Blogging is still a highly effective way to grow your brand — and you don’t even need your own blog to do it. Instead, you can find influential bloggers in your niche who have already built an audience and perfected their craft. It’s the shortcut to internet stardom, provided you connect with the right bloggers who share your audience and can help you achieve your ambitions.
Let’s explore how you can find bloggers, regardless of your niche, and how to best connect with them to leverage their platform.
Contents:
Why Is Finding Bloggers Important for Your Business?
Where to Find Bloggers: Top Resources
Best Practices and Tips for a Successful Blogger Search
Measuring the Success of Your Blogger Outreach Campaign
How To Utilize Meltwater for Finding Bloggers in Your Niche
Why Is Finding Bloggers Important for Your Business?
Bloggers have built dedicated audiences who read their articles and trust their recommendations. They keep readers coming back by providing high-quality content and information. If they mention you on their blog, it’s like a vote of confidence in your brand.
Being featured on a blog is like getting a stamp of approval. Their followers see this endorsement and are more likely to trust and engage with you. By collaborating with bloggers in your niche, you’re tapping into a ready-made community that trusts the blogger’s opinions.
Blogs can also give you backlinks and drive free traffic to your website. And because blog articles don’t “expire” like paid ads, you can essentially get unlimited brand exposure and website traffic.
Where to Find Bloggers: Top Resources
With over 600 million live blogs on the internet, where do you start to build partnerships? The first step: Start by choosing blogs in your niche.
Not all blogs will be a good fit for building brand awareness. You want to ensure you’re reaching your target audience and that your product or service makes sense to the blog promoting you. It wouldn’t look natural if an auto mechanic’s blog was promoting your high-heeled shoes, right?
If you’re not sure which blogs to target, start with these top resources and tools that can help you find bloggers to promote your product.
Meltwater
Meltwater’s influencer marketing platform makes it easy to discover bloggers in your niche. Driven by data, the platform lets you define your blogger criteria, then combs through 30 million profiles to find bloggers who match your needs.
You can dig deeper into potential blog partners by viewing their social media profiles, learning about their blog traffic, and finding out if their audience aligns with yours. You’ll have access to real-time influencer metrics that can help you shortlist your options.
Once you have a list of potential bloggers, you can connect with them directly through Meltwater. And if it’s a partnership that’s meant to be, you can track all aspects of your collaboration from the same platform.
Udemy
Many successful bloggers don’t just blog; they have entire brands that include online courses, books, ebooks, and other content. If you want to see who’s making waves in their niche, check Udemy and similar online course sites.
Udemy gives content creators a house for their online courses. Bloggers often add courses here to create new revenue streams. Checking Udemy also shows you who’s serious about creating content and who likely has an established brand and following.
You can use Udemy to find bloggers in your niche. Narrow your focus to specific categories, like health and fitness, music, business, or lifestyle. Keep refining your search to make a shortlist of bloggers and creators to reach out to.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo helps you discover trending topics and who’s leading those conversations. You can search the tool using keywords in your niche, then see who’s publishing content on your chosen topics (and how their content is performing).
You’ll also gain insights into their audiences and engagement rates. You’ll see top-performing content, who’s sharing the content, and gain a better idea of the influencer’s reach and impact.
Social Media
Bloggers use social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok to promote their blogs and gain more exposure and traffic. Social media is a great vetting tool to see how big a blogger influencer’s audience is and how engaged their fans are.
But beyond vetting, you can also use social media to find bloggers.
Do a search for mentions or hashtags related to your niche. You’ll see who’s posting content on those terms and the engagement they’re getting.
You can also use social media to introduce yourself to bloggers and start building connections that may lead to partnerships.
Bloggers rely heavily on SEO to gain organic traffic and get their content noticed. The higher they rank in search, the more exposure their blog receives.
A well-optimized blog is also good news for you if you’re trying to partner with bloggers. If they’ve done a good job of climbing the rankings, partnering with them will ultimately help your brand awareness. You’ll gain higher-quality backlinks and have the chance of getting in front of an active audience.
To find bloggers using Google, search for keywords related to your niche and see which blogs appear in the results. You might also see round-up posts listing several blogs in a specific niche or industry, which can streamline your research.
Best Practices and Tips for a Successful Blogger Search
Bloggers are marketers, which means they use many of the same tools and techniques you’re using to promote your products or services.
They’re on social media using hashtags and commenting on others’ profiles in their niche to grow their awareness.
They’re gaining exposure on round-up posts and posting content on third-party sites (like Udemy).
And they’re relying on SEO for organic traffic from people actively searching for content in their niche.
You can take advantage of these same tools and techniques to find bloggers in your niche. Here’s how.
Get clear about your niche
When working with bloggers to promote your business, you want their endorsement to look authentic. That’s why fit is so important — otherwise, your brand mention might come off as spammy or artificial. People can smell a promotion from a mile away.
To make sure you’re only working with relevant bloggers, you’ll need to get crystal clear about the niche you want to target. Think:
- What is your brand about?
- Who is your ideal customer?
- What qualities or characteristics should the blog align with?
- Are there specific qualities or values your brand doesn’t align with?
Remember, any blog you collaborate with has the opportunity to impact how others perceive your brand. Aligning in terms of audience and brand values will be key to making your collaboration authentic and meaningful.
Check more than one social media network
Vetting a blogger based on their Facebook or Instagram following is a step in the right direction. But don’t stop there.
Focusing on just one social media network is like putting all your eggs in one basket. You should explore different social media networks and the type of content on each one that’s relevant to your niche. You might find that some platforms will perform better than others based on your goals and niche.
Read the blogger’s content
Don’t judge your blogger partners based on engagement and audience size alone. Before deciding to collaborate, take time to read their content.
Dive in and see if their style and values align with your brand. The key here is fit!
You want someone who produces quality content and resonates well with their audience. Otherwise, you risk associating your brand with poorly created content or values that don’t match your brand.
Also, see how they integrate promotions and partnerships in their content. This will give you an idea of how they might represent your brand.
Avoid private blog networks
Not all blog opportunities are gold. In fact, some can be downright damaging.
Private blog networks are easy to come by, which makes them attractive to brands looking for a quick win. These are blog networks that link to each other in hopes of gaming the system and increasing rankings. But beware these blogs can harm your SEO and backlink profile.
You can spot a blog that might be part of a PBN by looking for:
- Similar designs and content between websites
- A lack of social media
- Syndicated content across various unrelated domains
Personalize your outreach
When you’re ready to reach out, make sure you personalize your message. Mention specific posts you like or campaigns that caught your eye.
Personal touches show that you’re genuinely interested in their work and not just sending out mass emails.
Tip: For a full deep-dive on how you can amplify your brand with a blogger outreach campaign, check out our blog!
Propose a clear collaboration idea
When contacting bloggers in your niche, be clear about what you’re offering and what you’d like them to do. Whether it’s a free product, payment, or mutual exchange of content, clarity from the get-go can set the right tone (and help you get what you want!).
Measuring the Success of Your Blogger Outreach Campaign
Knowing how to find bloggers to promote your product is the start of what can be a lucrative campaign. Just like any other marketing channels, you’ll also need to track the success of your efforts to see if blogger outreach campaigns are the way forward.
Measuring the impact of blogging is crucial to understanding what’s working and what might need tweaking.
Here’s how you can keep track of how well your blogger outreach is working.
Define blogger outreach success
Whether your goal is to build backlinks, increase your social media following, or make sales, you need to decide what blogging success looks like. Knowing your goals will help you measure the right metrics.
Use tracking links
Tools like Meltwater can help you assign tracking links to blogger influencers so you can see who’s driving the most results. You can create unique URLs for each blogger and see how many clicks each link gets.
Monitor engagement
Keep an eye on the traffic the articles and social media posts about your brand are getting. For social media, this includes likes, shares, comments, and clicks. For articles, this means monitoring website traffic, time spent on the page, and link clicks.
High engagement indicates the blogger’s audience likes the content and that it resonates with them.
Check sales and conversion rates
If direct sales are a goal, track how many sales are coming from your blogger partners. You can use tracking links and discount codes that are specific to each blogger. Analyzing which bloggers are driving sales will help you decide who to work with in the future.
How To Utilize Meltwater for Finding Bloggers in Your Niche
For brands on the hunt for bloggers in their niche, Meltwater provides invaluable tools across your entire strategy. Our influencer marketing platform provides end-to-end coverage, from finding bloggers and vetting them to communicating with them and tracking success.
Learn more when you request a demo by filling out the form below.
