Build a Small-Scale Influencer Referral Programme

Objective: Grow customer referrals and increase your organic search engine rankings and brand image.

How: This is a little different from an all-out affiliate program, which I outlined previously, because this is highly targeted. Within an open affiliate program the goal is to bring in as many affiliates as possible to generate the maximum revenue possible.

With an influencer campaign, the focus is around getting top figures within your industry to promote your product. Outside of the obvious benefits around generating new customers, there is a lot to be said for the effect this can have on your overall brand.

It's one thing having a bunch of random bloggers pushing your product, it's another to have industry leaders validating that it's worth investing in.

SumoMe, Noah Kagan's lead generation software company, run a focused influencer program where they will give referral fees to individual influencers that promote their product.

They actually build out a special landing page for these influencers to direct traffic to, which is a great way to add a bit more value to them. In some cases they will even run specific offers for the influencer to use.

You probably noticed that I mentioned in the "Objective" section of this tactic that you can 'increase your search engine rankings' as well. Well, here's a nice trick that you can implement with these landing pages to boost the ranking of your product pages (or any page, for that matter).

When you have a bunch of these unique landing pages for influencers, they're going to be linking to you fairly frequently, which will push a bunch of PageRank to these pages. Now that in itself is great but you probably don't actually want these pages to rank at all.

So, here's what you can do...

Add a canonical link on each of your influencer landing pages that points to one of your product pages that you want to rank better. Now, all of those links to these landing pages will be pushed through to your product page and you should get a nice ranking boost.

Just looking at SumoMe as an example and you can see there's over 9,000 backlinks from over 150 domains that point to these landing pages - a quick canonical tag will push all that lovely PageRank into a page you care about.

Here's a basic process for bringing in influencers to your program:

1. Put together a spreadsheet with the names and contact information of a number of top influencers within your industry.
2. Individually reach out to them and outline what you're looking to do, stressing the exclusivity, and what they're going to get in return.
3. Work with each influencer to put together a custom package.
4. Create assets for each influencer, including a landing page, creative and any offers.
5. Run an initial campaign with each influencer to show them initial value in the partnership.
6. Spend a lot of time hand-holding and maintaining the partnerships you form.