Influence Marketing Essentials: 5 Steps To Getting Started On Triberr

“What is Triberr and how do I use it?”

I’ve been asked that question enough times that I thought it would be a good idea to write an article about it. I joined the Triberr development team in November of 2013 and it has been one of the best experiences of my life. I love the Triberr team. I love the Triberr product. And mostly, I love Triberr users and fans. Nothing would make me happier than to see more people join Triberr by creating a free account and then benefitting from the amplification effect of this unique influence marketing platform.

What Is Triberr?

Triberr is an influence marketing platform for bloggers and businesses. It provides you with tools to help you grow your audience and increase the reach and influence of your blog. All of the tools available in Triberr are free, but there is a paid Prime member level that offers some additional perks to power users.

The central paradigm of Triberr is the Tribe. A Tribe is a collection of bloggers who band together around a topic or niche to support one another in the pursuit of helping their blogs reach more people.

Once you create an account on Triberr, you can (1) join another Triberr member’s Tribe, (2) create your own Tribe and invite other Triberr members to join it, or (3) both. The combination of members and Tribes creates an ecosystem that puts your content in front of other members and also in front of their audiences. The more Tribes you actively participate in, the wider the reach of your blog can be.

If you are a blogger, you should be on Triberr. It’s literally designed from the ground up to get you and your blog amplified. I know this sounds like a sales pitch, but in the wake of Google’s various algorithm changes and Facebook’s more aggressive EdgeRank, something needs to fill the vacuum to help bloggers reach a wider audience. That thing is Triberr. And it’s free.

Triberr has loyal fans that range from single bloggers to multi author blogs to business users. When used properly, Triberr can be a powerful tool to increase traffic. We know because {Web.Search.Social} is one of those businesses that has benefited tremendously.

But getting started with Triberr can be a bit jarring for some. Once you get in the groove, it’s clear sailing, but those first few steps can make or break a blogger’s relationship with Triberr.

So to help those who have not yet joined, or for those who have and are frustrated because you’re overwhelmed with new things to try and don’t know how to get started, I am going to give you the essentials of getting started on Triberr.

Essential Step #1: Create An Account

Sounds easy right? Well, it is. You go to the Triberr website, you decide which social account you want to log in with and – Boom! All done.

Whoa! Before you go running off, there are some things I need to tell you.

Once you create an account, you should immediately connect any other social accounts you have. You don’t have to do anything with them, but it’ll prevent you from accidentally creating a separate and distinct Triberr account by logging in with a different social account later. For example, if you log into Triberr for the first time using your Twitter account, you will have a brand spanking new Triberr account, but if you don’t tell Triberr about your Facebook account and then try to log in with your Facebook account later, Triberr won’t recognize the relationship between the two and it will create a new separate account for you. If you then try to log in with your LinkedIn account; you guessed it – now you have three accounts.

The solution is to set up all of your profiles right away when you create your account. You don’t have to post to any social account you don’t want to, but it’ll prevent you from running into a duplicate member problem and then losing track of what you’re doing.

The good news is that the Triberr team (including me) is working on a few new features that will prevent duplicates as well as ways to merge accounts that have been created separately accidentally.

Essential Step #2 : Add Your Blog

There’s not going to be any effect on the reach of your blog if Triberr doesn’t know where to find it. By adding your blog, you expose it to anyone who is in any of your Tribes. With a free account you can add 2 blogs and with a Prime paid account, you can add several more. Most users only have one.

Adding a blog is simple. You simply paste the URL to your RSS feed into the field provided under your account settings.

What’s a URL? What’s an RSS feed? Right. I see your point.

This is where it can get tricky for the non-technical person who just wants to write. The URL is nothing more than a web address. It’s the line of text in your web browser that looks something like this https://www.websearchsocial.com or this http://triberr.com. Every website has its own URL, or web address, and every page of a website also has its own address as well.

The site RSS feed is an address that contains raw data about your blog. Consider a single post on your blog. There might be a banner or a sidebar. There might be a sign up box or graphics. There may be an ad or a social media widget. Triberr doesn’t need any of that. It just needs the raw data of your blog which consists of a list of titles, authors, post dates, web addresses and some other relevant data.

It’s up to you to know where your feed is, but if you are using WordPress, it’s usually at the address yourdomain.com/feed. For example, the feed for this site is at https://www.websearchsocial.com/feed.

Other platforms (e.g. Blogger, Joomla, Drupal) will have a different address. Usually you can find your RSS feed in your site account or blog settings or by performing a simple google search such as “where is my Blogger RSS feed” or “where is my drupal RSS feed.”

If you have a hand made site or use an obscure blogging platform, you may not have an RSS feed at all or have a custom address. You’ll need to find that to finish essential step #2.

Once you have your feed address, go to the Account link on the top right of your Triberr page. Click on settings and then select the My Blogs tab. There you can add a new blog by entering a title, the URL and the RSS feed.

You should also take a moment to go through the Triberr terms of service because some RSS feeds (such as RSS feeds which aggregate other RSS feeds) are not allowed. This will not be an issue for most bloggers. If the TOS is a bit too dense, Dino Dogan wrote a great article called “How to get banned from Triberr” that has some great information worth reading.

Essential Step #3 : Join Tribes

There are a number of ways to find and join Tribes. The easiest is to click on Tribes on the main menu, choose Explore New Tribes and then select a category where you can then scroll through the available Tribes. Before joining a Tribe you can view its description, look at its members and see the blog posts that are currently in that Tribe. This will give you a good sense of what the Tribe is about and whether it looks like a good fit for you.

Most people prefer to share content from within their niche so you should only join tribes that are relevant to your blog’s content. Otherwise, you are not going to get a lot of shares, or worse, you may get pushed out of the Tribe or muted by other members.

Joining a Tribe is as simple as clicking the Join button. Joining a Tribe initially means that you are a Follower of that Tribe. You can participate in that Tribe and share all of the content in that Tribe, but no one else can share your content until you are promoted to Member.

Wondering how that happens? Simple.

Each tribe has a Chief, usually the person that created the Tribe. The Chief is responsible for maintaining order within the Tribe and promoting Followers to Members. Every Triberr member ultimately wants to be classified as a Tribe Member within each Tribe they are in, but your promotion depends on your behavior.

If you are participating and sharing content and connecting with your Tribemates, then getting promoted will be easy. If your content is strong and relevant to the Tribe then you are more likely to be promoted. If you never log in and never connect with or share other Tribemates’ content, your chances become more slim.

Most Chiefs will also regularly demote or purge members who are not actively involved. Remember, Tribes exponentially increase the reach of the content you put into it. If you are capitalizing on the reach but not helping others do the same then it will not go unnoticed.

In Essential Step #2, I illustrated how to add your RSS feed. If you have more than one feed, you can control which Tribes each of your feeds is available to. For example, if you have a business blog about marketing and a personal blog about cooking, you’ll want to join Tribes that are relevant to each topic and then only share the appropriate feed with its related Tribe. Your marketing Tribes are not going to be interested in your cooking content and vice-versa.

It’s easy to choose which Tribes see which feeds. Go to your settings page, click on My Blogs and then Assign Tribes.

It’s important to be strategic with your feeds when you have more than one blog. Don’t assume that because you join a Tribe that your Tribemates will want to see all of your blogs.

Finally, it’s important to recognize that the Tribes within Triberr are not run by Triberr or its staff at all. These ecosystems are self-managed through the daily interactions among the membership.

The simple rule is this: If you are a good Tribemate, you will be rewarded.

Essential Step #4 : DFTBA

I’m a big fan of John Green). He often ends his educational videos with the acronym DFTBA which stands for “Don’t forget to be awesome.”

That’s the essential rule of Triberr. You must be awesome. If you are, then others will be awesome back. In Triberr, this means spending time in the Stream.

The Stream is where the day-to-day magic happens on Triberr. The Stream is a list of all of the blogs that are attached to any of the Tribes that you belong to. The Stream is where you can read blogs by Tribemates and also share those blogs across your social platforms.

Every post in the Stream has a share button that can be triggered by hovering your mouse over it. Hovering over the share button will put that post in your social queue for delivery by Triberr on your behalf. You can set up the social profiles where you want to share and the frequency of sharing in your settings.

This works much the same as assigning blogs to Tribes. Go to your settings and click My Social Networks. Then you can click Assign Tribes and select which social profiles will be used to share specific Tribes’ posts.

This act of sharing a post is the magic that makes Triberr work. When you share a post, the author of that post will know it and that can be encouragement for them to read and share your content.

In general, you should not share blindly. That can have a negative effect if Tribemates get the sense that you are simply sharing to gain favor in the Tribe. Share wisely. The best Tribes consist of members who read, comment on and share each other’s content. This creates a strong community and incentive for cross promotion.

While you are being awesome, you can hide posts that you have already read or shared and take other actions. Some options are available by clicking the down-arrow in the right corner of each post in the Stream. Some are available by hovering over the photo of the blogger on the upper left of the post. Since you’ll be spending lots of time in the Stream, it’s worth it to take some time to explore all of the buttons and features.

Essential Step #5 : DFTBA To Infinity

You know that you have to give a bit of awesome to get back a bunch of awesome. But I should tell you up front that Triberr is not a single day affair. Most bloggers don’t want to see a one day or one week increase in their readership, comments and traffic. They want prolonged and steady growth.

With Triberr that means that you will have to DFTBA on an ongoing basis. Some Triberr members visit Triberr daily. Some weekly. Some Monthly. There’s no right answer except that regular usage, engagement and sharing will mean strengthening of your existing Tribes. That will present you with opportunities in other Tribes that could massively expand your reach.

You should also consider exploring the boundaries beyond Triberr. Connect with people that you are in Tribes with on other social channels, set up meetups or have one-on-one meetings over coffee. If you express an interest in other Tribemates inside and outside of Triberr, they will reciprocate.

That’s what’s at the heart of Triberr; creating an ecosystem that is controlled by members for the benefit of members. If you don’t know where to go from here after setting up your account, hit me or any other Triberr member up via our social channels or head over to the Bonfires section of Triberr. There are always members there looking to connect with other like-minded bloggers who share mutual interests.

Go Get Your Triberr On

That’s it. Those are the essentials. There’s plenty more to learn, but this will get you going in the right direction. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them in the comment section below.

Oh, and DFTBA.