Use Roundups to Explode Your Traffic Overnight

Have you got the new site blues?
You’re writing great content, day after day, but no matter what you do, you just can’t seem to get more traffic back to your site.  It’s frustrating. The work you’re putting in isn’t translating into more visitors.
You’re on a tight budget, so spending big on Facebook or Google ads isn’t an option. You need a way to get traffic without having to pay for it.
You just want eyeballs on your site. You’ve done everything you can to optimize your blog, but now you need traffic.
So, what can you do to drive traffic to your blog that’s free, easy, and takes a simple investment of your time?
It’s called the roundup post, and it’s one of the best ways to generate traffic to a new blog. As a bonus, you’ll also build relationships with the influencers in your niche at the same time.

What is a Roundup Post?

A roundup post is made up of responses from multiple experts in your niche on a topic that’s important to your audience.
By publishing a roundup post, you leverage the expertise and popularity of your niche’s experts. And by asking your experts to share your post with their audience, your traffic will increase exponentially.
Here’s an example of a roundup post from Ashley Faulkes of Mad Lemmings:

It’s a popular topic and provides a ton of value to readers, which is why this post has reached over 20K shares. Ashley has added even more value by rounding up the best posts and resources on each of the business ideas, along with tips and advice from experts.

Why are Roundup Posts Effective at Generating Traffic?

Roundup posts are effective traffic generators because featuring popular experts, and asking them to share your post, gets your content in front of a huge audience and you’ll get more shares overall.
BuzzSumo found that if a single influencer tweets your post, you’ll receive 31.8% more shares. And the overall share rate only increases as the number of influencers who share your post increases.

So, are you ready to boost your traffic with a roundup post?

How to Create Your First Roundup Post

Creating an expert roundup post can take a bit of time, but it doesn’t need to be difficult. The key is to have a system in place and follow it closely.

Step 1. Decide On a Topic

The first thing you need to decide on is the topic of your roundup post and the question that you’ll ask your influencers.
But how do you work out what’s a good question?
There are a few factors that go into a good question:

• It must be something your audience wants to know the answer to
• It can’t be answered by a simple yes or no
• There’s no obvious answer

When brainstorming for content ideas, you consider asking your email subscribers by sending them a survey. Click here for a really great tool that can embed a survey right into your emails! It is super easy to use & will have you on the right track in no time.
Another alternative is to check Quora, Reddit, and other forums to see what questions are being asked and which ones have the highest engagement.

Step 2. Choose the Experts You Want to Feature

It’s a good idea to always include more bloggers in your initial list than you want to include in the final post. Bloggers, marketers and entrepreneurs are busy people and not all will respond to your request in time, if at all.
Plus, the more experts you feature, the more traffic you’ll potentially receive.
For example, an HR company had the greatest traffic result from one of their roundup posts that had responses from over 150 experts. Two other roundup posts of theirs featured fewer experts and received less traffic. So, you don’t want to feature too few experts.
But how do you find enough experts to participate in your roundup?
Chances are you already know many of the experts in your niche. However, if you’re putting together a large roundup, you’re going to have to go digging.
Here are three ways to find more experts for your roundup
1. Search for Previous Roundups in Your Niche
There are a couple of different ways you can use to find previous roundups. You can search on BuzzSumo or Ahrefs to find popular content, or you can do a simple Google search for your keywords.

Once you’ve found a roundup in your niche, you can choose which featured experts you want to add to your list of targets.
Matthew Woodward suggests targeting the experts that engaged with previous roundup posts, as they are more likely to share and engage with your roundup post.
2. Alltop 
Alltop lists top blogs by category. A search of your niche will bring up plenty of blogs to search.
This is a more time-consuming method, as you’ll have to manually click through to the blogs to determine if you want to include the expert in your roundup.

3. Hashtagify.me 
Hashtagify.me can be used to determine the top influencers for different hashtags. Search relevant hashtags to find Twitter influencers in your niche.
Check their Twitter profile to find their blog and determine if you want to include them in your roundup.

Keep the list of bloggers and entrepreneurs you want to approach in a spreadsheet. If you can’t find their email address on their site, go ahead and sign up for their email list. You should be able to reach them on the email address they send the welcome email from.

Step 3. Prepare for Responses

Now that you’ve created your list of influencers to approach about participating in your roundup, you’ll need to prepare for responses.
A roundup post involves dealing with a lot of data, so it’s imperative to have a clear organization strategy before you start collecting information.
The simplest way to collate responses from your influencers is via a Google Form. It’s free, and very easy to get started.
You’ll want to include fields for:

• Name
• Website URL
• Twitter Handle
• Short Bio
• The question

You can quickly and easily set your form up to auto-populate a Google Sheet. Then all you need to do is link to your form when you email the expert to ask for their input.
The hard work of collating responses is done for you and when the time comes to write your post, it’ll save you loads of time.

Step 4. Reach Out to Your Experts

You’ve got your question ready, and your Google form is good to go. Now you can start reaching out to your influencers.
How do you go about this?
Influencers are busy people. Neil Patel suggests engaging with your chosen influencers before you send them a request to participate in your roundup – they are more likely to respond to someone who they’ve interacted with before.
You can get on your expert’s radar by commenting on their blog posts, joining their email list, responding to their emails, and sharing their content on social media.
When you craft your email to your influencers make sure you:

• Are clear about what you want them to do
• Outline the benefit to them
• Leverage social proof – if you’ve had a response from a popular, well-known blogger, let them know!

Here’s a template example from QuickSprout on how to word your outreach email:

Step 5. Write the Post

Once the responses are in, it’s time to organize your responses into a blog post. You won’t have to do too much writing – your experts have done it for you – but you’ll still need to write an introduction and conclusion, and format the post in a way that makes sense.
For your experts’ responses, you’ll need:

• A headshot from their website, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Gravatar. Save each image under their first and last name to make sure you’ve attributed the right head to the right influencer!
• A link to their website
• Their response
• Short bio
• A click to tweet (optional)

Here’s an example from Time Management Chef of how to format your expert’s response:

Step 6. Email Your Experts and Let Them Know the Post is Live

Email your influencers to let them know you’ve published the post and thank them for their involvement. You can ask them to share the post with their followers in this email.
Here’s an example email template from Sue Anne Dunlevie of Successful Blogging:

Step 7. Share on Social Media

The next step is to share the post on social media yourself, tagging the experts who contributed.
You may not be able to tag every expert in one post, so space it out over the course of multiple posts until you’ve tagged them all.
Here’s an example of how to tag featured influencers on Google+ from CrazyEgg:

Wrapping it Up

If you’re a new entrepreneur and you’re not getting the kind of traffic you want, try a roundup post. A roundup post is an excellent opportunity to reach out to influencers, form relationships with them, and leverage their audience.
By reaching out to expert’s in your niche, you can leverage their expertise and popularity helping you bring a ton of value to your readers and reach an entire new audience.
To start, choose a valuable topic by finding out what your audience wants to know. Looking at Quora, Reddit or using a simple tool to survey your audience can give you some insight into what your audience is struggling with. Next, you want to reach out to influencers to have them answer a question about the topic. Go ahead and use the template from Neil Patel to craft your email.
Once you’ve received your responses, write the post and start sharing it on social media. Don’t forget to ask your experts to share it with their audience as well. This is the crucial step as you are leveraging their audience and connections to help you grow your traffic. Use the template email from Sue Anne Dunlevie to help you craft the perfect message.
The final step? Sit back, relax, and watch your traffic and audience increase! If you’ve chosen your influencers well, it’s really that easy.
Have you published a roundup post? What were your results?

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