Building your own social media empire can take years, whereas influencers already have the trust and attention of your target audience.

All you have to do is pay them to show off your product or service.

In this post, you’ll learn how to find and choose the right influencers for your business in 6 easy steps.

But before all that, you might be asking…

Influencers have three qualities:

• Recognized expertise in a niche
• An active, sizeable audience
• Ability to engage with and influence their audience

If Ahrefs were to pay someone to increase their audience, a good choice would be an SEO expert like Brian Dean.

• In 2017, Brian Dean was recognized by Entrepreneur as an SEO Genius
• He’s got 113k Twitter followers and 407k Youtube subscribers. More importantly, each post gets dozens of comments, likes, and shares within minutes of release.
• In 2015, Brian invented the Skyscraper Technique, a single SEO strategy that gets searched 30 times a day!

But here’s the thing: although Brian is clearly an influencer, you can’t pay him to influence his followers.

Folks like Brian Dean require more than money to discuss your product. They require a good product. So even though he’s a great influencer for Ahrefs, he’s not a good candidate for an influencer marketing campaign.

But there are hundreds or thousands of influencers in almost every niche…

Influencers come in all shapes and sizes, so finding the right fit for your product can prove challenging. But fear not! It’s easier than it looks. If you know your product and can plan a budget, it’s all fun and games from there.

Here’s a process for finding influencers:

1. Figure out your budget
2. Look for influencers
3. Check which platforms they use
4. Search popular platforms for more influencers
5. Choose the best influencers
6. Make your pitch

Step 1. Figure out your budget

You probably have a number in mind that you think this experiment will cost. Maybe it’s a thousand dollars, maybe it’s a million. Either is fine, but understand that what you’re willing to pay will determine what kind of influencer you need to find. 

Here’s the range of influencers, brought to you by Ahrefs’ finest designers and Mark Schaeffer’s Marketing Rebellion.