How To Find Experts for a Roundup Post

If you’re thinking of creating a roundup post to get your audience to visit your website, then you are in the right place.

Writing an enticing expert roundup post for your website will bring undeniable long-term benefits in terms of traffic, authoritativeness, and peer recognition.

30% of bloggers report roundups are the most effective content format.

While they require less writing and research than usual blog posts, they involve intensive background work. Deciding on the perfect question, reaching out to experts, and piecing information together require a different kind of know-how.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

What is an expert roundup?
Examples of great expert roundups in SaaS
How to create an effective expert roundup

What is an expert roundup?

Expert roundups are blog posts that feature quotes or interviews of influential people in your niche about a specific topic.

Your experts will include bloggers, journalists, influencers, or company executives. They should have some authority in your niche and have something to share with your readers.

The most effective roundups ask a very specific question that the experts can easily respond to. People should be interested in the answers to this question.

This is a great method for effectively establishing your company among your industry’s blogging community. And because you will be connecting, sharing, and promoting these influencers’ comments, many of them will be willing to assist you in the future.

Examples of great expert roundups

Roundup posts could be a collection of software tools, strategies, statistics, or other related items.

Here are a few great example roundups:

Example of an expert roundup about SaaS marketing

Example of an expert roundup about cold emails

Example of an expert roundup about SaaS customer experience

As you can see, a roundup can be on any subject matter.

How to create an effective expert roundup

Creating an expert roundup post is easy. Making the maximum impact with your roundup is hard.

Several factors will affect how well your roundup performs.

Here’s how you can make a great expert roundup post that will drive traffic to your website:

Step #1 Find the right question

Your first job is to come up with a topic or question that the other experts can relate to.

Picking the right question will have a big impact on the success of your roundup post.

Your question needs to be:

Interesting to your target audience
Easy as possible to answer by your experts
Innovative as you don’t want to pitch something already done
Specific as you want that experts can provide short answers with a limited scope

How to get ideas?

Asking about solutions to specific problems, software tools to solve a problem, or strategies and techniques is an excellent place to start.

You can start scouring Q&A sites and forums such as Quora for questions your target audience is asking.

Or you can also use tools like Ahrefs’ Content Explorer or BuzzSumo.

What’s next is what some consider the most challenging part—finding enough actual experts to participate.

Step #2 Find experts for your roundup

Now that you have selected your topic, you need to pick the right people to include in the roundup.

With an expert roundup post, 80% of the content comes from your contributors.

It means the quality of the final post is mainly in their hands. So don’t fill your roundups with people just for quantity.

You need to identify industry experts and reach out to them for their perspectives.

Let’s make a profile for your ideal participants:

They are directly related to the tech and software industry
They have authority in the field: Tech company executives and founders, CTOs, top positions in tech companies, public speakers, success bloggers, and more
They are sharing original views on their social media or on business blogs
They have a strong audience and follower base

Let’s face it; it can be hard to get enough actual experts to contribute. And a roundup post that features only 3 people doesn’t have the same impact compared to a roundup post with 20 influencers.

So how can you find these people?

You can always count on Linkub to speed up the process of finding startup and tech experts.

Here’s how:

Go to Linkub’s Blogger & Expert Database.
Enter company names or keywords related to your roundup topic.

🔧 Pro tips: you can enter an unlimited number of keywords or company names with search operators to leverage a ton of results.

As shown in the screenshot below, you will get the best potential contributors relevant to your request.

Here, we got a ranked list of people that have spoken about at least one of our keywords, “fintech” or “stripe” or “profitwell”.

They are ranked by productivity and popularity.

Screenshot of expert list found in Linkub relevant to the roundup topic.

From here, go to the left panel and click on the “Job Position” filter to specify what kind of experts you want to contribute to your roundup post.

The expert list can be filtered with job position options to recruit CTO and executive profiles for the roundup.

You will find hundreds of experts on your chosen topics willing to accept your invitation.

Step #3 Collect contact information

Once you have a list of tech experts and executives who can give you valuable insight into your topic, it’s time to start collecting their contact information.

To speed up the process, you can filter the list with “Has email” and/or “Has LinkedIn profile” options.

The filters allow retrieving experts with contact information, such as email addresses or Linkedin profiles.

Now that you have sourced the influencers in your industry, you can export your results in a CSV file.

The export button above the table exports the experts in a CSV file

For each potential roundup contributor, you access this information:

verified email
social profiles
number of followers
job position
software he likes to talk about
media used
favorite keywords

The example spreadsheet below is a snapshot of the export.

Example of an expert list export to pitch for a roundup post.

Step #4 Pitch experts

Now you need to develop and send an outreach message. But it isn’t rocket science.

Write your invitation

There’s no guarantee that you won’t be rejected or ignored by your potential expert.

However, you can always improve your chances of success by focusing on the essential details of your pitch.

Here are key points to consider when crafting your outreach email:

Personalize your message.
Remember that you’re dealing with leaders, influencers, and company executives here. Sending a generic email that land in the spam folder is the worst thing you can do.
Keep it short.
Influencers are bombarded with emails from content marketers who want to work with them. Getting to the point is critical if you want people to participate in your roundup.
Don’t expect too much in return.
The easier it is for the influencer to contribute, the more likely they will participate.
Emphasize the benefits.
Focus on the advantages they will obtain from participating. It is the benefits you provide that will persuade them to join.

Here is an example:

Example of a cold email template to recruit experts for a roundup post.

🔧 See more outreach email templates to recruit experts in our template database.

Use outreach platforms

You can use an email marketing software or outreach platform to reach your experts.

For example, we have used Hunter to import our CSV file and launch an expert recruiting campaign.

The list of expert is imported in Hunter cold email platform.

Step #5 Write the roundup post

At this point, you have received a great collection of awesome responses.

Now, you need to put it together.

Here’s a checklist to make a roundup post a great one:

Write a catchy headline

Your title needs three components:

number of experts that contributed
who the experts are
and the topic covered

Example: 50+ Experts Share their Best SaaS Pricing Strategies

Introduce the topic

In your introduction, you will explain the problem, why it’s relevant, and how you solved it by consulting with industry experts.

Highlighting the number of experts who took part is important, as well as the quality of their comments. Do your best to present the experts positively; this will help you in the next phase.

Design the expert quotes

It is a piece of cake.

Your main body will be made up of expert responses.

You can add navigation that makes it easy to jump through the expert citations.

For each contributor, include its image, Twitter link, blog or company URL, a share link, and their response.

If you want to expound on a point that one of the experts mentioned, insert a contextual link.

Offer a solid conclusion

Keep this part short and simple.

Summarize the roundup with collective data to give your readers an angle to consider.

Make a list of the key points you want your audience to remember.

Give a call to action to share or invite them to leave a comment with their own response to the question you raised.

Step #6 Let the experts know when the roundup post is live

Your article is now live.

Ultimately, a roundup is no different from any other piece of online content.
Creating it is only half the battle.

You need now to promote it.

To begin, notify all of the experts who contributed to your article that it has been published.

Invite your roundup participants to spread the word about the live post. If you did an excellent job writing it, they should be eager to help promote it.

Don’t hesitate to follow up. Invite each expert to participate in an exclusive interview or to write a guest post to build a solid relationship.

💡Pro Tip: Contact all the experts that ignored your initial outreach. Inform them that the piece has gone live and that they can still submit their responses if they like. A lot of them will jump on this.

Take the time to share it across all the channels you have access to.

Here are some ideas:

Share the post through your newsletter with your subscribers.
Create a post on your social media and tag the contributors.
Repurpose the roundup content into an infographic or Slideshare presentation.
Share the topic on Quora and forums.

To sum it up

By inviting a group of experts to address the same topic, you will not only create valuable content for your website, but you will also establish strong relationships with industry experts.

To find your contributors, use Linkub’s Blogger and Expert Database.

It will help you identify and reach hundreds of tech experts for your question without shedding blood, sweat, and tears of a manual search.

How To Find Experts for a Roundup Post

What is an expert roundup?

Examples of great expert roundups