How to Create Content That Your VIPs Will Love to Share

One of the worst feelings in the world of inbound marketing and enrollment is to write an incredible blog post, publish it, share it, and then…crickets.

I actually just shuddered a little bit thinking about it. (Because I have been there way, way too many times!)

It's a lot better when the opposite happens: when you experience the thrill of seeing an expert in your space share and promote your content for you.

This post will give you a practical, actionable approach to writing and designing the kind of content that VIPs love to share with your audience.

How to Find the Influencers in Your Space

The first step to getting influencers to share our content is knowing who those influencers are. There are a few ways you can do this. And good news: they're not mutually exclusive, so we can mix and match these approaches.

1. Google Your Keywords

A quick Google of our keywords is probably the easiest way to figure out who the influencers are in our space. I suggest opening an incognito window in Google Chrome and searching for a keyword in your space.

For example, let's say you're a university that just launched a new program in Koine Greek. You want to get some exposure for the new program, but you're not sure who the big influencers are online.

Start by Googling "Koine Greek tips." Here's what I find:

Now we'll click through to the top results and find out who wrote them. If these folks are ranking for this search term, we want them sharing our material!

2. Buzzsumo: Search by Topic

Another way to find influencers is to jump into Buzzsumo to see who's creating the most popular content on your topic.

What's Buzzsumo? It's a web app that looks at pages on the Internet, and then sorts them in order of how many times they've been shared on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Let's use Koine Greek as an example again. This time I'll go to Buzzsumo and enter "Koine Greek" into the search bar.

This tells Buzzsumo to look at all the articles about Koine Greek online, and then list them in order of how much they've been shared. (You can also use Buzzsumo for specific websites and even authors, too.) Here's what I find:

I can see that the most shared post, "Learn New Testament Greek," has been shared 148 times on Facebook, twice on Twitter, and once on Pinterest for a total of 151 shares. In some cases, Buzzsumo shows me who the author of a post is. In others, I'll need to click-through to find out who wrote the content in question.

This gives me an idea of which websites are writing the most popular content on Koine Greek, which means there's a good chance that I'll find influencers on these sites! You can do this for any area of interest you want to find influencers in.

3. Ask Your Team

I did this recently with the team at Disciplr (a product in the pre-launch stages at the time I write this). I emailed the team and asked a few simple questions:

Which websites would you love to see us featured on?

Who does our audience look to for advice?

This returned a long list of people the Disciplr team thought of as influencers. (More on the results later in this post.)

4. Ask Your Audience

If we really want to know who our audience views as influencers, we can also simply ask them directly.

Send a handful of your most engaged customers or subscribers a personal email asking them which blogs they read.

Send a mass email to your list with a link to a survey asking them which blogs they read. (You want to use a tool like Google Forms or Survey Monkey to process all the responses.)

What Now?

Find a good place to keep your list of influencers. I use a simple spreadsheet, but you can use whatever you like. The important thing is to have a place to save your list so that you don't need to do all this research again!

How to Get Influencers to Share Your Content

OK, we have our list of influencers. Now here's how to encourage them to share our content.

It's time to write some content for them to share. Here's where it gets interesting, because that kind of content must meet two criteria:

Your audience has to want it.

It has to make the influencers look good.

We can't just produce content for the blog and then think of ways to get others to share it! The whole getting-VIPs-to-share-our-stuff process begins with the creation of the content itself.

There are several ways to write this kind of content, but I want to focus on two sure-fire ways to make it happen.

Strategy 1: Write Original Content that Makes Influencers Look Awesome

How do you feel when someone publicly recognizes your good work? Warm fuzzies, right? I bet influencers feel the same way when someone thoughtfully points out their job well done.

That's why one of the best ways to get influencers to share our content is to write content that makes them look amazing. (Which shouldn't be hard­—they're influencers for a reason, right?)

This strategy consists of two main steps.

Step 1: Write Content that Calls Attention to the Experts

When we're writing our content, we can sprinkle in some nods to the people our target audience respects. That might look like:

pointing to their work as a case study

linking to one of their blog posts for more information

giving them a direct shout out and linking to their Twitter handle.

Doing this gives you a few benefits. First, it helps bring on the warm fuzzies for those experts. Second, when we recognize the people our audience respects, it make it easier for them to associate that kind of quality with us, too.

Sidenote: This happens to all of us. We immediately feel more connected to people who root for the same sports teams, listen to the same bands, and chow down at the same favorite restaurants. It works the same way with experts. If I know you read my favorite blog, I'm more likely to think you know what you're talking about.

Source: How to Create Content That Your VIPs Will Love to Share