Should I use my "personal" or "website brand" account to interact and build relationships with influencers/bloggers in my industry?

This is the kind of question I usually get by most of my clients and love the opportunity to help with a few ideas. Since you are planning to offer the spaces mainly for art events, meetings and popup shops, you are mainly targeting locals rather than tourists in the first place. So I would focus on those clients first. Start using local social media and invite people to a cocktail on one of your spaces. You can either have a mini showing, art-gallery style. Go to the office buildings in the city and invite the employees. Show up at artists' coops and handle invitations to your cocktail. Go to the places your users already are. Once in the cocktail collect the information of those attending and ask them specifically what use they would give that space (meetings, events, etc.) Once you have filtered their responses you can email them with specific tips and suggestions on how to discover the best spaces the city has to offer for their specific needs. You can even sponsor a local, up-and-coming artist and offer invitees to let them know when the artist would do a popup shop in one of your spaces. We can definitely brainstorm more about this if interested Good Luck Elba Nino

Do the opposite. Think about it from their point of view. They get requests like these all the time and most of the time the request comes from random people they don't know. That would be kind of annoying right? You get an email from someone you don't know but they want you to do something for them? You'd delete that email too. Best way to get their attention...get a referral from someone they know and trust. Get someone else they know and trust to introduce you (this is the whole reason I built my business www.reverralriver.com). Referrals work the best. Second best way...develop a relationship with them before asking for anything. Don't email and ask for something right away. You wouldn't ask someone to marry you on a first date would you? Develop the relationship slowly. Give them value before ever asking for anything in return. Over just a few short weeks you could easily establish a relationship to the point where you could actually mention an "ask" which should be very open-ended and create absolutely zero work/friction for the person you are asking. One of my favorite techniques to warm-up a relationship...just email and tell them you appreciated (insert an article they wrote or service they provide, whatever, just stroke their ego). Tell them you're a fan and often point people their way. Then go way above and beyond and find their physical mailing address (it's not that hard to do) and send them a small gift or hand-written postcard in the mail just to say thanks. Then email them once you know they got it and just say thanks again. Then start emailing them various articles or things they might think are valuable, I'd say no more than once every 4 days. Connect on LinkedIN and message them funny pictures or GIF's. Show them you're human. Make them laugh and smile and just say "Hey I appreciate all you've done so just wanted to return the favor and make you smile (insert funny GIF here)". Then, once they know who you are, don't ask them directly to partner...ask them if they know anyone who would be interested in partnering. Below is a template I've used with great success...and the beauty is that they will often ask for more info and get interested themselves, but usually only if you have offered them some sort of value to stand out amongst the crowd. --- Hey (prospect first name), Hope you laughed at the last GIF I sent. I was just wondering if you knew anyone that would be interested in a partnership/affiliate opportunity… Real quick summary… I’m building a SaaS that automates the process of asking for referrals…it uses artificial intelligence to find potential leads in your existing customers network and makes it super simple for your customers to make the referral (one click of a button). If you know anyone that has an audience of people that would benefit from something like this I'd be grateful for an intro. I won't let you down I promise if you can make an intro. I’ll draft up all the marketing material and do all of the work, so all they would have to do is say “ok”, hit copy, paste, and send and I’d be happy to pay them 25% commission for life (or if there is another payment structure in mind I’m happy to talk about it) So what do you think? Can you help me out? Thanks, Parker ---- If you found this useful please upvote. Book a call with me if you want to know more or if I can help further.

Paying bloggers for direct advertisements is a bit of a grey area. It's grey because loads of brands are doing it, but it's such a difficult thing for advertising regulators to monitor. Check out this guide so you're aware of the guidelines and risks: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/plain-language/bus41-dot-com-disclosures-information-about-online-advertising.pdf You should also be aware of the SEO risks to your business. In short, if you get caught paying bloggers to write about your company and those articles contain links to your site, you're at risk of receiving a manual penalty from Google. See this for more: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en Risks aside, those tactics you noted are fine, and can work great. Depending on your product or service, You might want to consider signing up for a variety of the affiliate networks out there such as ClickBank or Affiliate Window. Lastly, the best way to get them writing about you is to make them a part of your growth. Find relevant bloggers in your niche and recruit them as your product testers and focus group. If they feel a part of it, and your product or service genuinely enhancing their lives (or the lives of their readers), why wouldn't they write about you?

Hello! First, you're going to have to spend some time researching your targets. You can go for the typical outlets that feature startups, but I think you'll find great traction if you start researching bloggers that are in the healthy food space. I would also spend some time researching who has covered your competitors, who might be healthy snack subscription services such as Urth Box, Healthy Box, Graze, etc. You can use a tool like Buzz Sumo (buzzsumo.com) to see what publications and AUTHORS (this is the most important part) have covered their launch or anything related to them. The authors are extremely important because often times they have their own personal blogs, or they write for multiple places. Once you find the authors you want to target, get to know them and engage with them. I have a lot of tips (and also a research spreadsheet as a resource) that you can find in these two places: Post: http://www.copyblogger.com/stronger-outreach/ Resource For Research/Tracking: http://t.co/89AER7pUBW As far as an example email, something like this might work for a food blogger, customized for each person and in your own voice. Never, ever send the same exact pitch to food bloggers, and make sure you research their temperament before reaching out. You'll want to get to the point, but make sure they know that you appreciate their blog, them, and what they've written about. Also, make sure you're following them on their various networks and that you've engaged in some way with them. This may take some preparation but it's worth having that warm touch before reaching out. Also make sure they're open to accepting pitches. Some explicitly state that they're not, and you should honor that. ---Hi [name] <-- always address by name. I'm [your name] and I'm the founder of [company name], which is a healthy snack food subscription service. We [name competitive differentiator here] and I'm hoping to help spread the news of its launch to the food community. I was looking through your blog/site/publication and I noticed that you've posted about [something related to your area - healthy snacks, healthy recipes, quick bites, etc - share link] and [share why it was important to you - maybe their post talks about one of the reasons you decided to launch the company, etc]. Do you feel as if [company name] would be a good fit to share with your audience? We'd love to share a promotional code with your readers so that they're able to get the first month free and test out the snacks. Thank you so much for your time! ---- As far as reaching out to bloggers that have covered competitors, that's another beast, because you have to be respectful in how you approach it. If you have the resources, you can always write a post that discusses something in the health space related to food, including (proven) scientific facts, with visual "fact cards" that can then be pitched to a bigger news outlet. That's just a very loose, general example as more research is required to figure out what will resonate with that crowd. It's also something that I could brainstorm and cover in depth on a call. I'm always available to chat via Clarity. I've executed outreach for a lot of product launches in the past and I'm happy to chat about this. Have a great day!

Some of those same influencers who turned you down might have written about your service if you hadn't offered to pay them. You should have instead sent them a bag of dicks. If they're a celebrity, you can get their agent's address from http://contactanycelebrity.com/ (it sounds fake, but it's actually totally legit, agents actually send them info). If they don't have an agent, try to look for a 'fan mail' address that they might have posted on a video or something. If you can't get any relevant address, then look up their friends on social media instead, and offer to pay them $xxx cash to send a back of dicks to their friend, and a cut of whatever orders end up being generated by that (if the influencer ends up writing about it). There are more techniques you can use to get influencers to post for free about it. Send me a message if you want to discuss it more, or just to say thanks if any of these ideas work (I'd actually like to know). all the best, Lee