Page 90 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

worst practices on influence marketing, but for the focused purpose of this book,
I want to emphasize that simply getting important people to share your content
doesn’t necessarily translate into business success. I’m going to illustrate that
point with a story and then, just when you’re convinced influence marketing is
not for you, I’m going to show you how it is for you. I’m that sneaky. I’m like a
cobra hidden in the influence marketing brush.

The downside of viral

Like every new blogger, my dream of success meant getting a business superstar
to share my content. I was convinced that validation would change everything
and propel me into the sunny skies of Internet fame and fortune. About two
years into my blogging career, to my surprise and delight, my dream came true.
One of my blog posts was tweeted by marketing superstar Guy Kawasaki, who
has a Twitter following roughly the size of France.

As soon as he tweeted the post (on a Friday) my traffic surged, and over the
weekend the number of people finding my site was 500 percent greater than the
normal rate. Briefly, the Guy-traffic crashed my server and shut down my
website. Look at me—I went viral!

When you go viral, you naturally reach a lot of new people outside the
comfortable “normal” audience you’ve built over time. In fact, about 98 percent
of the tidal wave of readers over that weekend had never been to the blog before
(something that is easily determined through a free analytics program). I had a
full weekend of blog tourists!

Guy and his audience had no connection to me, and the new people visiting
my site had no reason to stay around after their nanosecond of curiosity had
subsided. There was no lasting impact from that traffic spike. As far as I could
tell, I didn’t even get one new subscriber from the biggest single day ever on my
blog, up until that point. Bottom line: There were no discernible business
benefits from a superstar igniting my content.

Now that I’ve moderated your expectations about getting a celebrity to make
you famous and successful, it’s time for the cobra to strike. Because done well,
there are indeed significant benefits you can achieve by igniting content through
a “borrowed” audience.

Three types of influencers