Have you ever sent cold emails to bloggers requesting their help in promoting your content or book?
Experienced any success with such cold emails?
This article will be about some simple ways to form relationships with bloggers in your niche to increase your web presence and brand. Also, within the process, you will gain valuable insight about competitors in your niche market.
Be an Active Social Media User
It’s a total waste of time to simply be on social media, whether it is Twitter, Facebook, or Goodreads. You need to be an active participant on whichever social media platform you are on.
Before contacting bloggers, it’s imperative to connect with them on all social media platforms that you actively participate in. And that doesn’t mean to just become friends with them. Engage with them by replying to their tweets, supplying a link to a relevant article that is interesting, or asking great questions on their Facebook posts.
Social media is just a digital alternative to real life conversation. So, spark a conversation and keep it going.
2 Ways to Actively Engage on Twitter
1. Create twitter lists for bloggers in your niche.
Let’s say your niche is education technology. Then, create a public list, name it ‘Great Education Technology Bloggers,’ and add the bloggers you want to engage with on that list.
Making it public is great because the blogger you add will see that you have added them to your list called ‘Great Education Technology Bloggers.’ It shows that you highly regard them and want to specifically follow them.
Creating a list is beneficial because you can easily see the tweets of the bloggers you want to engage with. You don’t need to sift through hundreds of tweets to find a specific blogger’s twitter activity. Below is a screenshot of where to find the list functionality on Twitter.
2. Engage in Hashtag Chats
Did you know that there’s another use for hashtags, other than for the purpose of targeting your tweets?
Hashtag chats are being used quite effectively to engage with twitter users in your niche.
Are you an English teacher? Then you might want to engage in the #engchat discussion that occurs every Monday from 7-8 PM EST. Engchat.org coordinates this discussion by supplying a topic for each session. Give your opinions and continue the conversation using #engchat during the specified time.
There are an abundance of hashtags chats that all users from all different types of niche can participate in. It’s a great way to not only engage with others in the same niche, but also to see what others may be doing that you are not.
Through such hashtag chats, you may find other bloggers who are willing to accept you as a guest blogger. This is a better process for forming a relationship with a blogger or website owner before asking to guest post compared to just sending a cold email.
Become a Part of Their Community
There’s nothing more gratifying as a blogger to receive thoughtful comments on a post. It shows that visitors have read the article and put some thought into what you have written about.
Before contacting bloggers, it is critical to become a part of their community by commenting on their posts. Don’t just write a dead-end comment that summarizes the article. Take a few minutes to think about the topic and provide an insightful thought that continues the conversation.
This is a time-efficient method to slowly grow a relationship with a blogger and it doesn’t hurt to learn more about what others are writing in your niche.
Go Out of the Way to Engage with Bloggers
We send out bi-weekly editions of our newsletter. Amidst all the content we supply to our subscribers, we also ask them for feedback on certain topics and just general recommendations they have to improve their experience in reading our newsletter.
Now, in more cases than not, readers will just sift through the content without actually recommending improvements. Also, there isn’t a comment section in newsletters that we can check as it is just an email.
But, when a subscriber goes out of his/her way to email, tweet, and facebook message us about our newsletter, it really is uplifting.
A reply to our most recent newsletter:
Subscribe to your bloggers’ newsletters, infographics, or whatever it is they provide and respond to them via email, Twitter, or Facebook. It is a similar idea to commenting them on a blog post, but definitely something that requires a little bit more effort, thereby expressing your valuing of them and their content.
What People Forget in this Digital World
In this faceless digital world, people forget that relationships still need to be made before contacting bloggers.
Remember the marketing landscape before the technology boom? Face-to-face interactions to gain trust and credibility before any cross-promoting happened.
Use these simple ways to form a relationship before you send that critical email requesting to guest post, be an interviewee, or other promotional tactics you want to employ. One email can either make or break a collaborative opportunity between you and a blog host.
