are some influencers that don't really blog, but are extremely influential. I still think given, you know, all things being equal, I would prefer to work with someone that actually has a blog, that they're actually publishing their own unique content, their own unique perspective, there's a placeholder there so that when they promote you, it gets indexed by Google, it gets promoted, and people actually have a website they can go to, I just think it'll make your campaign all things given equal. I think it'll make it more successful. That's my two cents. So do they have a website these people that you're thinking of reaching out to? Because you've heard about them in the industry? You've seen them on Twitter lists, or you did some searches on Twitter or Google Plus you found out about them? You know, do they have a website and if they have a website, what are the publicly available numbers that you can see as far as subscribers, okay, some bloggers will show their little you know, Feedburner number of RSS subscribers. What about the popularity of the website via Alexa now Alexa is not the most accurate statistic but it is one data point. And what other numbers can you determine? Obviously the other numbers are mainly going to be social media numbers, Facebook fans, you know, Twitter followers, they can be bought, but if you're looking for someone say you're in E commerce and you're doing fashion and you're really focusing on Tumblr on pin, rest, you obviously want to try to find someone that has large numbers in those social networks where you think you're going to be more effective. So this is how you get a little bit more strategic. So once you've done that, I mean, you do this over an Excel spreadsheet, and you look at all the potentials, and you have a shortlist of people that you may want to reach out to. The next thing you want to do is analyze their influence. You know, this is part of the identifying the bloggers, but by analyzing their influence, I primarily talk about a cloud score, not clouds, you know, K L. O UT, I'm sure you're familiar with them. It's not the end all, it's not a perfect algorithm, it is one algorithm, it doesn't mean that if you have a very low Klout score, I would not consider working with you, I mean, a cloud score of a 90 versus a cloud score of a 30, I think we would all agree there is a significant difference. It's easy to get a low cloud score, it's not that easy to get a high cloud score, when all is said and done, but really not just look at the cloud score. But look at how these people are engaging on these platforms, right? If it looks like it's all automated, or they're just saying the same thing over and over again. And it looks like they're not being authentic. And you can understand why so many people like or follow them, it could be that they're buying fake followers or bid they're buying fake likes. So you know, that's gonna come down to your analytical abilities to really see through and try to figure out who they are. So after this, you've either confirmed that people on your shortlist should be the ones you work with, or maybe you've narrowed it down even further. So the next thing you need to do now, and this is sort of the second step is how to reach out to bloggers, this is where so many companies make a mistake, they go for the gusto and just immediately say, Hey, we're doing a campaign, we'd love to be a part of it. No, don't do that. This is social media. Everybody, right? Start. Your outreach campaign starts with developing relationships with these people, right? So this is how you begin to reach out to them. And I really recommend you think a lot about this. As like I said, this is where companies make mistakes, I've had a company, reach out to me say, hey, Neil, we think you'd be perfect there, you know, fashion company sent me a catalogs and schwag $100 gift certificate, please give us a try. We think you'll like us, you're you know, you're the perfect man for our brand. And guess what that was like a year and a half ago, I still haven't used that $100 gift certificate. It's just not relevant to me, it's not on my top list of you know, things that if someone had sent me new podcasting equipment, hecky, I'd try it out, right, it's not on my top things that I want to do, or that I need, or that I want to have. And therefore, it may seem irrelevant to you. But if it's not relevant to that person, it doesn't make sense, which is another reason why you develop a relationship beforehand to really make sure and ascertain that that's the right person from your campaign. So when you're looking for bloggers, you need to make sure that they are relevant, or genuinely have an interest in what you're trying to promote. The only way you're going to know that is to be building a relationship beforehand to try to gauge that. The longer the relationship you build, the better success your campaign is going to have. Right? How do you build a relationship with bloggers? It's actually very easy. We're human beings, right? Have you ever commented other blog posts? Have you ever shared their blog posts from your brand's handle in social media? Have you sent them any social signals on any given social media platform, I highly recommend you do that. If you don't do it today, start doing it tomorrow. And as you do it over time, you build a relationship so that when you contact them several weeks, a few months down the road, they know that you know who they are, and you already have a relationship, it's going to make your program all that much more, first of all successful at convincing that blogger and more successful. So you're ready to pull the trigger. Now you've developed that relationship, here is how you want to do the actual outreach communication. Obviously, there's more components that go into best practices and blogger outreach campaigns once you start the campaign. And this is really getting to that point, which I believe is the hardest part. But when you pull the trigger, right? What are you going to say? How are you going to treat them? And I think what most people forget, like I just said is that bloggers are average human beings just like you and me. They may be known as some sort of rock star in their field of influence. But at the end of the day, they're human beings. They have needs and personalities and emotions, like you and me. So trying to find out what makes that particular blogger tick is a challenge in psychology and sociology, right? That being said, there are things you can do to try to understand what that blogger would like from a relationship with you. And what would be the incentive to help that blogger promote your brand, look back at their past blog posts, right? What brands have they promoted? Have they been part of other campaigns? If you're building a relationship, you should see in the past month or two, you know, what products have they promoted or services or companies or brands and how have they promoted them? Right? Were they taking pictures with them? Did they go on and actual travel to participate in something? Does it look like they just receive money in exchange for blogging? I think that through analysis, you will probably be able to come to a pretty educated guess As to what sorts of campaigns they have joined before. So once you do that, you can now establish yourself in a way that, you know, you contact them, hey, we noticed you work with brand A, we're a big fan of yours. We're creating a campaign and we think you might want to take part in. And when you talk about a campaign, making a campaign that someone would be proud to be a member of something like brand advocate, VIP Council, All Nippon Airways, you know, the as a brand ambassador, I think brand ambassadors is an awesome thing that I was proud to be part of. And I know some of the brand ambassadors actually put it like on their LinkedIn profile brand ambassador, that is the type of naming that you want. And I think a lot of brands really take for granted. It's just like the naming of a Twitter list. You want to name it in a way that when someone becomes a member of it, they become really proud about it, and would naturally want to spread the word about it. In conclusion, fellas to put everything I said in a nutshell, right? Instead of trying to fit bloggers into your outreach program, mould your outreach program around the needs of each individual blogger, and I think your campaign will be all the more successful for it. That is my advice for today. Ladies and gentlemen. I hope you liked this podcast, one special requests at the end here. If you haven't followed on SoundCloud or Stitcher if you haven't commented on iTunes, I'd really really appreciate if you could do so help expose this podcast to others, individuals, businesses who may be in need of it and can take advantage of it. That's it for today. I'm signing off from sunny Orlando, Florida, wishing you a beautiful warm day wherever you are in the world. Bye bye and make it a great day. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate your iTunes subscriptions, ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on the show or recommend content, please contact Neal Schaffer at meal at maximize your social.com Thanks for listening and have a great day.