After you compile lists of bloggers you would like to target, you can begin to break the list down and determine who are the influencers in your niche, including people whom I like to call hidden influencers. Hidden influencers are people that have a large social imprint that doesn't necessarily show up on their blog. For example, some bloggers don't have a lot of commenters on their blog but their Twitter feed is followed by tens of thousands. Here are some ways to determine whether a blogger is an influencer:
You now have imported all the feeds of your niche in one place. To see the results, click the Topic tab on the right sidebar; your named list of imported topics appears. When you click the title of a topic, a list of all the blogs you entered appears, now ranked by PostRank. (See Figure 1-3.)
When you click the arrow on the right of the blog title, the top-ranked posts recently created by the blog appear in the new window. This feature allows you to see what content is popular in your niche.
By using PostRank, not only do you have the blogs ranked within your niche, but you also know the top posts of each blog based on traffic and social-media sharing. Pretty useful intelligence to have, no?
After you identify the influencers, you want to attract them to your blog. If influencers read your blog, they may offer you guest-blogging spots, share your content, and form a relationship with you so that you can be mutually beneficial to each other.
In order to turn these influencers into readers, you can try multiple tactics, including the following:
Not only can you get the attention of a popular blogger by engaging in conversation on his or her blog, you also get the attention of that blogger's readership. If the readers and commentators like your contribution, you can get additional traffic, new readers, and even potentially high rankings back links into your Web site; all because you left a comment on the blog.
When you use any of the tactics in the preceding list, the three C's (content, communication, and consistency) come into effect. When you communicate with these bloggers, you need to make sure that you have consistent content on your site. Trying to reach out to another blogger when you have only three posts total doesn't present the most credibility but after you've worked at it for a few months, doing blogger outreach can provide you with a good way to grow your audience.