Linkedin Marketing Excellence Personal Use Ebook

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Once you've put all this time and effort into growing your list of Linkedln connections, you might then start to think about how you can use them to market your business, your website or your blog.

This is where 'influencer marketing' comes in - a relatively new term in the world of internet marketing but also one of the most powerful and important strategies that you have available to you. Essentially, influencer marketing straddles the line between conventional marketing and networking and combines them in a truly powerful way. What's more, it can save you countless hours when it comes to promoting yourself and getting ahead on the web. As it happens, Linkedln is actually perfectly influencer marketing and is perhaps the optimal tool for doing it effectively.

What is Influencer Marketing?

So how does this idea work? Basically, influencer marketing means that you're going to stop trying to reach as wide an audience as possible with your marketing and instead you're going to focus on the quality of the audience you market to. This might mean focusing on one individual and getting them to retweet or promote something you have to say.

So if you were to take conventional marketing on Twitter, you might spend countless hours trying to build your number of followers and then trying to create new content that would help increase your engagement. Over countless hundreds of hours spread over months or years, you would build enough of a following to become an influencer in your niche and to start getting more business each time you post.

With influencer marketing though, you would skip this step. Instead, you would focus on creating a relationship with someone who already had a huge amount of influence. Let's take Richard Branson for instance. If you could somehow reach Richard Branson and get him to Tweet about your product (and to include your username) you would likely get thousands of new follower's overnight and gigantic sales for your book or your services. In other words, you could leapfrog all of the competition by going directly to a key influencer who has the ears and hearts of your audience. This way, one single retweet, guest post or shootout could be an order of magnitude more effective than hundreds or even thousands would regularly be.

How to Reach the Big Influencers

Problem is, Richard Branson probably doesn't want to shout out to you on social media and in fact you probably have no means of contacting him...

This is where that 'degrees of separation' thing comes in again. You see, if you could find someone who knew someone, who knew someone, who knew Richard Branson, then you would be connected by 3 degrees of separation. And anyone who is connected to you by that many people, will then show you your connection to them. In other words, you would be able to go onto Linkedln and you would be able to see the two people who you need to go through to get to Richard Branson.

What's more, if you're connected to someone by three degrees, then you will be able to send them 'InMail'. This is a message that they'll receive in their Linkedln inbox and which statistically has a higher chance of being opened.

Suddenly, it becomes all the more possible that you could reach a big influencer in your niche -especially if you're working hard to grow the prominence of your website. Get big enough and you might be considered an E-lister. That might be enough to encourage a few 'C-listers' to contact you to potentially do business together. That in turn means that you now have the opportunity to directly contact some of the biggest thought leaders on the planet. This is powerful stuff.

Climbing the Ladder

Remember what we said earlier though: outright messaging Bill Gates out of the blue is not going to go down well - even if you have a vague connection by people neither of you really know all that well (imagine that!).

So how do you instead go about getting the attention of the big players? One trick is not to aim quite so big. Instead of looking to get free promotion from the biggest names in your industry, instead try to make meaningful connections with the rising stars. Look at the people who are just ahead of you and try to work with them instead of trying to jump ahead. These people will have a much better chance of wanting to connect with you because they won't be inundated with requests and because they have something to gain from the relationship as well as you do.

Even then though, you need to be careful about how you get in touch. Once you've made the connection, try to manage that connection by congratulating them on birthdays etc. and by sharing content they might find interesting (more on that in a bit). Then, when you do get in touch, make sure it's with something that they will genuineiyf\u6 interesting and avoid any thinly veiled motivations that are too self-serving. Think about the kind of message you would respond to and try to come across as genuine.

This is even more important if you're emailing a big name in your industry. Instead of straight away telling them you want to do business with them, try just saying that you're a huge fan and that you'd love if they checked out your website. Leave it at that for a while. Likewise, sharing something you think might be useful with them is another way to gradually build rapport.

Tip #1: Note that you already have some very powerful contacts in your connections! It could well be that someone you know is now a big name in a particular blogging sphere and if they've already connected with you then this is almost like a 'freebie'. Linkedln makes life easy for you as well by actually highlighting the true thought leaders with an 'Influencer' badge right on their profile.
Be Persistent... But Not too Much!

Don't be disheartened if you don't get a positive response right away, you will likely find that these people have a lot on their plate and they as such won't always have time to respond to your messages. The best strategy then is to wait a few months - even a year - and to try again.

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