In today’s marketplace, there are two big advertising tendencies: paid media and earned media. The first obviously refers to paid advertising: pay-per-click advertising, media buying, social media advertising, and so on.

The second – and the most relevant today – is earned media. For those who don’t fully understand the concept, here’s a resource that helps you differentiate more types of media.

I previously stated that earned media is the most relevant advertising trend today. The reason for this statement is quite simple: word-of-mouth-marketing ruled, rules, and it’ll always rule. We’re past the times when aggressive banners and ads influence our decisions.
 

Search Engines and Consumers are Getting Smarter!

Consumers are smart, and they learned how to base their decisions using different judgmental criteria. Along with the consumers, search engines have also become in. The algorithms that help Google, Yahoo, and other search engines evaluate the content from the web are more and more complex and precise.

The point is – earned media results are ranking way better nowadays. Signals that come from different influencers and relevant websites from around the web represent a huge and positive SEO signal.

An earned media marketing campaign is never done with a rush. Creating a good reputation, and basically, a user-generated content takes time and effort. You must offer consistent value, and you must sell your name pretty well. You must network, and you must wait.

Here are a few ways to make a little buzz and start leveraging other organizations in order to improve your SEO and business results:

1. Traditional Networking

Traditional networking still remains the best approach when it comes to connecting with other people. You simply start following someone, you do your homework about him, and then you proceed to the pitch.

You want something from him and he might want something from you. That’s the beginning of a productive relationship. You can also network with anyone you want – it can be an editor, a principal, or it can even be your town mayor. If it helps to improve your brand’s awareness, then it’s worth the time!

2. Industry Bloggers

Along with the digital media boom, a new category of businesspeople was born. They’re often called “industry bloggers” or “industry influencers”. These people usually own the most relevant website within a specific niche. For example, PewDiePie is known as the most famous video games YouTube blogger. He also has a website and millions of fans!

You can do several actions in order to gain an industry blogger attention:

1. Offer him something that would cost him time or money. Ask him to feature your blog’s name in return for your service.
2. Julie Petersen, the educational influencer and the founder of writing service reviews blog advices to create an infographic that reflects one of his previously distributed blog posts or topics. Again, exchange it for a precious backlink to your website.
3. If everything fails, even though you’re looking to create earned media results, you can negotiate a price and proceed with the strategy.

3. Social Media Influencers

Let’s not forget about social media. For a few good years now, social media is extremely popular around the entire world. I won’t start with the reasons for which social media is so important for any business who wants to thrive because you should have already figured that out.

Social media influencers can bring your website a lot of awareness and SEO signals. In order to gain social media influencers attention, follow these strategies:

1. Share, Tweet, Pin, or Like their content frequently. This is just the initial stage. After you’ve done that for a while and nothing happened, you should proceed to the next step.
2. Engage with them by leaving comments. Make sure you ask something relevant or share a valuable insight. If you are not relevant, you won’t succeed to approach the influencer.
3. Pitch him directly. You can find out his e-mail or Skype address and carefully send him a message. It shouldn’t be too intrusive, but rather a valuable proposition.

These strategies are meant to help you connect with these “famous people”. In both blogs and social media cases, you should build relationships with people that can benefit you on the longer run. You should always provide value too, as you’ll never go too far if you don’t.

Extra Advice

Once you’ve started to gather some backlinks and mentions from various places, you should start developing your own content distribution platform. Start creating blog posts around your niche and focus on the right keywords.

In addition, you can contribute to different blogs that are closely related to your niche. They shouldn’t be direct competition. See if they accept guest posts. If so, you can start displaying your names in even more places!

Earned media is definitely relevant and important if you wish to rank well in the search engine pages. If you take a look, every 1^st position on Google has already made efforts to create a reputation around their name, and their earned media presence and results are often very healthy!

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