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.

I grew this blog from nothing to a blog with 10,000 monthly visitors, working part time and without using SEO.

Want to know how I made it happen? I’ll show you what I did. Click here to get instant access.

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.

influencer marketing

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.

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:

influencer marketing

24 hours later, Sam replied to my comment:

influencer marketing

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:

influencer marketing

And hope for the best…

24 hours later.

Sam replied:

influencer marketing
 

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:

 

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:

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.

I grew this blog from nothing to a blog with 10,000 monthly visitors, working part time and without using SEO.

Want to know how I made it happen? I’ll show you what I did. Click here to get instant access.

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

  1. Verena,

    Super impressed with your interaction and engagement. I appreciate being on your list and watching your journey as you grow your blog. Also, great story about Sam Hurley. He seems like a genuine person and I will start following him because he has some great content. Plus he’s cute. In the meantime, keep up the great work! You are doing this the right way. It also helps Sam Hurley because he is destined to pick up some new followers and fans too (case in point!).

    Be well!
    Jody

  2. Good job Verena, I had the pleasure to be friends with Sam on Twitter too. Great guy!
    I love it when people use Social Media to be social instead of just shouting about their content.

    Keep up the good work!

    1. Thanks for your positive words, Raul.

      Social media is a great place to build relationship. Just don’t let the fact that you don’t know the person hold you back from sending an invite to connect. As long as we have high quality content; reach out to the influencers. They are very likely to get our content out.

      Yes, Sam is a great guy.

    2. Raul – You’re the man! 🙂

      “I love it when people use Social Media to be social instead of just shouting about their content.”

      Quote of the day…

      Sam

  3. Verena,

    What an *awesome* article! I absolutely love your style, not only through your outreach techniques but the way your blogs flow. It’s a pleasure to read.

    People are right when they say you are doing things the right way!

    Thanks so much for including me in this post, I am truly honoured

    Here’s to a lasting relationship!

    Sam

  4. Simply wow. You are growth hacking your blog’s traffic… and will use as a case studies for my list also.

    1. Glad you liked it Ali! Let me know if there are any other topics you would love to read about.

  5. Wow! So we call it influencer marketing 😀
    Great share, Verena. Actually, Sam made my content viral last week. But I didnt mentioned him with with my blog with such a vision.

    I have just started using social media marketing for my business and only person I memorized from my approx 1000 followers till now is Sam.

    I just wanted to let him know that he is important to me and I am loving his content. One of the biggest surprise was when he replied to me and shared my post couple of times in a day. By the result, I got 500 hits on my post within 5 days.

    I see him as an idol for social media marketing success.

    1. Bhupinder –

      What awesome compliments!!! Thank you so much! 🙂

      I’m very happy to have made a difference to your traffic…I appreciate your engagement and also you taking the time to leave such a thoughtful reply here on Verena’s blog.

      YOU ROCK!

      See you on Twitter soon,
      Sam

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