*English version

Welcome to my first podcast episode in English. The majority of you may already know that I have a podcast in Romanian but I want to challenge myself, so starting today, I will also be doing interviews in English with marketers, content creators, and other people I admire.

This time around, I will be discussing with Andy Crestodina. Andy is a well-known marketer, speaker, and entrepreneur. A few months ago, I coordinated a project at Bannersnack and decided to involve Andy as well. What we did was ask 300 bloggers, content marketers, and content creators about the way they use visuals on their blogs.

I really enjoyed working with Andy. He truly impacted my professional life in such a powerful way and taught me that I should be good with others and help them whenever I can.

Simple as that.

So when I decided to start my English podcast, I knew right from the start that he’s the first person I wanted to interview. In this episode, I will discuss with Andy about influencer marketing because he knows a lot about how to use this strategy to improve your rankings in search results and also how to build a trustworthy network that can boost your brand.

Here’s the interview.

Topics we discussed: 

• What is influencer marketing from his own perspective and how they are using it at Orbit Media?
• We’ve done an experiment. No budget. No “Andy Crestodina” name. Create a specific type of content (text, audio, video) and how is he using influencer marketing to get more exposure, more awareness and more web traffic.
• Where does influencer marketing fit when it comes to social media and SEO? Aside from being a new channel, is it something complementary to these 2 important activities in marketing?
• In a presentation, Andy said that great marketers are creative, analytical and friendly. So we dived into this topic a little. 
• What’s the best piece of advice Andy would give to someone who’s just starting out with influencer marketing?
  

Ideas To Take From This Episode: 

• Influencer marketing, at it’s best, is also known as friendship.
• It’s not cleverly hidden advertising messages. It’s not Instagram mentions.
• It’s a long term relationship with someone who wants to help people who you want to help.
• You are in alignment with the influencer, because you care about their audience. They care about your audience. It’s not a one-time event. It’s a long term relationship. And you and that influencer are working together to create new value that matters to people and helps them in their lives.
• It is collaborative. It is empathetic It is helpful.
• At it’s best, influencer marketing is two people working together to help a larger audience through one person’s content and the other person’s connections.