It’s logical to think that influencers with big audiences hold the key to growing a blog. All it takes is one tweet or link and thousands of visitors will rush to your blog. In reality, this is not the case.
Yes, an influencer can drive a flood of traffic, but the windfall is temporary. I’ve seen it here on Pushing Social.
This is a snapshot of the traffic to PS:
The spikes were caused by popular bloggers who were gracious enough to mention one of my posts. As you see, new visitors arrived in droves. After a few days, the traffic settled back to levels prior to the surge.
Or did it?
Take another look…
After the spike, traffic settles down to a higher level. I did the math and discovered that traffic between posting days jumped by 17%.
What happened?
I call it…
The Groupie Effect
Every influencer is followed by dozens to hundreds of “groupies.” These people religiously comment, retweet, and share almost everything that the influencer says, does and links. They form the core of the person’s influence. Once they arrive on your blog, they settle in and do what they are good at: sharing content.
Although I love the spike in visitors, I really love the sustained groupie traffic to the blog. Of course, I can continue promoting my content to influencers, or I can take a more direct approach.
Why not woo the groupies and bypass the influencers?
Try this little trick: click the number portion of the tweet button on this post.
You’ll be shown a list of people who retweeted this post. Even though all of these people aren’t Pushing Social groupies, a few are.
You can get another clue by perusing my comments. Who seems to show up the most? Does the same person show up as a retweeter? If so, then you’ve probably found a groupie.
Finding them is the easy part. The hard part is wooing them.
Groupie Seduction
Groupies thrive on engagement. Ignore them at your own peril.
Some thought starters:
Answer comments: Groupies make a point of leaving substantive and thoughtful posts. Don’t let them languish without a reply.
Thank retweeters: Watch your Twitter timeline. When a new groupie shows up, make sure to thank them for the retweet.
Walk them home: Find your groupie’s blog and tweet out their posts and comment. Everyone loves comments, and it is a sure-fire way to get on their radar screen.
Ask questions: Groupies are passionate about your niche. Ask them what fascinates them about your subject. You’ll learn something new and show your new reader that you are interested in what they care about.
Show them a good time: I love connecting with groupies on several different social platforms. Go ahead and invite them to Google Plus, introduce them a great tweetchat, or Like them on Facebook.
If you show genuine interest in your new readers, they will hook you up with all the traffic you need.
Go ahead and do the “retweet button” trick and find your groupies. Are you missing the groupies by focusing too much on the influencers?
About Stanford
Standord,
I’m obviously a groupie. Even when I don’t plan on visiting your site, I’ll scan through the posts on feedly, and simply by reading the title, I end up picking your post. You definitely know how to write a great title.
You have to truly enjoy writing the post and interacting with the people reading your posts or the reply doesn’t comes across as genuine. This point” Ask questions: Groupies are passionate about your niche. Ask them what fascinates them about your subject. You’ll learn something new and show your new reader that you are interested in what they care about.” is so important from both the blogger and the reader’s perspective.
As usual, I really enjoyed your great tips.
Connie
How did I not know that you could click on the numbers to get this info? I feel like I get blinder the further I go. Once again, thank you for a very simple, yet ridiculously useful tip!
Hope you are doing well! Haven’t talked to you in a little while.
This is what social media is all about. When you blog and expect the best of your readers, you have to return the favor so they will return. I know I have kept so many of my “groupies” because of continued conversations in the comments section, on Facebook, and Twitter.
Stanford, another tip is to search for your domain on Twitter search. Here is a link to any recent retweets of for pushingsocial posts: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=pushingsocial.com
I have found it easier to look at tweets from the last day or so via Twitter search than to individually search for people that have tweeted each post, and someone that comes across an older post and likes it enough to share it in some ways seems more valuable than someone RTing my latest post.
Although for me there isn’t much activity on LinkedIn, you can also use LinkedIn Signal to find people that shared your post publicly on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/signal – you may need to search for a fragment of your title to get it to come up in trending, but then you can click on it to see all recent public LinkedIn shares.
Good tips for building relationships, thanks for sharing!
– @wittlake
Fabulous post, thanks so much for writing it! The suggestion I find particularly helpful about this post is the “walk them home” tip. I think we remember to RT more easily then we remember to really follow up and make a connection.
We all should support each other as bloggers, if we do this then everyone will enjoy big traffic numbers.
“Black Seo Guy “Signing Off”