Influencer Marketing Case Study: How I Got the #2 Global Digital Influencer to Share My Content with His Audience

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer Marketing engages key leaders in your niche to drive your name to their larger market.

Rather than shouting your name to the world by yourself, you approach key leaders in your niche to leverage their influence.

Get them to get out the word for you.

Just getting started on blogging?

Influencer Marketing should be a vital part of your growth strategy.

Imagine getting Arnold Schwarzenegger to tweet your muscle building blog post.

That would certainly to cause some good stir for you in your market.

You get the idea…

Influencer Marketing Case Study

In this case study, I’ll show you how I got the #2 global digital influencer Sam Hurley to share my content with his audience.

Here is Sam’s bio:

2016 #2 global digital influencer

Top 100 social media influencers

Top 100 B2B marketing influencers

Top 100 cloud influencers

Tops 100 social selling influencers

And… Sam has more than 110,000 strong followers on Twitter.

Me?

Launched my blog 3 months back.

Twitter followers: 200+

If you’re a nobody blogger like me, it’s real hard to get Influencers like Sam to share your content with his audience.

Unless you know his wife well…

And his wife is willing to do you a favour by persuading Sam to tweet for you.

Bad news is:

I don’t know his wife.

And I’m a total stranger to Sam.

How did I get Sam to share my content?

Here is what I did…

I spent some time researching Sam’s Twitter profile.

I saw Sam had a Pinned Tweet.

#SEO Starter Guide: Destroy Your New Website in 3 Actionable Steps [#sem #startup] —-> https://t.co/f5YXqfF1xi 😯🔥👾 pic.twitter.com/UP53bYFBEE

— Sam Hurley ➤➤➤➤➤ (@Sam___Hurley) November 19, 2015

Usually a pinned tweet is important to a marketer.

They want the content to have the maximum exposure.

“I better check that out where the tweet leads to, ” I thought to myself.

Clicked on the tweet and I landed on Sam’s blog posts.

It’s an epic content on technical SEO. Sam shows his readers how to do technical SEO check on a website.

It is a masterpiece, one of the best articles I’ve ever read on the subject.

If you own a website, read it. You will thank yourself later. I gained a ton of value from reading the post.

Step 1: Get Sam’s Attention

I wanted to thank Sam;

At the same time, I wanted to get his attention before I invaded his email inbox.

I hopped over to the comment box and posted this:

24 hours later, Sam replied to my comment:

Nice!

I got Sam’s attention.

Step 2: Reach out to Sam

It’s time now time to reach out to Sam so that I can show him my content (and hopefully, he’s willing to share it).

I need Sam’s personal email address.

I need to locate it.

After spending 30 minutes or so in front of my laptop screen; I realise it was not easy…

#1 Sam’s personal site had no contact form. I was just a 1-page squeeze page.

# 2 I opted in to see if there is any email notification from his autoresponder. There isn’t one.

#3 I tried this method to hunt down Sam’s email address in Gmail. No luck.

#4 I signed up for a ContentMarketer.io account; the bad news was, Sujan Patel told me their app is not mining email address anymore.

#5 I tried my luck at EmailHunter.co, no luck.

I’ve tried all method I knew.

All failed.

If I can’t invade Sam’s inbox, I can’t show him my content.

I’ve left with one last option to reach out to Sam.

Twitter

I could Tweet him.

I tweeted Sam this:

And hope for the best…

24 hours later.

Sam replied:

Step 3: Send Over My Link. Make it Easy to Share

The rest is easy…

I sent over a short email with a link to my blog post.

And I make it easy for Sam to share.

=====
Hi Sam,

It’s Verena. https://twitter.com/growthtext

Here’s something you might find interesting…

Mari Smith has a twitter following of over 460,000 raving fans and I got her to tweet for me. Her tweet immediately skyrocketed my blog traffic by 330%

I’ve written an article on how to get influencers like Mari to send a ton of twitter traffic to a blog just by sending them 1-2 cold emails.

Here is the link: http://growthtext.com/twitter-marketing

I hope I’m providing value.

Sincerely,
Verena

P/S: Special tweet ready to go if you’re inclined to share
http://ctt.ec/Ifebm
=====

24 hours later, I woke up and saw this in front of my screen:

T#witter #Marketing Case Study: How She Grew Her #Blog Traffic 330% Using This Twitter Trick https://t.co/X1J03jD2Ej @growthtext

— Sam Hurley ➤➤➤➤➤ (@Sam___Hurley) April 23, 2016

Sam tweeted my blog post.

The tweet was retweeted and distributed on Twitter and then over to Facebook.

Traffic then got channeled to my blog post.

Getting my content out to Sam’s audience was just the beginning.

We exchanged emails regularly.

We became friends.

Sam is an expert in technical SEO, growth hacking and digital marketing in general.

He’s an extremely busy guy, but he still squeeze time in between his heavy schedule answer some of my questions.

And share my new blog posts that need exposure:

Ultimate Traffic Guide: 100+ Actionable Tips to Increase Your Web Traffic https://t.co/DiO8SjI2mO via @growthtext

— Sam Hurley 😎💻😎 💗 Kindness Enthusiast 💗 (@Sam___Hurley) April 27, 2016

Blog Traffic Report: How She Use Twitter to Increase Traffic 380% With Zero Ad Spend https://t.co/HTEy2xFzW9 @growthtext

— Sam Hurley 😎💻😎 💗 Kindness Enthusiast 💗 (@Sam___Hurley) April 24, 2016

Conclusion

When you’ve built a relationship, it becomes easy.

Influencer marketing is easier than ever on the social media.

As long as you have high quality material that provides value to improve peoples’ life or business, be bold.

Reach out to thought leaders with a large following to get your content out.

Twitter can be a great place to engage with influencers.

You just have to do it right.

Here is my 3-step “right” process:

Step 1: Get the influencer’s attention first by commenting and tweet his blog post.

The rule is simple.

Give before your take…offer your help to someone else before asking for a favour.

Step 2: Reach out to the influencer via email.

Can’t find his email? Send him a tweet; ask permission to send your content.

Step 3: Send over your link and make it easy for them to share.

That’s it!

Influencer Marketing is powerful. Do it right and you’ll catapult your blog’s growth.

I hope you’ve found value on this post.

Now, if you think this post is helpful to your audience, click the social share buttons on this page and spread good stuff!

By the way…

I’m sharing everything on my journey to 10,000 monthly visitors.

Every month I’m posting a traffic report summarizing my progress here on Growth Text.

I’ll also show you what traffic strategies I use during the month that make the difference in the amount of traffic and the number of opt-ins this blog accumulates.