How to Write an Expert Round Up Blog Post: a 3-Step Strategy for Blogs
Hello, and welcome to the round up post article and I'm glad you've chosen to learn about publishing expert roundup posts that crack the internet. I'm going to show how to publish a single blog post that would get you the traffic you desire.
I'm sure you've heard or come across expert round-up articles (or weekly roundups) on the internet.
Here's my first ever blog post:
Twitter Automation: 62 Experts Share their Automation Secrets and Tools (No Longer LIve)
This guide will help you craft a winning strategy from the start - coming up with the best ideas for your roundup posts, getting social media influencers to participate, to spreading the word out to as much as possible to attract traffic to your brand website.
GUIDE OUTLINE:
STEP 1: How to pick a topic for your roundup post: I show you how to pick the best title idea for your roundup for long term blogging success.
STEP 2: How to find the right influencers for your roundup post: I show you quick ways to easily get a list of top bloggers that would be happy to participate in your roundup [even if you’re completely new].
STEP 3: Reaching out: How to find the best way to reach out to each blogger on your list AND email templates that I used to get over 70 social media infuencers to participate in my roundup that attracted over 20,000 visitors and 3,000 social media share in its first week.
The 3-Step Guide to Creating an Expert Round up Post
STEP 1: How to Pick a Topic for Your Roundup Post:
To be able to hit the jackpot and get thousands of tweets and social media shares on your expert roundup blog post, you need to create something outstanding - something that will leave influencers jaw-dropped.
About 4 years ago, I was sitting on my couch at home during the summer break from school extremely frustrated because I didn't know what to blog about.
I went on Google searching for ways to find content ideas to blog about.
I stumbled on Sue Anne’s successfulblogging.com and signed up for her “Your first $1,000 webinar”. I showed up for the webinar but was attracted to JUST ONE (1) THING…
EXPERT ROUNDUPS!
It immediately lit a bulb in my head and I'm like “ooh, I'll do this”.
I then immediately came up with my first headline (topic), X CEOs REVEAL THEIR NUMBER 1 TACTIC TO MANAGING THEIR TWITTER PROFILES WITHOUT WASTING MUCH TIME, within few minutes.
First Draft Topic: 60 CEOS REVEAL THEIR NUMBER ONE TACTIC TO MANAGING THEIR TWITTER PROFILES WITHOUT WASTING MUCH TIME.
Let me show you how I came about it…
Here are things I considered when I came up with this title;
I wanted to help people manage their twitter profiles - what topic would tie to this? “twitter management”, "twitter automation", "twitter tools".
I wasn't going to target everyone - I wanted to work with companies, businesses and brands; targeting “CEOs”, "Managers", "Directors", etc, came up.
I needed to solve a specific problem; “managing twitter without spending much time” came up.
Get the idea now?
Think about the products or services you sell.
Brainstorm topic ideas directly related to it and are what your target audience will want to consume.
In my case it was "CEOs" and "Managers".
Next, think of one unique problem that your product or services solves and pull out a topic around it.
Don't worry about your title being Google or SEO friendly, just put some ideas down.
With keyword research, I adjusted my title to;
TWITTER AUTOMATION: 62 EXPERTS REVEAL THEIR AUTOMATION SECRETS AND TOOLS.
The baseline?
Just get a few ideas off the ground and when influencers start participating, better ideas will come.
In my case, I switched my headline from the first to the latter after I got participations from about 10 to 15 influencers.
Make use of Keyword tools like Google keyword planner to come up with ideas for an optimized title.
Expert roundup posts generally climb up quickly on search engines.
In fact, my first expert round up, ranked on page #2 on Google for highly competitive keyword, "twitter automation" within 3 weeks.
Why?
Influencers are going to share your roundup post and 1000s are going to visit your website. Thus you need to be very careful and make sure you use this opportunity to get the targeted influencers!
After getting a few topic ideas for your expert roundup, you can begin finding influencers for the roundup.
STEP 2: How to find the right influencers for your expert roundup post:
How to FindSocial Medoa Influencers that’ll Most Likely Participate in Your Expert Roundup? When I started finding influencers who will be interested in participating in my expert roundup blog post AND also connecting with me, I didn’t do any research nor plan out a strategy to finding the perfect influencers.
What I did was I used buzzsumo.com, to pull off every influencer that had certain keywords or had a certain number of following/influence.
But here's the thing...
You may end up getting connected with soccial media or niche influencers who are not interested in roundups. You might even piss them off with annoying cold emails and follow-ups.
Worst of all, it takes lot of time and energy doing these email reach outs.
How then do you find exactly who to build relationships with for your expert roundup post? Here's a simple hack;
“Finding Influencers who have already participated in similar weekly roundups or expert roundups” Finding Influencers that have participated in similar roundup posts is the best way to pull off influencers that will most likely say YES to your requests. Why? Because they have already shown interest in roundups.
Use Google and run “[your niche] + experts reveal their best secrets“.
So for example, if I’m to find travel experts to build relationships with for my ecpert roundup post, I’ll run the following:
“travel experts reveal their best secrets”.
"top 10 travel experts"
"travel expert secrets"
Get the ida? Now carefully go through some of these roundups (in your niche) and keep a list of experts that have participated; I use Excel for keeping all things LISTS.
STEP 3: Reaching out:
Next, let's look at how to find the best ways to reach-out to every social media influencer in your reachout list, what your reachout email should contain and what to do after publishing your roundup.
You ready? Good!
How to Reach Out to Popular Bloggers and Make them Participate in your Round Up.
When I was starting, I didn't have any strategy to reaching out to influencers. I didn't even have a list so I made a lot of mistakes which caused me a ton of wasted efforts and time.
I've broken down this entire process into 3 steps:
Finding their best contact details.
Crafting a reachout template then reaching out.
Post Publishing.
1. Finding their best contact details.
When I started, this caused me a ton of wasted hours and energy. I spent much time finding the best email addresses to reach each social media influencer.
Here's the thing:
Influencers hate SPAMMY mails so most times, they hide their email addresses.
This makes it super hard to find their email addresses but there's a solution…
Contact Pages or Contact Forms!
They hardly hide their contact me pages and that's where you get to reachout without having to spend so much time finding private email address, phone numbers, etc.
Both messages sent [using their contact me pages OR personal email addresses] mostly land in the same inbox.
Head over to their websites or blogs and find their contact me pages. Most times, it's either at the footer or the menu of their websites.
That's how I got social media and blogging moguls like Jeff Bullas, Sam Hurley, Leonard Kim, Noah Kagan, Evan Carmichael, Keith Keller, Ryan Biddulph, Adam Connel, etc, to participate in my expert roundup.
2. Crafting a reachout template then reaching out
After putting together your excel list of names of experts, their websites and contact-me page links, it's time to craft a winning reach out template to use.
Do not make the mistake of typing different emails for each influencer. That's a big waste of time.
Just craft 1 or 2 email templates and edit them for each influencer. Here are the exact templates I used during my reachouts;
__________
Hello, Madalyn. Simon here from simonzaku.com. I'm putting together this huge round up guide that'll feature a lot of experts about twitter marketing. Experts like Sam Hurley, Keith Keller, Katherine Sullivan, Samantha Kelly, Ryan Biddulph, Adam Connell and a couple more have participated already. Mind sharing with us too? Just a few lines will do perfectly if you're out of time. Just let me know so I'll send over the round up question. Btw, thanks for the follow on twitter via @s_zakuu Best, Simon.
___________
Hi Sam! I'm Simon from simonzaku.com. I'm putting together a huge round up guide about how to save time on twitter. Experts like Sam Hurley, Noah Kagan, Evan Carmichael, Leonard Kim, Keith Keller, Mark Schaefer, Madalyn Sklar, Rebekah Radice, Katherine Sullivan, Samantha Kelly and exactly 40 more have participated already. Mind sharing with us too? Just a few lines will do perfectly. Here's the question: "What's your number 1 secret to growing and managing your twitter brand w/o wasting much time?" Best, Simon.
___________
Hello, Rebekah. Simon here. I'm putting together this really huge round up guide of successful & expert entrepreneurs, bloggers and marketers all over the globe for my website. A little different from the gazillion of expert roundups. Marketing gurus like Sam Hurley & Katherine Sullivan have participated. Mind sharing a few words with us too? Best, Simon (s_zakuu).
__________
Follow Up Email
_________
Hello, Sam! I reached out to you days back about a huge round up I'm putting together on how to save time on twitter. A lot of top experts like Sam Hurley, Leonard Kim, Noah Kagan, Evan Carmichael, Keith Keller, Mark Schaefer, Madalyn Sklar, Rebekah Radice, Katherine Sullivan, Samantha Kelly, Ryan Biddulph, Adam Connell and exactly 43 more have participated already. I’m just following up to see if you've gotten the email :) Here’s the question once more: "What's your number 1 secret to growing and managing your twitter brand w/o wasting much time?" Deadline: 30th of Sept. 2023. Best, Simon (s_zakuu)
________
Follow-up emails are crucial for any cold email reach out campaign. In fact, about 60% of the social media influencers I emailed replied after a follow-up.
3. Post Reach Out: How Do You Promote Your Expert Roundup Post?
This is a chapter from my premium ebook but I decided to add it up here for free.
Asides, hitting up the experts that participated telling them it was live, I promoted the content to even more people.
After publishing my first blog post which was my expert roundup article, what I did was I started reaching out to people who've shown similar interest. These are people who've shared similar content, commented on similar content or even engaged with any similar tweeted content. For the sake of this lesson, I'll be showing you how to find and reach out to users who've tweeted or shared similar content to yours. One thing I love about this strategy is that you can use it for other regular articles on your blog too. The goal here is to find and reach out to at least 50 people interested in your type of content. Like I said, these are people that have tweeted similar blog content to yours. You find them, pull out their email addresses and reach out to them. The first thing to do is to find similar articles to your round up and I recommend using Google searches here because it's the fastest; don't use tools. Head over to Google and search for the keyword(s) your blog article is targeting. If you're targeting “beauty for teenagers”, run the phrase on Google to find content that already ranks for it. So let's say the title of your post is “10 Ways to Make Money Online”, I'll Google “Make Money Online”. Pick the top 5 results and keep in an excel file. The next step is to find people that have tweeted out those 5 articles and when starting out, I used buzzsumo to pull out these users FOR FREE! I think buzzsumo offers a free trial period which I jumped on during the time. (I just confirmed they offer a 7 day free trial). So head over to buzzsumo.com and sign up for their free trial. After setting up your account, you'll be able to login to your dashboard using the email and password you used. On your dashboard, navigate to the “Content Analyzer” tab and insert any of the 5 article links above then search. Click on the “twitter sharers” tab and export the list to excel (or CSV). Repeat these for all the 5 articles above and you should have a long list of 100-250 people that have tweeted similar content. Reaching out to 250 or even 100 people is a hell of work because you need to find their email addresses, websites … What most entrepreneurs do is they pay cheap freelancers to get this done. You can find good and super cheap freelancers on fiverr.com or freelancer.com for this.
But here's the thing; If you're like me, then you shouldn't outsource everything (including reaching out) to freelancers. They should take care of finding email addresses, websites, social links... while you do the emailing. This is so because some of these freelancers don't have experience with cold email reach outs. So to be sure you're not outsourcing this vital task to someone who might jeopardize everything, it's better to do it yourself. Reach out to 10-15 people every day. Reduce this number to 5-7 if you're out of time. That's it! I hope you've learnt a thing or two from today's blog article.
Now, here's the plain truth about reaching out to busy social media influencers…
Majority of the bloggers you'll reach out to will not participate. In fact, most times, 70-80% of influencers you email will not participate.
It won't matter how good your reachout template or email is. It won't matter how enticing your round up topic is.
It also doesn't matter how you try to persuade them to participate OR how many times you follow up.
Majority will still not participate!
Want to know the simple reason?
I wasn't building anygenuine relationship with them.
During my expert roundup project, the few influencers I had built relationships with, participated without hesitating. Why?
Because they knew me…
They've already gotten emails from me…
Whenever the name, Simon Taki Zaku, pops in their inbox, they already know me.
Most times, influencers don't even open any email from any name they don't recognize. Yes, a lot do that!
“Building Relationships with Popular Influencers takes a lot of time, when will I publish my round up”
When you do a quick Google search on how to build relationships with popular bloggers, most of what pops revolve around…
Comment frequently on their blogs…
Join their newsletter…
Tweet out their blog posts…
Follow them on twitter…
All of these are good and work great but thing is, they take a lot of time to work out.
I'm going to introduce you to a simple strategy to get connected to as many influencers as you like.
This simple strategy doesn't require you to be friends with popular bloggers before asking them to participate in your round up.
I myself missed out on this strategy when I started. It was when I was almost done with my round up that I came about this strategy.
Now, this isn't another strategy that will take days, weeks or even months to work…
In fact, you can start applying the strategy right after you learn it. Yes, it's that simple…
In my book, How I Became Friends with 100+ Popular Bloggers in One Year, I walk you through this very strategy to help you get as much influencers to participate in your round up post.
This was something I wish I was offered when I was starting out.
At the moment, the book is just $9.97 but I'll be raising the price this week end because I've gotten feedbacks that the strategy is worth more than the price.
Don't take my word for it. Here's what Amy from NeededInTheHome.com has to say…
"This eBook is a quick read and a great value for the price. Simon's creative thinking when it comes to networking just can't be beat. There are some ideas that most people do not think of. Yet after you learn the method, it makes perfect sense and you think, now why didn't I think of that, it's so simple and yet I missed it! He applies this to bloggers, but I think this could be applied in other business situations as well. My favorite idea is saving the blogger time with the links idea. You will have to read that section to see what I mean. I would love to have someone save me time in that way and it would create a great impression in my mind."
Here's what you'll learn in this ebook:
How I easily get on any influencer’s radar [no matter how popular or busy he or she might be]
Actionable strategies that I used to make popular bloggers notice my new blog [with one post]
How I began exchanging emails back and forth with 15 popular bloggers all in less than a week [with just 1 secret strategy]
How I got some of the most populous bloggers and marketers on the internet to participate in my roundup post [even when I was a total stranger]
The strategy that led to over 1,000 social shares on my FIRST blog post [on this very blog] in less than a week of publishing
Most of all, how to become friends with extremely popular bloggers in your niche.