Connecting with successful bloggers and building relationships with those bloggers can lead to long-term benefits. Some of these bloggers may decide to go on a joint venture with you that allows your products and ideas to be seen by more people. Others may leave a testimonial for your product. Testimonials from successful bloggers boost the credibility of you and your product.
How do these connections happen? How do successful bloggers connect with other successful bloggers? How do up-and-rising bloggers make connections with the top bloggers? First off, you should only try to connect with successful bloggers in your niche. The successful bloggers in your niche would be the most open to promoting your products and sharing your expertise with other people. With that established, here are the seven ways to connect with successful bloggers.
#1: Go To Business Events That They Are Speaking At
Going to businesses events that successful bloggers speak at is the easiest way to start connecting with those bloggers. At the end of the blogger’s presentation, you can interact with that person and start the connection. Hand the blogger your business card. Don’t ask for a joint venture or for the blogger to promote you right away. Relationships need to build before they reach that point.
#2: Email Them
If you saw these bloggers at speaking events, email them to continue the relationship. If you decide to email a successful blogger who you did not see at a speaking event first, then go for it. Send the email. The worst thing that can happen is that the blogger does not respond. When you email successful bloggers, make the emails human. You can thank the blogger for providing valuable content instead of doing a product pitch.
#3: Interact With Them On Social Media
Successful bloggers have a few things in common. One of the things they all share is ownership of their own social media accounts. Many of these bloggers use Twitter to promote their content and interact with their audiences. If you see a successful blogger interacting with his/her followers, then that successful blogger is someone who would probably interact with you if you take the initiative to start a conversation.
You can interact with a successful blogger by thanking them for writing a particular article or asking them a good question related to the niche you both are in. I would start a social media conversation with a successful blogger once every week, and as the blogger responds to more of your conversations over a period of a month, have one conversation every five days. Every month, increase the frequency of conversations you have with this blogger until you eventually have one conversation with this blogger on social media every other day. The time it will take for a blogger to respond to you is dependent on how active this person is on social media, so choose to implement this method with the bloggers who are on social media often.
#4: Know More People
Our world is more connected than ever, but it is also smaller than we realize. Some people you interact with may be friends with the successful blogger you are trying to interact with. It is a small world after all, and you never know who knows who. It is entirely possible that the person you recently talked to on social media knows a successful blogger in your niche and can arrange for you to have a quick conversation with that blogger. I use social media to reach out to more people. You never know what types of opportunities will come your way.
#5: Subscribe To Their Email Lists
When you subscribe to a successful blogger’s email list, you get all of their latest emails. Plenty of those emails will contain valuable content that can help you get better at your niche. One thing few people know is that you can reply to most of the emails a blogger sends, and that blogger will see your email. I use iContact to send emails to my subscribers, and if a subscriber respond to an email I send, I get to see the response. I also have the ability to reply to an email that a subscriber sends me. Many services are set up in this manner. If a blogger sees you in her inbox often, that blogger may respond to you, but only if you send emails to the blogger in the same manner you would have an in-person conversation with your friend.
#6: Talk About Them On The Web
Some bloggers choose to get notified every time they get promoted on someone else’s website. Other bloggers check their notifications tab to see who mentioned them on social media. There are also a handful of bloggers who do both. By linking to these bloggers’ blogs and mentioning them on social media as you share their content, these bloggers will notice. Some may reply to you.
[tweetthis twitter_handles=”@MarcGuberti” url=”http://bit.ly/1b36yrn”]Promoting successful bloggers on social media may lead to you getting a response.[/tweetthis]
#7: Comment On Their Blog Posts
Some bloggers make it a point to respond to every comment their blogs get. If you go through the comments section for my blog posts, you will see that I respond to everyone’s comment. It’s simply the right thing to do. If you leave a meaningful comment on a blogger’s blog post, that blogger may respond to you. You should leave a comment regardless of whether the blogger responds or not, but if you want to know the chances of getting a response, look at the blogger’s past blog post comments and see how many comments the blogger responded to.
In Conclusion
Building a strong relationship between you and a successful blogger starts with the first interaction. This is your first appearance—the only thing a blogger knows you for during your first encounter. Once the first interaction is done, you must continue interacting with that blogger, but only in a meaningful way. Remember that successful bloggers are people with emotions just as we are. They want to be treated respectfully, and starting a conversation just to ask for more exposure doesn’t fit in that category. Promote the blogger’s content and social media posts. Ask good questions and leave thoughtful comments on the blogger’s blog posts.
Which of these tips was your favorite? Do you have any additional tips for interacting with successful bloggers? Please share your thoughts and advice below.
Mark – Love the material. Great advice. Soon I’ll be ready to begin directing tons of traffic to my blogs. The email list tip was very helpful, never would have thought of that one.
I’m happy I could shed some light with the email list. I wish I learned about that earlier, and if you ask any marketer, that marketer will say he/she wishes to have learned about the email list earlier.
Hi Marc, thanks for another useful/practical post.
I find it interesting how so many of the things you write about would seem to be obvious or common sense, but without them actually being stated, how much are people actually aware of them, and more importantly, applying them?
Probably very little.
My sense is that few people realize that success is often about doing key/simple things consistently. Even for those that do I suspect it is much easier said than done.
I notice that it is something that you do very well and that’s one of the reasons that I tend to follow you more closely than most.
Keep up the good work.
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I agree that success is about doing the little things over a long period of time. Doing the little things, like writing one blog post every day, is what allows a blog to get filled up with thousands of high value blog posts. I now only write three blog posts per week to provide more in-depth value, but there was a point when I wrote one blog post every 12 hours.
Same thing with Twitter. You don’t get 100,000 Twitter followers by gaining 100,000 Twitter followers per day. You consistently gain Twitter followers over a long period of time. That’s how the milestones are reached. That’s how success happens.