Working with bloggers: Different ways to collaborate to benefit your business

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Dec 23, 2016 / by
Working with bloggers: Different ways to collaborate to benefit your business

Once you have found bloggers that you feel would suit your business and who have the right kind of following, reach and engagement that you think will work best for you, the next step is to decide how exactly you’d like to work with them to get the most out of the partnership.

There are several different forms of sponsorship and potential ways to collaborate with influencers in your niche, and which ones you choose to employ will depend on your aim, time restraints and budget. Let’s take a closer look at some common ways to collaborate with bloggers to benefit your business.

Brand ambassadorship

One option for working with bloggers is having one or several brand ambassadors. This means that you pay a blogger (usually a fixed monthly amount) to talk about and endorse your product or service whenever possible on their blog and social media.

This naturally also involves giving the blogger access to your product or service free of charge so that they can give an informed opinion about it. It can be a highly successful strategy if done correctly, but it can also be a risky investment for a first time collaboration with a blogger, especially if they do not have significant reach and influence among your target audience.

Sponsored content

Mainly used for gaining more incoming traffic to your site, paying bloggers to publish sponsored content is a relatively straightforward way to work with bloggers. Note that sponsored content should never be used for link building purposes. There are generally two types of sponsored content that bloggers are interested in publishing: guest posts written by you or customised blog posts written by them.

The advantage of having the blogger create the content themselves is that it will be in keeping with the rest of their blog, meaning it will ideally get just as many views as their regular content and it will also appear more natural for SEO purposes. Keep in mind, though, that most bloggers will likely charge more for writing the content themselves, as opposed to having you supply it.

Creating an infographic around a hot topic in your niche and asking bloggers to share this with a link back to your site is a great way to easily spread your message and gain backlinks. It’s also less work for both you and the bloggers involved, as you only have to create it once and the bloggers don’t have to spend a lot of time on new content creation.

Man using a tabletProduct reviews

Possibly the cheapest and most risk-free way of working with bloggers is to offer them the chance to do product or service reviews, giveaways or competitions. This basically involves you sending out a free sample of your service or product to a blogger in exchange for having them use it and then write a review about it on their blog, linking back to your site.

Giveaways or competitions

Another compelling way to approach this is to have the blogger use the service or product themselves and additionally organise a giveaway or competition on their blog for one of their readers to win a free sample themselves.

This strategy will have the blogger talking positively about your service or product and also generating interest in it by having their readers take part in a competition to win the chance to use it themselves. This will create hype around your business and also increase your exposure to the right audience through the blogger so that even among the readers who don’t win, your name will be remembered.

Offer publicity

In addition to paying or sponsoring them, there’s one thing all bloggers crave: publicity! Offer this as an incentive when reaching out to them and this will go a long way to sweeten the deal. David Risley does a good job of explaining why this works:

I know it is ironic because you’re probably contacting the blogger for publicity yourself. However, is there an opportunity for mutual back scratching? For example, do you link to press coverage? If so, let the blogger know that you’ll link to their review on your site in the press section. That helps the blogger’s credibility and bloggers like that.

Take your time deciding how you want to approach working with bloggers, but also don’t be afraid to experiment with it. It can be an extremely effective marketing strategy, but it may take some time to find the right approach for your business so don’t expect it to happen overnight!

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