Case Study: How to Leverage Other People’s Businesses

Here’s a simple outreach technique that you can use to leverage other social media accounts. Not only does this method generate targeted traffic that converts, as well as some quality backlinks, but it’s also a valuable way to network with business owners in a similar niche to your own.

Initially, our intention was to post up a quality article on our blog, do a bit of social media exposure for the article using our own social channels, then move along swiftly to our next blog article. However, it quickly dawned on us that we should take this whole thing further if we wanted increased exposure to our business.

So, with that said, after publishing the article on our blog, which you can see here: https://invalley.com/8-top-tools-seo...e-without.html

…we reached out to the companies that were mentioned within the blog post using a simple email template in order to let those companies know that we’d highlighted their business.

Here’s the email template we used:

http://i.imgur.com/EbHbk9S.jpg

Keep it short and simple. You can create the custom tweet link with clicktotweet.com.

A Win - Win for Everyone

It is important to note that we are not directly competing with these companies although we do target a very similar customer group (you might say a ‘complimentary’ customer group). This is why the technique is so effective. And what’s more, it can be applied to almost any niche:

For example, if you have a productivity blog, you could make a list of the top 10 productivity apps after which, you simply email the companies or individuals you’ve mentioned within your list. Or if you sell fitness supplements, you can write a post about the top 5 personal trainers.

It should always be a win - win; the companies that we mentioned in our blog post received free publicity, and they get to decide if they want to share our article with their audience (no pressure) in one way or another – a quick shout out to their list, a mention on Facebook, a Tweet, a Google+ post... whatever.

The Success Rate

In the example above, the success rate for us was 75%. This means six out of the eight companies positively responded to our email in one way or another. A few of the companies shared the post with their customers which brought us traffic and 3 sales:

http://i.imgur.com/PsFlMK8.jpg

Reaching out to the companies cost us around 15 minutes of our time, so it’s more than worthy of the effort!