I wrote (and spoke) last week about the importance of building relationships with bloggers. They really are a great resource for learning what your target audience is interested in and what the buzz is about in the community surrounding your expertise. But before you start building a relationship with a blogger, you’ll have to find them first.
It’s easy to search on Google for bloggers related to your expertise. If you’re a green-living expert, you can simply type in “green-living blogs” and you’ll find links to these blogs, articles mentioning them, blog posts about these blogs and blog posts about these blog posts about these blogs. I know — kind of overwhelming. Usually you’ll find the most popular blogs related to your expertise, and because they are the most popular they will also be the hardest to break into. But right off the bat though, you have your goal: Get on that blog!
But how? You’ll need to be realistic. If you’re just starting out, you should find a less popular blog or one who maybe has even more of a niche following your expertise can fit into. Don’t forget about that BBOC (Big Blog on Campus) though. Bookmark it, follow daily and stay up to date with what they’re covering. You can count on this: All the bloggers you’ll create relationships are doing the same. You should too.
Sites like Technorati are really helpful in narrowing down blogs and bloggers to start building relationships with. You’ll definitely find the most popular ones and the most popular posts, but they also have comprehensive directories with each blog’s authority ranking on the particular subject manner, i.e. green living. You can search Technorati just like you would search Google and start browsing blogs with the reach you’re committed too. Make a realistic list of five or so blogs you’d like to be a guest-blogger or be featured on, then get ready to begin building your relationship with them, which I’ll cover real soon.
Drew;
An excellent suggestion for how to become involved in blogging. I like to think of these activities as a process. A formally defined process which adheres to the Continuous Process Improvements mantra of Think, Plan, Do, Measure and Repeat. Using this approach, no matter how badly you begin doing your social media marketing, you will get better and better at it over time. For anyone interested in learning a little more about how to do this, this link is to an index with two such formal process descriptions:
1) How to run a Social Media Marketing Campaign which includes some pointers on blogging, and…
2) How to run a B2B Twitter Campaign.
Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/bzaac9
Thanks for the info Eric!
Google Blog Search and Technorati are the 800-pound gorillas in blog searching, but just to be thorough try BlogPulse (by Nielsen), the venerable Best of the Web ( http://blogs.botw.org/ ), LeapFish, IceRocket, Trendpedia, BlogScope.net, Twingly, and blogcatalog.
Microblogs can be searched at TweetScan, Topsy, CrowdEye, TwitScoop, and DailyRT, etc.
Another way to find bloggers is through the back-door listings of social-media sharing, recommendation & aggregation sites such as Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Sphinn, and StumbleUpon.
Few PR pros bother to consider discussion boards and fora, but they can be searched at BoardReader, BoardTracker and Omgili.
Other options include social-media search engines such as SocialMention (which offers a Social-media Alert, similar to Google Alerts), and so-called “realtime” search engines such as OneRiot, Scoopler, Collecta, Wowd and LeapFish.
Thanks for the info!
Great advice about starting with the blogs mid-way up the food chain. Who are the influencers of the influencers? I’m also struck by how many “online marketing plans” lack any serious PR component, such as a blogger relations campaign! Maybe your post will help! (Found you on LinkedIn)