You can make a lot of progress as a marketer by courting the attention of influencers. There are some great ways to leverage your network, but there are also mistakes that can hold you back. If you do the wrong thing, you could get in your own way and cost yourself a lot of progress.

Don’t let easily avoidable misunderstandings cost you your relationships. Make sure that you are aware of these four potential mistakes.

(1) Asking For Help Too Soon

The worst thing that you can do is to ask for an influencer’s time before you develop a relationship with them. Influencers are extraordinarily busy, and they do not have the mental bandwidth to say yes to most requests. If you don’t know them, there’s little hope of getting their attention this way.

The best way to avoid this mistake is to do the exact opposite. Stop yourself from requesting any help. Leave low-stakes comments on their social media posts or respond to their work, briefly and kindly, via email. Wait for several successful engagements before you even think about asking them for anything.

(2) Thinking Too Small

If you have the right intentions and the right strategy, there is no need to aim low. Even the busiest people inevitably make a few exceptions and spontaneously meet with or respond to other people.

Imagine that you’re the lucky person who receives a response from Jeff Bezos, Oprah Winfrey, or someone else of that magnitude. On a more reasonable scale, there are many influencers with millions of followers online who are not as famous as you’d think and may be responsive to your comments.

(3) Having No Goal For The Relationship

After you successfully engage with an influencer a few times via social media, email, phone, or in-person, you have the foundation to ask them something. You can try gently to leverage the relationship to get some benefit for yourself.

Don’t make the mistake just trying to be friends. Influencers are more likely to be colleagues, or perhaps mentors in a small way. If you’re going to send them a private message of any kind, then make it short and to the point. Ask for a specific piece of advice or other small favor and leave it at that.

(4) Getting Complacent After Six Months

Some marketers make great strides in their network by meeting a few valuable influencers in their first six months. Then they get satisfied and stop working on meeting more new people.

Your influencer network will always be changing in some way. If it isn’t getting bigger and better, it will start to shrink and atrophy. People grow, move, and change; many of your most prized connections will either lose interest in you or change fields entirely within a few years. Stay ahead of this change by meeting new people on a weekly basis.

Influencer Marketing is Important

Your brand will become a lot more relevant if you successfully pursue influencer marketing for a year or two. Once you know more people of power in your field, you can’t help but gain some relevance.

Don’t settle for proximity to success. Make sure to build your own brand and become an influencer yourself once you can. The full path to being an influencer goes beyond this article, so keep reading about content marketing and social media to learn more. You can reach a broad audience in part through the tactics outlined in this list.