How to woo an influencer in ten lessons

Influencers are people that have the ability to impact signicantly other people's opinions. They are the pillars of Influence marketing and can play a substantial role in PR strategies.

If you have something great to offer to consumers, influencers might help you get to them and convince them of its qualities. But, you need to build an excellent relationship with the influencers first. According to Eric Enge, founder of Stone Temple, in today's social web, there are a three major ways an influencer can have a big impact on your business:

• They can write a blog post / article about you.
• They can share information about you in their social media accounts.
• They can ask you, or permit you, to guest post on their site.
• Or, any combination of, or all of, the above.

Influencers can give you a larger audience than the one you could have got to all by yourself.

Image from www.seomoz.org

Now, how can you do to begin that strong relationship I mentionned above? Check out these little tips:

1. Identify the influencer that could help you and before approaching him, try to know what he's interested in. Analyse what they say on Twitter, what they talk about. You will then figure out the best way to talk to them.
2.  Introduce yourself. Proceed exactly like you do in real life when you're starting a new friendship.
3. Smartly respond to post, tweet or facebook update in a way that can add value to it.
4. Share great stuff that can be interesting for the influencer and his audience.
5. Share HIS stuff in other to show your give and take attitude.
6. Give, give, give. I'll never say it enough. Help others with useful informations. Seek answers that could be helpful for your own audience (or anybody else that could get to your profile by chance) on a regular basis .
7. Seize any opportunity of personal interaction in real life by attending conferences for example.
8. Personal interaction is great but don't act too friendly and don't focus your attention on one person and exclude other people. It could start to feel a bit freaky and you don't want that, huh?
9. Mind the line between following and stalking. Don't show desperation. You want to showcase yourself as someone who knows what he is doing. Be patient if you don't have immediate reaction from the influencer. He might take some time to notice you.
10. Get busy getting some credit. Once you've started sharing interesting things from others and giving significant contribution with your comments, check out if you can guest-blog for any platform that your influencer is interested to.

 The Internet has change the way people interact and abolish the barriers of distance by bringing the world to your door. However, influencers as anybody else on the web remain humans. So, don't forget your good education and always trust the rule of "Please - Thank you - Sorry".

For more informations on Influence Marketing, read this great post by Eric Enge, Influencer Marketing - What it is, and why YOU Need to be doing it