How to Create Great Roundup Posts

What is a Roundup Post?

This type of blog post is a collection of tips/insights on a particular theme or topic, answered by experts in a specific industry.

For example, I once worked with AHREFS and created an expert roundup post with 90 SEO specialists involved. Each one of them had to answer the same question.

How to Select the Right Theme for Your Roundup

Before I craft an expert roundup I ensure I study the website or blog where the expert roundup will be posted. All I do is simple: I analyze the audience by taking a close look at the most commented posts, the comments themselves, and latest topics published.

Based on the target audience and the theme of the site, I am able to decide on a very specific topic.

For example, let’s say your site is about tennis gear, then a good topic would be best tennis gear to buy.

How to Pick a Great Question for the Participants

Once you’re done with the theme/topic, next step is to find a great question. Brainstorm a few minutes. I have a fill in the blank template I use each time I get writer’s block, which has about 60 potential questions to ask.

Here are some ‘personalized’ examples:

What mistakes should beginners avoid when buying a pair of tennis shoes?

What is your recommended budget to invest in tennis gear and how would you spend it?

Which pair of shoes do you recommend for tennis beginners to buy: Nike or Asics?

Where to find the experts

Experts are everywhere: Google. Quora. Linkedin. Facebook. Twitter. Forums. Blogs. YouTube.

The key is to focus on one or two channels and hunt for experts over there.

My favorite place is Twitter and personal blogs. It gets easier to find their email this way. And email is the best way to connect with the expert because, from my experience, all the other channels are not reliable for one on one contact.

With e-mail it is very easy and less time consuming to manage all your expert answers in one place and then collect the responses in a word document to be edited & published later.

How to make them say ‘YES’

irst of all, if people recognize your name before you contact them with your expert roundup request, you’ll have a higher chance to get them say “YES”. If you do cold calling via e-mail, then rates will drop significantly. So I suggest you first have the expert recognize your name. Here are three ways:

1. E-mail them about something related to their blog.

Maybe you’ve seen their logo and you like it that much that you want to ask who designed it for them. That will open the door for you.

2. Comment on their blog on a topic you like

They’ll surely notice your name, particularly if the comment is insightful and meaty; this will open the door for you.

3. Interact with them via social media. Share their stuff multiple times that they’ll notice your name. It’s a great starter!

Once you’re done with one of these, you email them a short message.

Example:

>> subject line

X, quick question

Hi, Y here. Hope you’re well?

I’m creating an expert roundup on ____ (theme)

for Z person / famous blog and I’d like to invite

you to participate.

Here’s the question if you’re interested:

_______________________

I’d need your response within 7 days.

200 words is ideal but not required.

Thank you

[Your name]

Wait 3 days for a response. Follow-up with another shorter email asking if they’re still able to send their answer. Some will reply.

Out of 100 emails sent, maybe 30 will respond. This is a good conversion rate.

How to promote your post

Once you collect your answers, ensure you save them all in a word document, and edit it (add the title, intro, responses, and outro)

Your post goes live. Return to your experts and give them the link to take a look. Most will promote it to their followers via social media.

Some will promote it to their newsletter subscribers.

Others will even mention it on their website, in a blog post which is relevant to the topic.

I’ve also seen people have a section in their “about me” page where they list all the interviews they’ve done along with expert roundups and other Internet apparitions.

Go back to people who have agreed to participate but for some reasons they haven’t. Email them as well. For extra promotion.

This initial promo effort is enough to help you get traffic, shares, and links.

Obviously, traffic is significantly higher if you have more experts involved.

I usually aim for 40+. The highest number of experts I’ve seen in an expert roundup were a whopping 192. You decide if that’s too much.

39+ Experts On How to Create Great Roundup Posts

1. Andy Crestodina

If your strategy is to create “ego bait” and get the experts to promote the post, you can increase the likelihood by reducing the friction. Try any of the following:

• Add a “click to tweet” link. This will let them share it with a single click
• Link to posts on community websites or groups with a nudge for them to go like it or upvote it.
• Share it in the distant future with a quote and mention in the post. This will encourage them to share it again later on. Here’s what it might look like.

The trick is to be both friendly and persistent while making it as easy as possible for your contributors to help out.

2. Mike Allton

When I’m promoting a roundup post, there are essentially two phases or approaches.

The first is to promote it everywhere like any other article, making sure that my entire audience on multiple platforms has a chance to see it. I follow an extensive Blog Promotion Checklist to ensure that coverage.

Second, since there are influencers involved with the post, of course, I’m sure to mention them on the various shares. But there are additional opportunities now that others are involved in the post.

1. Tag those experts on Facebook and Instagram.
2. Mention 2 – 3 different influencers with each tweet.
3. In the coming days, share an individual influencer’s graphic and a quote from the text. Repeat for each one.
4. Pin each influencer’s graphic (you are creating graphics for each expert, right?)
5. Write a follow-up blog post that highlights or analyzes the answers, or dives into specific points made.
6. Host a live video panel with some or all of the experts to further discuss the topic.
7. Use quotes from specific experts in future articles and link back to the roundup.
8. Create a SlideShare presentation from the responses, and turn that into a YouTube/Facebook video.

Thus, not only do we get an initial spike in interest and traffic, we also get to fuel ongoing social media and content activities.

3. Jordan Kasteler

The nice thing about having influencers in your post is that you get to tap into all of their audiences when they want to share the piece they’re featured in.

Make it easy for them to share by providing them copy/paste snippets they can choose from to post to their audiences.

Aside from utilizing the influencer power, find out people they’re well connected to and who would want to share content their friends are featured in.

Using Buzzsumo, you can find influencers who have shared similar roundup posts before and reach out to them to share. Be sure to have plenty of posts/tweets that tag the individuals so they can easily re-share too.

4. Jason Quey

There are many ways of getting traffic to an expert roundup. Here are a few ideas:

1. Make sure to let the experts know it’s live.
2. Choose a topic that’s proven to be hot. In an interview with Aaron Orendorff, he shared how he used tools like Buzzsumo and Google Trends to find proven content. This led to creating posts that were the most shared on Copyblogger, Unbounce, and Shopify.
3. Do good keyword research to find long tail keywords. Getting an initial bump in traffic is great. But good content promoters know SEO is what provides long-term value.

Even with a keyword said to get only 10 searches/month, Dan Shure was able to generate 110,000 unique visitors in two years by targeting the right keyword.

5. Tim Soulo

Actually, I would promote a roundup post the same way we promote any other post on Ahrefs Blog:

• Send an email to our subscribers;
• Share a post on Twitter & Facebook;
• Buy ads on Twitter & Facebook;
• Reach out to people who might enjoy this article.

In most cases that would be enough to help our article take off. And if we see that it performs really well, we might do a few more rounds of sharing it on social media, buying ads and reaching out to relevant people to increase the reach of our roundup further.

6. Ryan Biddulph

The easiest way to promote an expert round-up is to notify all bloggers featured through multiple channels. This is more about giving experts love versus trying to get anything out of the post.

Example: I’d email each blogger featured but then I’d tag them on Twitter, Facebook, G Plus and LinkedIn. Tagging fellow bloggers give them mad publicity and also alerts them to the post, so they promote it to their networks and email lists. It’s really like promoting on auto pilot once you tag the experts because these dynamos will do most of the promoting for you.

7. John Rampton

If I were to write an expert roundup post tomorrow, I would promote it on my social media channels, including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

I’d do so at different points in the day when I know there is greater traffic looking at my pages to get the most interest.

I also have syndication relationships and would share the roundup piece with those contacts to see if they had any interest in posting it.

From there, I’d take any places where it was posted and create a press mention that is featured on my blog with links to the article.

8. Tor Refsland

Let me flip it around.

If you were to publish an expert roundup post tomorrow, how would you promote this post to get more traffic?

Your answer would be depending on one single question…

How freakin´ important is it for you to get massive exposure to your post?

If it´s not that important, you´ll just email your email list and post on your standard social media platforms, right?

In other words, no massive exposure for you.

If you answered that it was FREAKIN´ important to get massive exposure to your post, then your answer would be completely different, right?

Your answer would then be…

…that you would promote the post like your life was depending on it.

Everywhere and to anyone that you think it might be a good fit for.

That being said, few people will actually do that.

Why?

Because getting uncomfortable is scary as heck.

I was recently able to 20x the revenue in my business through business coaching.

Do you think I had to get out of my comfort zone in order to do that?

I sure did.

Do you think it was worth it?

You betcha!

9. Adam Connell

Before I talk about exact strategies to promote these posts, let’s talk about potential.

Even with a minimal amount of promotion, expert roundups (or group interviews as I call them) can get some impressive results when you get the right question, and the right combination of participants.

For example:

The last one of these posts I published on Blogging Wizard received a few thousand shares, along with 5,000+ visits within just a few days. Crazy right?

Now, I’ve published a bunch of these posts before but with the latest one I tried something different. And the results were amazing.

Here’s what I did:

I picked out the most actionable tips from each response and repurposed them into an infographic.

Then, I partnered with two other companies. 24Slides.com created the infographic and TweakYourBiz.com hosted the infographic.

This bagged us an extra 2,000+ shares, and 35,000+ more visits.

And that’s with minimal promotion.

How I’d promote a group interview/expert roundup post:

The specifics of the strategy would depend on the post and how much time I’ve got available.

But in general, a bare minimum would be:

• Share on niche social bookmarking sites (e.g. N4G.com for video games and Inbound.org for marketing)
• Email to participants (include links for them to vote up on niche bookmarking sites)
• Email to your own list
• Schedule multiple social shares, tagging participants to roll out over the next few months (use quotes & benefit driven descriptions)
• Reach out to your peers (friends, business contacts etc)
• Boost with paid social (Facebook and StumbleUpon Ads for example)

Additional steps could include:

• Email outreach (resource outreach, broken link building etc)
• Repurpose into an infographic & support that with its own promotional campaign (you could have another site host it to get extra traffic)
• Repurpose into a Slideshare presentation & schedule more shares, tagging participants
• Quote parts of the post in Quora answers

Most of the above will apply to any blog post, and it’s only a snapshot of what can be done.

Ultimately, how you would promote your own expert roundup would depend on the post itself, your niche and how much time you have available.

The truth is that a lot of what works in some niches doesn’t work in others. It’s all about finding what works for you and your audience. So be prepared to experiment, get creative and adjust the recipe for your own blog.

10. Gael Breton

Alright so now you have your roundup post live, how do you make it gain momentum? I think of content promotion in terms of concentric circles. Content that already has a lot of shares and social proof is easy to promote so step 1 is to get some basic action going.

For this, I go with the low hanging fruits. These are usually:

• Email my email list
• Send a push notification
• Share on various social networks
• Spend $20 – 50 retargeting my visitors on Facebook

Once you have done this, it shouldn’t be too hard to hit 100 likes/shares on your social counters, maybe a few comments. From that point, I go to the next circle: the people that responded.

I email them telling them the post is live, getting them to share it and comment it.

After this is done I go to the last circle: people I don’t have a relationship with. Usually, I follow the skyscraper outreach method where I send the link to people linking/sharing similar content and ask for either a link or a share depending on what’s suitable.

At this point, the post has a lot of shares, comments, and social proof and this makes it a lot easier to get a yes.

10. Greg Elfrink

I actually just did one of these on the Empire Flipper’s blog .

The first thing is, I wanted to make sure the content was really great. In this case, it was case studies and tutorials (with a few services thrown in that I really like). Once the post went live, I reached out to all of these people. Many of them I was already friends with on facebook or had met at conferences, so had a somewhat personal relationship with them already. I sent them a message saying that I had featured their content on our blog as part of my best posts of 2016 round up, and instantly had many of these influencers sharing our posts with their following.

A round up post is supposed to use other people’s credibility to promote the post, so I think the best way is letting the influencer know they have been featured and have that person hopefully promote it via their social media and email lists. The round up post is also a powerful post for more than just link building or social shares – it can create long-term relationships with that influencer which can lead to real content collaboration down the road.

11. Janice Wald

1. I would contact the person I interviewed and ask them to share my interview on their social media.
2. I would tweet about the interview, include the link, and @ and the respondent’s Twitter name. I would include “Please Retweet”.
3. I would promote the post on Google + and include them in my description of my article. On Google+ you type + and their name to notify them.
4. I would promote the post the way I promote my other posts– I promote in Facebook groups, on Twitter repeatedly, and I put the graphic on Pinterest. My last expert interview I also promoted on BizSugar.

12. Patrick Coombe

For an expert roundup post, I’d really go the manual route. The biggest draw that these posts have is they get shared by the people that were featured in them, and they tend to be link magnets so I would look for people that have done so in the past. Many times, these people are not the major influencers. If you look at the “big” influencers in our industry, for example, Rand Fishkin he is always in expert roundup posts but he almost never links or shares them. Not saying anything bad about him, he is just very busy and only posts selective things. So look for roundup posts in the past that has people that have a tendency to share them. Personally, I don’t share every roundup post I’m featured in as I get at least 1-2 requests per week.

Next, I think everyone should consider re-structuring their roundup posts so they don’t look like roundup posts. People are starting to get immune to them, so I’d structure them as a normal blog post with featured insights from key experts within the post. I’ve always been of the opinion that the more automated you get with your marketing (outreach, email, social, blogging) the less personal it seems.

13. James Norquay

To promote the expert roundup post I would start by running a paid campaign via Adwords and Facebook. Do a simple boost to your post about your roundup to really increase the reach of the post.

Another method to get your new roundup post out there is to buy space on other people’s websites. This opens your reach to new influencers.

Remember not everyone will have the same contacts so reaching out to your own even if they aren’t featured can open up more reach for your post. They might even have extra to add to the post which increases its value.

14. Donna Merrill

Once I have written my expert roundup and published it is time to promote my next roundup post. First of all, I’d begin by sharing it with content curators who, my research indicates, should be interested in the topic.

Then, I would work closely with my expert contributors to make sure they know the best ways to promote it themselves, post-publication.

Do not assume that just because someone might be an expert in their niche, that they are necessarily expert promoters.

Do some follow-up work with them to inquire what they’ve done, or intend to do.

Always offer to help them work out a content marketing strategy to make sure all their followers have been made aware of their participation in the project.

Make sure they know how much they will benefit from their participation, not only in the writing of the post but also marketing it.

This can go a long way toward incentivizing contributors to promote as much, and as meaningfully, as possible.

Additionally, I would employ some blogger outreach strategies, myself.

They might include things like mentioning my roundup post in Facebook groups and other social media gatherings.

It could also mean repurposing the post or reprinting it on various other blogging platforms such as Tumblr or LinkedIn Pulse.

Writing entirely new content or spinning off some of the ideas presented in the roundup, could become new blog posts on my blog, or on other content and blogging sites.

I would even do a series of videos to publish on YouTube.

Each video would be a summary of some major point that was developed in the roundup.

The videos would link back to my roundup post.

To maintain a steady flow of traffic to my post, I would periodically write a new blog post that could naturally link back to my original roundup.

In that sense, subsequent blog posts could be used to link back to my roundup as a sort of content enhancement or upgrade.

15. Codrut Turcanu

It takes me 2 weeks to write an expert roundup, and the same goes for the promotion strategy.

Hard work pays off! That’s something most people wouldn’t like dealing with.

My promo technique is actually a combo strategy between Twitter mentions and e-mail outreach.

Plain and simple. It works, try it for yourself and share your results with us.

16. Dave Schneider

We’ve been using our own blogger outreach and marketing tool called NinjaOutreach as well as the methodology of influencer marketing to promote our business and any content we produce, which includes expert roundup posts. We’ve been doing this for more than a year and so far this strategy has worked well for us. We have no plans to change track anytime soon.

The gist of it is finding the people who have already volunteered to be in an expert roundup post, and then launching an outreach campaign to them. Because they already participated before, they are more likely to be receptive to it again. Then, after you publish the post, reach out to those same people asking them to share it with their audience, and most of them will.

17. William Harris

I’m a fan of the personal touch. The influencers that I reached out to, took the time to write something specific for me to use, so I like to write a specific email to them.

Of course, I start with a base template to be more efficient, but I still like to manually reach out to them when I can.

I also have a spreadsheet with all of their twitter handles that I like to tweet out to when the post goes live, and I tag them on Google+ and Linkedin when I share it there. They shared their tip because they wanted the exposure as well, so I try to make sure I give them credit anywhere that I share the article.

18. Donna Moritz

After seeing so many bloggers jump into expert roundups as the big way to get their blog on the map, I am going to give a little tough love here. Firstly, focus on building relationships with other bloggers and experts, and spend some time sharing their content and getting to know their blogs before reaching out so they recognize you. With so many expert roundups, influencers are starting to make very quick decisions about which emails they respond to, as there are only so many hours in the day.

Instead of doing a post with a gazillion experts on it, consider reducing the number of experts and going deep with some quality tips. Your readers are more likely to read it (nobody has time to read 97 tips!). Your experts will feel more valued and your post won’t look like every other expert roundup that is all about getting you traffic. Most importantly, lean less on the experts to promote your post (as they get dozens of these requests every week) and find ways to show that you are taking the lead and promoting your post in savvy ways too. Add an infographic, create a Slideshare, embed shareable images on the post that the influencers can share more easily. Don’t leave all the work up to the experts! They are busy enough and they are already doing you a big favor by writing your content for you, so take the lead and show them you are doing all you can to share their tips.

Do some of these things and you will get a yes every time and the experts will share without question. And you will never have to send an annoying “Did you get my last email” email to harass them to comment and share.

19. Jennifer Van Iderstyne

Really, like any piece of content, it comes down to audience targeting. Knowing who you want to reach and what you want them to do from the outset and writing to achieve those goals. To get there, it also helps to thinks strategically about the experts you include and their level of individual authority.

If your goal is to get traction by having the participants contribute heavily to spreading the piece then their personal level of pride for being included is a factor. For that, you want to look toward emerging professionals who are working on building their own experience profiles and reputations. This method is more likely to have greater buy-in and share probability within their networks.

Another approach is to target experts who are the bonafide leaders in their space with established respect, credibility and name recognition among their peers and newer professionals as well. An aggregation of more recognized experts will probably be less successful as vanity bait, but it may also have more provocative insight. That aspect will appeal to the growth oriented crowd who will find value in the content and will see sharing as providing value to their networks.

Also, with expert roundups, broad questions will get a wide array of answers and often have high-level theoretical responses. Whereas more specific questions will often contain more actionable ideas and reveal more process based patterns. Depending on the popularity of the specific subject matter, and the timing of the piece, that may also create more potential for momentum.

20. Greg Narayan

Create a strong focus keyword phrase for the entire post, optimize the UX of it with a simple layout, link to it internally, and generally give it strong organic SEO for long-term traffic.

Can you tell I’ve been working with Yoast and reading their finest posts lately?

Once you’ve published the thang, politely nudge the experts inside the post to give it a share. It’s a great way to build long-lasting niche relationships and if you round up 50 experts and 1/4 say they’ll share it, that’s 12.5 authoritative shares!

21. Dom Wells

Well, the whole point of an expert roundup post is that the experts promote it for you. However, to make things work better I’d do the following:

a.) Include a “click to tweet” link in my email letting them know the post is live, making it very easy for them to click it and tweet it out. Something like this

Hey [name},

Thanks for taking part in this post, it’s now live! I’d love it if you could share this with your audience, click here to tweet it.

b.) If the post topic is relevant to something like inbound.org, I would also ask them to upvote it there, or on Reddit, or something similar.

c.) I would feature fewer experts. A lot of expert roundup posts are filled with something like 50 experts or more, which is great if you just want them to tweet it out, but nobody really reads posts that long unless they are on a hot topic no-one has blogged about recently, or unless it’s one of the first expert roundup posts they’ve read.

Most of them are just too long.

To make your post stand out more, include fewer people, provide an easy access summary of answers, and make it a lot easier to read the whole thing. Then people will be much more likely to link to it

22. Tori Reid

Carefully target your experts and the rest will follow.

Make sure their audiences are plentiful, targeted, and engaged with the content they have to offer. But the most important (and often missing) piece is to make sure the content they typically offer aligns with what you’re providing in the roundup.

For example it’s better to grab blogging experts to provide input about blogging rather than approach a nutrition expert that just happens to have a successful blog.

The blogging expert’s followers are interested in blogging (which is what you’re writing about in this case), while the nutritionist’s followers are just interested in nutrition and won’t care when the nutritionist shares a roundup about something outside of their niche.

Once you publish the roundup, most of the experts in the roundup will love to share the post with their plentiful, engaged, and highly targeted audience — sending plenty of traffic to everyone who contributed to the article.

23. Albert Mora

The promotion of an expert roundup post is the same as any piece of content, you’ve got to take a holistic approach:

• Use Facebook ads to get in touch with your target audience
• Email your list (you should have one!)
• Use your social channels to spread the word
• Send an email to your friends/acquaintances asking them to share your roundup
• Submit it to Reddit and/or communities related to the topic of the roundup (inbound.org, blogengage…)
• Use HARO (https://www.helpareporter.com/) to get in touch with relevant journalists
• Leave comments on blogs related to your roundup
• Perform naked conga in a famous event (oh wait! forget that one)

24. Sean Falconer

The very first step is I contact all the experts that contributed and let them know that the article is live and that I’d love their help sharing it out.

Second, I contact every expert I contacted that did not contribute and also let them know the article is live. Sometimes they will share the article as well and it’s also a great way to build up your relationship with them so that next time you need their help, they are more likely to contribute.

At this point, we move into our regular content promotional phase of social media interaction, sharing with people that care about the topic, and link building outreach.

If the experts are part of specific companies, down the line I will periodically schedule Tweets about the article with the company’s @ mentioned, these will typically lead to retweets and a new bump in traffic for the piece.

25. Evgeniy Garkaviy

Like most contents I create these days, I will start promoting my next expert roundup post on social media. I know that Facebook is the largest social media, but I like twitter better and have a stronger presence there so I will start on twitter. I will then promote it on Facebook and G+.

Once the social media promotion using my own assets is completed, I will encourage experts featured on the roundup to promote it too. I manually contact people who participated and let them know that roundup is live. In most cases, they are very happy to share on their social networks.

Once the social media promotion phase if completed, I will then move to SEO. I will build links to the post to make it appear as high as possible on SERPs.

26. Sean Si

The best way to promote an expert roundup is to actually ask the experts to promote it.

I don’t see any other reason why I would write an expert roundup than tapping on the circle of influence of those experts themselves 🙂

That should bring you an almost sure-fire, instantaneous amount of eyeballs.

27. John Hall

A great way to promote a piece of content is to utilize LinkedIn as much as possible.

A big recommend of mine is to republish articles or blog posts to LinkedIn’s publishing platform. That way your LinkedIn profile not only hosts all your content in one place but LinkedIn’s platform will distribute it into the feeds of those that would find it the most interesting and who aren’t necessarily connected to you, helping to expands your reach and influence.

I also encourage people to share their content within certain LinkedIn groups they’re members of if they think other members of that particular group will find the content helpful.

28. Eli Seekins

I’m a naturally timid marketer. I’ve always struggled with asking. And simply asking makes a big difference. I know this and have been pushing myself to step more out of my comfort zone. For example, I don’t really feel comfortable asking experts to link to my roundups. I’d rather them naturally want to link to it because of the quality and relevance of the content. So my #1 strategy is always first to create epic content that people love and want to share.

That being said, it’s still important to actually actively promote your content. The simplest and easiest way to do this is to ask the contributors to share and possibly link to your post when you let them know that it’s live. Organic SEO is my favorite. Writing guests posts that link back to the roundup, and linking to your roundup in your other blog posts are some more simple strategies. Having a social media strategy can obviously help as well.

Expert roundup posts are very popular right now. But I think we will start seeing them evolve and get more creative. For example, I’ve been wondering lately, what would happen if you paired a roundup post with other content like videos or multiple guest posts or even an infographic to make the content even more shareable? I’m excited to experiment with some of these ideas this year.

29. Lilach Bullock

The beauty of expert round up posts is that they basically promote themselves, particularly if you have some influential people on your list.

In most cases, the experts who have participated will want to promote your post as it includes them and their links. That said, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do promote it as well.

Start by teasing your email subscribers with your upcoming project and then send them an email once it’s done.

Social media is a given, but you can also try submitting your post to content sharing communities.

There’s a lot that you can do, but at the end of the day, it’s the experts in your post that will truly help you promote it, especially as a new blogger.

30. Brian Lang

Asides from letting the participants know that the post is live, do the same things you would do to promote any other blog post.

Share on social media, reference it in future posts and possibly
do an outreach to let others know about it.