Working with bloggers can help your small business get more traffic from Google. For reals. That’s why at the beginning of last year, we tried to convince our small business Instagram followers to add “find a handful of lovely bloggers” to their 2021 to-do lists.
Have you done it yet?
Don’t fret if you haven’t – we’ve made it super easy for you to find the right bloggers for your small business.
SEO backlinks from blogger collaborations
A backlink is a link from someone else’s website to your website. Google uses backlinks to help establish:
- Context: If your website has 5 links from different garden centre websites, that is evidence that your website has something to do with gardening.
- Community: If someone in Bristol is looking for gardening advice, and you have backlinks from Bristol 247, Bristol Post and Best of Bristol, Google can use this to justify ranking your Bristolian solutions higher.
- Authority: Your website says you are an award winning gardener and horticulturist. Backlinks from awards websites and the Royal Horticultural Society give evidence to support your claims.
So basically, working with bloggers is a big search engine optimisation (SEO) win.
Let’s talk bloggers
Website-based bloggers often get grouped in with straight-up social media influencers, but there is a massive difference in how their collaborative content and brand features can benefit a small business.
Social media influencers can help a business to access a new audience with tagged posts, Stories, Reels and more. As well as making sales off the back of a piece of content, the goal is to grow the social following of the sponsoring brand.
Website-based bloggers can have social media influence too, and offer that access to the new audience and the potential for sales and follows – but they have one key difference that we are gagging for – a website.
Bloggers’ websites give Google that sexy backlink evidence, and a somewhat-permanent connection between two online presences. For example;
- An interior design blog backlink tells Google that your website is about homes and gardens.
- A small business blog backlink tells Google that you’re an independent business.
- A local personal/lifestyle blog backlink gives more local evidence and a big ol’ dollop of a nice human vouching for you.
You get all this SEO goodness, plus a lovely feature or article on your indie brand, plus something to chat about on social media, plus new potential customers clicking onto your website, and probably some lovely new photos too.
How to find relevant bloggers
It can seem like a big ol’ time-consuming job trying to find worthwhile bloggers and influencers who are relevant to your small business, especially if you are not already super familiar with the blogging and social media world.
In a tiny nutshell, there are a few ways to find relevant bloggers to write about your small business:
- Use niche Instagram accounts such as Bristol Bloggers to find local influencers who match your aesthetic and also have a blog.
- Ask your pals or other small business owners if they have worked with any wonderful local bloggers.
- Pop a shout out in your Instagram Stories for blogger recommendations.
The blogs you choose to collaborate with don’t need to have a huge following to be beneficial for your business, but in theory – the more specific their content and the better the SEO of the website that is referring, the more ‘authority’ it has.
You can even check the SEO of a bloggers website with a couple of our favourite SEO tools, like the Ahrefs Backlink Checker, Ubersuggest, or even a simple keyword density checker.
It’s super important to remember that this the value of your website connection isn’t static, so a feature on a brand new, small blog might only help a little at first, but as their blog grows and your business grows, it could contribute more and more to your SEO.
Experienced bloggers should have an idea of their pricing, but some bloggers will be flexible when it comes to working with smaller businesses or charities, for example.
How to contact bloggers
If you missed it, I previously wrote a blog post about working with influencers for small businesses – which was a step by step guide by a blogger/influencer (me!) on how to communicate with bloggers & influencers.
Here’s a quick, basic template for sending a message (preferably an email, rather than an Instagram DM) to a blogger:
Subject: Blog collaboration with [business name]
“Hello [blogger name],
I hope you’re having a lovely week. I’m sending you a message on behalf of my small business, [business name], and I’m looking to work with bloggers who write about [insert their topic].
I came across your post on [insert specific thing] and thought it was [insert specific complement].
My business makes/sells/provides [insert description of business] and I thought we’d be a good match because [insert reason].
Would you be open to featuring one of our products within your blog? If so, I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Thank you so much,
[insert your name]”
From here, you can discuss the project with your chosen blogger(s), whether your budget stretches to payment or a gifted product, and any other requirements you both have.
Head over to our blog post, 5 local Bristol bloggers who love collaborating with small businesses for some inspiration of bloggers to contact, or have a browse of our other influencer marketing blog posts to learn more.
