Today we’ve got a super-easy, no fluff way to build rapport with influencers in your niche and create a valuable piece of content for your blog.
If you’re lucky, it might even drive a flood of visitors to your site > nice bonus!
In my recent post about our Expert Roundup Article success, I referenced the fact that we were using ERAs to drive traffic and natural links, but that the main benefit was how they allow you to make connections with influencers.
Why?
It doesn’t matter whether you’re building an authority site, a niche site or selling a product or service, connections in your niche are key. In fact, they’re equally beneficial in the offline world as well.
As an “online world” example, Hayden and Spencer from NichePursuits.com struck up a partnership in 2012 offering information about finding expired domains and building Private Blog Networks. It generated a ton of interest and was mutually beneficial for adding value to their respective audiences. Although both were having great success then, and were always destined to have success, the expired domain/PBN information the pair were putting out certainly played a positive role in their journey.
Truly, you can build a business empire though the right connections, both in the online and offline world.
With that in mind, the immediate return you get from ERAs by way of a short-term traffic spike, some links and social shares, pales into insignificance when compared to the medium to long-term ROI you’ll get from having a solid base of connections with other bloggers.
Just recently, we validated a really cool tactic for nurturing these relationships for both niche sites and authority sites that are just being launched. In saying that, the tactic would actually work for any online business in my view; it’s not only limited to niche sites and new authority sites.
We’re calling them Content Round-Up Articles (CRAs).
Content Round-Up Articles (CRAs)
Content curation is not a new tactic and round-ups of content related to a specific topic is frequently done in the form of link-filled articles. Matthew Woodward does this with his monthly roundup of internet marketing posts. They’re useful resources for regular readers.
Our CRA process is a little different to normal content curation and involves building an article from extracts of content that is produced by people within your niche with whom you’d like to build a relationship with.
Well, in saying that, your goal could just be to get free content for an article rather than building connections, so you don’t have to exclusively set-out to build relationships. Quality content alone is a benefit!
I’d love to share the specific article, buuuut, it’s a partner site with one of our Intern graduates so I’m not keen on putting his asset at risk of competition.
What I can share is the results and also some ideas about how you could do a CRA for your site.
First, the traffic result:
Our partner in this site (Matt) didn’t set out to use the content to drive traffic. Our aim with the site right now is to fill it with non-review articles to add value to the visitors, keep them on the site longer etc (being an Amazon affiliate site, it’s got a high proportion of product review articles).
After creating the article, which took him 1 hour, he decided to submit it to Reddit and it took off!
^ The site that gets around 1,000 visits per day on average, largely organic traffic. All up, we ticked just over 10,000 views on the article that was created using this tactic.
Side note > Matt had been doing well with Reddit promotion, but was sticking to 2-3 main sub-Reddits. He decided for this article to try something a new sub-Reddit; It worked! Reddit is such a unique beast, it pays to test new sub-Reddits, new ways of using it, tweaking what you usually do just to see if you can get an improved result.
Ideas for CRAs:
We’re targeting our CRAs around keywords we want to target with articles from an SEO perspective > may as well try to pickup some search traffic if it’s there.
The article Matt created in this instance was so quick to put together because it was actually using images sourced from other blogs in the niche. It’s in the health & beauty niche and so lends itself to using images to convey the message in the article.
So the article was literally just;
- an attention-grabbing, yet SEO optimized headline
- an introductory paragraph
- 10 x images
- beneath each image is a prominent reference link to the site it was pulled from and the aim there is to end them ongoing traffic to get their attention
- a concluding paragraph
- that’s it!
You don’t need to use images though, let’s look at how you could implement the exact same thing on any site you have…
Let’s say you had a site on rowing machine reviews and you wanted to target a user-help/how to type keyword, here’s what you could do.
- Choose a KW like “rowing machine technique” (ok search volume)
- You’d type in that exact keyword in Google (or close variants)
- Click through to sites that look like good networking targets
- Find a tip on rowing machine technique from each site you visit
- Copy the tips into your article, citing each site you pull the tip from
- Keep going until you’ve covered the topic fully
- Give it a cool title “Top Rowing Machine Technique Tips From 10 Rowing Experts”
- Hit publish
- Email the experts you quoted to let them know you loved their site and quoted them in an article, would love to stay connected etc etc etc.
BOOM! High-quality article, 10 new connections made, 1 hour of work.
You could promote it on Reddit yourself and certainly ask the experts you’ve cited to share the article with their audience. May just land yourself 10,000 new eyeballs on your site at the same time!
Learn With Us
Our January and February Internships were fully booked, our March intake is well on the way and we’re still 30 days out from the start. It’ll be fully booked within the next week or two.
As a participant, you get to learn with us as we identify new tactics for getting more eyeballs than ever before on your sites.
We cover in-depth modules on CRAs like is outlined above, Expert Round Articles, getting links from Wikipedia, guest post outreach that works, more ways to connect with influencers, effective use of Reddit, lead collection + list building and of course, we’re always testing variations of what we know works + validating new ideas.
Come join in!
John says:
Content is very important nowadays.
I tested a few months ago two different websites, both using WordPress, and I realized that I need to add at least one time a week a new article, otherwise my site goes down eve if it is well optimized for search engines.
Andre says:
I agree John. In some cases I’ve seen site jumps of 30 positions overnight after content was posted. It’s definitely something that is very important for Google these days.