A Shockingly Simple Way to Connect with Influencers

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I’d be willing to bet that almost all of the good things that have happened in your career were due to the influence of someone else. At every stage of our careers and our lives, we need the help of other people with influence, opportunities, or connections.

But the question is: How do we create more of those connections with influential people?

Well, there are plenty of ways to do this, but I want to share with you one very simple way that has been working for me lately. In fact, it’s so shockingly simple that I can’t believe I have only recently begun to use it more.

Let me give you a little backstory.

I do interviews every Friday on my podcast. But I don’t just want to interview anyone. I want to interview the highest-caliber people I can connect with. In order to connect with influencers, we often think that it involves going through a web of connections in social media. But there is a simpler way.

Many of the people that you would want to connect with are involved in email marketing. They have a website and probably have some sort of lead magnet they give away in exchange for your email address.

In return, they will send you an email with the giveaway item, and will probably follow up with a series of emails or even a regular newsletter of some kind.

I subscribe to a lot of these lists—probably too many! But there were several thought leaders that I wanted to connect with recently. In fact, I wanted to interview them for my podcast. I’m on their email list, so I get emails from these people on a regular basis.

So the next time I received an email from each of these people, I simply replied to that message with a question of my own. I asked a follow-up question about the content of the email, and in some cases just sent a message saying thank you for their great content, and how it has helped me.

In every case, either the person or their assistant replied back with a message within a couple of days. As I engaged these people in conversations, I asked if they might be willing to do a follow-up interview on my podcast. Each of these people agreed. I couldn’t believe it was so simple!

I think it’s important to note at this point that you should not take advantage of this. It’s important to engage in a real conversation and let that have value in itself, rather than being a means to just get something that you want.

I genuinely wanted to interview each of these people on my show, and I genuinely appreciate their content and message. So I consider this a matter of adding value to another.

In fact, the way I usually frame a request for a podcast interview is to say that I want to feature this person in the content on my podcast. That way, I’m not framing it as simply asking for something—instead, I’m framing it as helping to promote them to my audience.

This is a very simple strategy you can use to connect with anyone who has an email list. I’m not saying that you will always be able to develop a direct relationship with that person, but since email goes right to that person’s inbox, or at least to an assistant, there is a high likelihood that you can at least engage in conversation with them.

How about you? Have you tried the strategy to connect with influencers and thought leaders? If so, how did that turn out?