These four tips will help you build a
"win-win" relationship with your influencers.
Many marketers strive to align themselves with influencers
because this kind of engagement has been proven to rapidly expand brand
visibility for many businesses.
With influencer marketing, a much larger audience is suddenly
exposed to your brand, which often results in a significant spike in traffic
that can lead to more subscribers, followers, and leads.
An even greater benefit of influencer
marketing that some folks miss out on is the long-term SEO improvement. A study
conducted by Moz revealed the weight of some significant ranking factors in
search, and if you read between the lines, you’ll see how influencer marketing
can work to your advantage in organic search.
1. Expanding your link profile.
As much as Google’s algorithm has changed in
order to eliminate junk listings from search results, backlinks are still
important when it comes to determining your position in the search results.
What’s changed with backlinks is how the algorithm scores them, specifically
focusing on the source’s authority, quality, and relevancy.
This is a primary reason why guest posting has gained
popularity, as marketers and brands create content to publish on the sites of
influencers or influential brands.
When you create content with the purpose of generating targeted
referral traffic, providing value to an extended audience, and improving your
reach, you’re also generating organic and natural links that will enhance your
backlink profile in the search engines.
2. Growing site traffic.
I mentioned how influencer marketing can
generate significant traffic for your site. This traffic typically comes from
referral links, but you could see an increase in direct traffic as well.
Backlinko created a list of some 200 ranking factors used by Google’s
algorithm, which includes both Direct Traffic and Repeat Traffic as ranking
factors. This was confirmed by the Moz study I referenced above, in which traffic
is the fifth most influential factor on the algorithm.
Guest posting is just one way to generate traffic. When you form
connections and build relationships with influencers, they will share your
content across their social channels, where it will be picked up by your
audience.
Although social signals do not impact organic
search rank, the growth in traffic to your site over time will have an impact
on your rank.
3. Bringing the content home.
A good relationship with an influencer isn’t developed quickly,
but it can bring a tremendous amount of value once established. While many of
the top influencers tend to be incredibly busy, you may be able to get a guest
post on your own site from a mid-level influencer with a growing audience.
Once you have that high-value content
published in your blog, take the time to promote the content far and wide to
both of your audiences. Not only will you gain the benefit of a traffic boost,
but that content could also start generating inbound links.
Other people will likely curate that content and link back to
it, or quote the influencer in their own posts or to link back to your content
to cite facts and statements from the influencer.
4. More visibility with video.
Given that YouTube falls under Google’s
umbrella, it’s no surprise that traffic increased considerably after the Google
Panda update. Unfortunately, highly relevant and well-trafficked videos might
still get preferential treatment in the search results.
Take this as a solid opportunity to work with an influencer to
produce more than just blog posts. Diversifying your content not only expands
your reach to different audience segments, but it can also give you more of
that coveted first page real estate in organic search.
A video interview with an influencer, audio from a podcast, or
interview segments divided into slides with striking visuals can give you a
significant bump in search visibility. While these efforts won’t contribute
directly to the search visibility of your site, it’s always a good idea to have
other entry points into your funnel, such as videos.
When the influencer’s audience searches for content related to
that influencer, they’ll find your videos optimized and co-branded, which will
ultimately give your own brand a lift among those new audience segments.
Every relationship should be reciprocal,
whether it’s with your audience or an influencer. Working with an influencer in
the ways I listed above can give you a lift in organic visibility, but you
shouldn’t approach influencer marketing as a means of “using” or “leveraging”
the influencer. The best results will come from a mutually beneficial
relationship where respect is established. If you treat them selfishly,
influencers will start to ignore you.
A win-win approach creates a stronger relationship,
and influencers you engage with will be happy to work with you more often when
you reciprocate by helping them expand their own brand visibility and audience.
Written by: Aaron Agius
Credit: Entrepreneur.com
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