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This is about connecting ?
It’s nice to plug yourself into communities you and your business align with. Connecting with bloggers is a great way to reach established and engaged communities. These people are the reason you do what you do right? So you can spend time with vibrant people who you align with.
Bloggers are community organizers, they provide value to a network of likeminded individuals through written content, videos, events, services, etc. Connecting with bloggers at scale can be a great way to find your community as an individual. It’s also a great way to connect with people who could benefit from your product or service and get earned media.
This guide will show you methods you can use to increase your connection rate in four steps:
- Find blogs
- Scrape Data
- Get contact info
- Turn them into buddies ☺️
Some may tell you that using a method such as the one illustrated below is wrong. That you are spamming people. This is a valid argument that has merit, but Future Sharks has a different point of view. We love the communities we work in, and any chance we get to plug in to other likeminded communities we take.
Outside of hacking your way into lots of contact information relevant to your business, you are giving yourself the opportunity to connect with other like minded individuals and creators at an increased rate. This is about connecting not spamming!
Step 1: Find blogs
Feedspot is the best resource I have found for this that gives you blog names and domains in a list format. List formats are almost always easier to pull information from.
The easiest way to navigate the Feedspot blog (basically a database of RSS feeds) is through a google search. Feedspot is not the easiest to navigate on its own. Typing something like this in google will search within Feedspot’s blog database:
Site:blog.feedspot.com “target key word”
Lets use “TEA” as our keyword for an example. Type Site:blog.feedspot.com “tea” into google and you will see these results.
We will use the first link: “Top 100 Tea Blogs”
Step 2: Scrape Data
This chrome extension, will give you the ability to pull targeted information off the page. Lets walk through how to use it for Feedspot:
- Download the data miner chrome extension and create a free account.
- Click on the extension while on the page you want to scrape and then click “create new recipe”
- Select “Create new recipe”
Side note: You may have to watch a few tutorial videos to learn the script syntax. Luckily in this case all we need to grab is the website domain and Feedspot makes visible for us.
Clean Data
Once you get the data you will need to clean it up in excel or google sheets. We want all of them to look exactly like this: “website.com”
No “www” or “https://” allowed. It will hurt the amount of emails we find.
You can do this with a excel/google sheet function called “split text to columns” found on the “data” tab.
This function breaks up single columns into multiple using the syntax of your choice. You will need to play around with the characters you use for splitting text but here are two that cover 90% of websites:
- Data ➥ Split to text ➥ custom ➥
- “https://”
- “.blog”
- “www.”
After running these you may need to do a little manual cleaning to make sure all the domains are in the same column.
Step 3: Get contact info
The are a couple ways to enrich domains to populate with contact information for people who have a “@website.com” email but my favorite by far is Anyleads.
1) Start a free trial at Anyleads
2) Navigate to the “Find Leads” tab
3) Click “Enrich Domains” and paste the cleaned domains into the given field (This will take 10-15 min to complete).
4) Export completed data file with enriched domains
Step 4: Turn them into buddies ☺️
Once the file in Anyleads is fully enriched you will have a dataset with name, work email, title, description, linkedIn URL and much more.
Take a look at your data set. You may find that some of the domains you have are other players in your space and perhaps competitors in certain circumstances. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
They have a blog to talk about more than themselves. They are building a community. It’s likely that they want relevant industry content and to tap into other like communities. Often your competitors are great referral sources.
The next thing you want to do is upload the LinkedIn Urls Anyleads gave you, back into Anyleads using the Enrich LinkedIn URL tab. This will spit out personal emails for the LinkedIn URLs you enter.
Now you have work emails, personal emails and LinkedIn Url’s to connect with these blogs at scale. I have a three step process I like to use:
Connect with them on LinkedIn using a quick intro message.
“Hey Jane, I love connecting with other tea enthusiasts, if you happen to be in the LA area you should swing by my office in Venice for some Matcha shots ;)”
Upload the personal emails you get from Anyleads into Facebook as a custom audience and include the audience in the next post you boost.
I like to boost posts to people after they have already gotten an email or a LinkedIn message from me. You will end up spending less on PPC.
Enroll them to a short email sequence that is non-intrusive.
We are aiming for a mix of value and a clear ask for collaboration on blog content. The key is to go in for the relationship, not the immediate win. These blogs will be around for a while and they like working with buddies 🙂
Send us a note if you give it a try! We would love to hear if you got some value from it.
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