Marketing strategy has nowadays become a priority tool for many companies. Indeed, digital marketing turns out to be the most effective way of getting closer to customers. This situation has lead to an explosive growth of bloggers over the Internet. As a result, before launching the « Aycoo project », I have decided to make some researches on how to build strong relationships with bloggers in order to make a positive first contact.

Why is it important to create a solid relationship with bloggers? 

The human value of friendship

Socializing and making new friends is a natural part of human beings. At work, as well as at home, the more we are getting along with our family members or colleagues, the more productive we become.  The same approach occurs when it comes to building a relationship with a blogger. A quality relationship helps in making the business grow faster. That is the reason why I advise people to create and maintain a powerful relationship with bloggers.

As such, to build a worthy relationship with a blogger, I recommend these few tips:

• Undertaking regular visits on their blogs, participate in a discussion, and leave nice comments on their posts to increase credibility. If possible, try to leave bright, hilarious, and interesting comments related to their articles. This is very helpful for catching the blogger’s attention.
• Interacting without making advertising: as a web marketer, I strongly discourage sharing a link to your blog while leaving comments on blogger’s posts, because this only discredits your contact with the blogger.  The secret of a better friendship with bloggers is finding an effective approach to consolidate your expertise without doing any advertising. It may appear like a tough and long-term job but this actually leads to very promising results. Once a blogger notices your expertise, you can easily post a guest article on his blog and offer your services.
• Exchanging with bloggers via their social networks: bloggers are very ongoing and sociable people. They like sharing and discussing with their followers. So do not hesitate to contact them through their social networks. This is a brilliant way of getting noticed before reaching them for any further partnership requests.
• Setting up blog posts to support your favorite blogger: I think this is one of the most exciting parts of creating a blog over the Internet. Bloggers are always sensitive about other bloggers who write interesting posts about them. Quite often, they will share back your post with their audience. And this kind of  » collaborative blog chain  » actually helps to improve your blog’s notoriety making it visible to a wider panel of Internet users.

A powerful tool for growing startups

As an ongoing project, building a firm relationship with bloggers has been particularly necessary in order to get the Aycoo project off the ground. Exchanging and developing bloggers network through interaction via their blog, their mail contact or their social network has been helpful for:

• Developing  mutually valuable contacts
• Generating a better understanding of the project
• Building up trust and credibility towards Aycoo’s activities
• Growing the blogging community
• Promoting the brand’ s visibility throughout the web

Now that we have understood the major stakes involved in building a stable relationship with bloggers,  let us see how to find these potential bloggers over the web.

How to find potential bloggers?

Concentrating on target leads

Before starting the pursuit of potential bloggers with whom building a strong relationship with,  identifying the core target of Aycoo services has been significant to me. Indeed, when the marketing campaign started, I was tempted to target each and every blogger listed over the Internet, through researches on search engines like Google.  However, I quickly realized that this was just a waste of time. So I decided to focus my efforts on bloggers that seemed relevant to Aycoo’s niche. Therefore, I concentrated my researches on blogs that were specializing in DIY, home lifestyle, interior design, bioproducts…which are among the most concerned targets affected by this project.

Organizing the results into a spreadsheet

Once I have collected the list of blogger prospects I am going to build a relationship with, I found it methodical to create a spreadsheet on Excel where I could manage all of the information collected about DIY potential bloggers. I have organized it into several columns including date of first contact, the URL address, and the mail contacts. This is very helpful in checking the progress of the potential blogger’s contact process and avoiding repeated contact of the same blogger.

Now that you have been able to find your blogger prospects, you will have to prepare the content of the mails that you are going to send.

What kind of content shall we deliver to generate the blogger’s interest?

Contacting blogger prospects is quite easy online because they are easily reachable through mail contact or just by simply fill in the contact form on their website. Nevertheless, it is substantial to pay particular attention to the mail content.

To create a singular relationship with bloggers, it is definitely recommended to:

• Find out how you are going to help them: Personally, when I try to build a relationship with someone new, I always try to put myself in my partner’s shoes. This acts as a great icebreaker and makes the social dialog go smoothly. So remember to focus on what you can offer to your blogger in order to help him while preparing the email content.

Speaking for myself, I like personalizing my mail content depending on the bloggers’main interest. For example, when it comes to building a positive relationship with DIY bloggers who regularly share some DIY tutorials on their site, I pick up one article from these tutorials to illustrate my arguments.

• Be brief, clear, and concise by giving a short overview and summary of the service you are proposing. I am used to gently proposing writing an article with unique content at the end of my mail as a personal contribution in feeding the prospects’ blog.

To sum up, building peerless strong relationships with bloggers takes time and involves a lot of patience, creativity, and perseverance. Like in human friendship, the best way to gain bloggers’ trust is by promoting your offer in a natural way without any advertising.

When the bloggers really trust in you, they are more likely to recommend you to their audience, link to your blog, or promote your brand on their social media profiles. Finally, building strong relationships with bloggers is simply magical for self-interest because you discover new people and learn to create and maintain powerful and valuable connections with them.