Tools to Find Influencers and Bloggers within your Niche
Monitor hashtags with tools like Hashtracking to find niche influencers on social media. See if they have following and if they get re-tweets.
Blog groups/events/conferences are one way to meet other bloggers. You can even consider buying advertising campaigns from their site. Request a screenshot of their analytics to see how much traffic they get.
Build your own community to support and help each other, i.e. private Facebook group.
Grouphigh.com is used for blogger research and campaign tracking.
Google your industry keywords and see who are the top blogs in the search results. Look at their domain authority like on Moz.com
Contact Bloggers
Make a personalized message and mention how you guys can work together and potentially build a long-term relationship. You can use the same bloggers for future products as well.
Some will want upfront payment, an affiliate link, and get a hold of any physical product to endorse/review. Some will start as a sponsored post and then become an affiliate getting paid indefinitely from evergreen content.
"Sponsored Post" with payment upfront in the title/subject line often times get opened first by influencers. "Partnership Opportunity" is no longer an effective term and "Paid Brand Ambassador" is better than "Brand Ambassador".
Check out our 2016 SEO Tutorial Video for templates on what to say to bloggers:
How to Review a Site
Check out their analytics if they trust you enough to give them to you (screenshot).
See their sponsored posts. If there are too many, it could lower the value of the site.
See if they have worked with reputable brands long term as they review sites for quality control.
Personally review their content to make sure there is value in their posts. Are they using original content? Do they embed video?
See how many social shares they have if they have posts with counters.
Evaluate if the audience is there to buy products or to see unrelated news or gossip.
How to Measure ROI
Be clear about your goals from a guest post like sales, conversions, referred traffic, SEO, etc.
It can sometimes be difficult to measure buzz from mentions and shares and their effect on sales like from a video from influence not based on clicking on a direct promo link. Also, users might Google a brand instead of clicking through a link to buy a mentioned brand.
Use a specific hashtag to track across multiple platforms to track their influence.
Maximize your ROI by creating high-value original content with relevant keyword phrases. You can also consider creating YouTube videos with the influencer as well.
Most guests posts don't result in immediate sales.
If you get an evergreen post (timeless content), you could potentially get ROI indefinitely.
Hire Influencers
You can also hire influencers to write and create content for your blog and social media. They can then share that content on your site onto their social media.
