Main » Blogging

February 20, 2007

The Do's and Don'ts of Marketing to Bloggers

Why is marketing to bloggers a good idea? Inbound links from blogs improves Google rank, which increases traffic from search engines. Exposure from bloggers can land a company's website on a social bookmarking site like Digg or Del.icio.us, driving thousands of new visitors to the site. But bloggers are a more fickle bunch than most traditional media people. Marketing to them appropriately can yield great results; approaching them the wrong way can backfire.

As someone with a well-trafficked blog and a high Google rank I get bombarded with marketing requests every day. "Your site would be great for my SEO, would you please link to it?" "You obviously love food. I would love to send you some of my ice cream for dogs and you could write about it if you wanted to." (Both real examples.) Most pitches receive a cursory glance and get deleted without a second thought. A few get a response from me, especially if the pitch is respectful and polite. Even fewer get the response the marketer was hoping for.

So, what's the trick?

If it's your job to reach out to bloggers, here are a few guidelines that may help you be more effective in your approach. Note that marketing to bloggers is sort of like selling vacuums door-to-door in a neighborhood where almost everyone knows each other, and most are chatting with each other over their fences. In any strong blogging community there is a lot of back-channel talk going on. This can work to your advantage or disadvantage, depending on how you approach the bloggers in the first place. Now for the guidelines, let's start with the "Don'ts".

Marketing to Bloggers Don'ts

  1. Do not send obvious form letters. Did you know that we bloggers share the form letters we receive from marketers with each other? We do. This is a great way to get nowhere with the very people you are trying to influence. It also demonstrates that you have done practically no research whatsoever on your audience. Form letters result in promoting pork sausages to vegans or pitches for ready-to-eat cheesecake filling to gourmet scratch cooks, people who would sooner shoot themselves than use your product.

  2. Do not ask for links, unless you are willing to pay for them, at which point the conversation turns to advertising policy and rates. This whole reciprocal link thing might be barely tolerable on a blogger-to-blogger level, but is considered annoying spam when it comes from a company pushing products.

  3. Do not leave blog comments plugging your products. Talk about generating ill will! It's called blog spam. As a blogger I don't really care that you think my readers would be interested in your ready-made lemon syrup. I'm not interested in allowing a company to promote its products on my blog without my permission. If you abuse comments, eventually you'll generate such bad feelings that people will start writing in their blogs about how your company is spamming the blogosphere. Then the next time someone looks your company up in Google all they'll see is a litany of complaints. Not exactly the intended result, eh?

  4. Do not come on too strong. If you send out product, you can follow up with a "did you receive it?" but not a "when are you going to write about it?" Do not insist on anything. And if someone doesn't want to promote your product, please don't argue with them. Thank them for their time and move on.

  5. Do not put the blogger on your mailing list (unless they have requested it.) This should be obvious, shouldn't it? But clearly it isn't as getting put on some random marketer's email newsletter or mailing list happens all the time. Bloggers hate it.

Continue reading "The Do's and Don'ts of Marketing to Bloggers"

Posted by elise on February 20, 2007 to Blogging, Web Marketing | Permalink | Email to a friend | Comments (18)

December 6, 2005

Blogging for Business

Ten years ago, business leaders were forced to scramble to define their "Internet strategy". These days the question making the rounds is, "Should we get a blog?" To help you answer that question, let's review what a blog is, and look at the different ways that a blog could help your business.

Continue reading "Blogging for Business"

Posted by elise on December 6, 2005 to Blogging | Permalink | Email to a friend | Comments (1)

February 15, 2005

Weblog Tools Market - Update February 2005

By Elise Bauer
February 15, 2005

Updated February 18, 2005. Scroll to end to see update.

This article is a continuation of the analysis presented six months ago in An Overview of the Weblog Tools Market.

Last August in An Overview of the Weblog Tools Market the concept of a Weblog Tools Use Index was introduced - the degree to which Google spidered pages associated with certain weblog tools, with the proposal that this number could be used as a proxy for the extent to which the tools are being used, and therefore give some indication of "share" of use. To reduce the confusion that that terminology caused, in this article the sum of the number of websites linking to a weblog tool URL and the number of websites containing the URL will simply be the factor used to determine comparative percentages, or "Google Share".

I believe that Google Share is a fair proxy of the extent to which these tools are actually used, with some caveats. Blogs that are used in a corporate setting often sit behind corporate firewalls, or may have any reference to the blog tool stripped out. This would affect the numbers for tools such as Movable Type, Wordpress, and other stand-alone (non-hosted) blog applications. Among hosted services, Typepad offers password-protected, non-indexed blogs which account for 30% of the total Typepad use, according to Typepad maker Six Apart. Typepad would therefore be underrepresented in Google by this amount.

Market share analysis is an educated guessing game, especially when you are trying to determine share with only publicly available data. Private companies rarely release usage stats to the public. The public companies that own blog tools - Microsoft and Google - are not required to publicly report data for products that represent such a tiny fraction of their overall revenue. And even though the hosted services know how many active accounts they have, many of the software makers do not. Those offering shareware or GPL tools can only count the number of downloads, not the number of people who use their free software, or the number of blog entries created with their tools. Google can give us some indication of the degree of use or influence of these tools in the public World Wide Web.

Please note that the analysis presented here is limited to tools and services used in the United States. Clearly, a broader market analysis would be preferred, one that included local services in Europe and Asia. But, as this author is lacking the language skills which would be necessary to conduct such analysis, this report, like the one that preceded it, is focused on the US.


What has happened in the last six months?

One piece of public data we have is from Technorati, a service that tracks weblogs. In August 2004, Technorati had tracked a little over 3 million weblogs. At the time of this analysis, early February, 2005, Technorati had tracked 6.9 million weblogs, an increase of approximately 120% in six months.

Continue reading "Weblog Tools Market - Update February 2005"

Posted by elise on February 15, 2005 to Blogging | Permalink | Email to a friend

August 6, 2004

An Overview of the Weblog Tools Market

By Elise Bauer
August 6, 2004

Weblogs, although often described as online diaries, are a much more interesting trend than that label would imply. Yes, weblogs are personal journals on the web, and as such they represent the breadth and depth of human interest and knowledge. Not only do blogs allow millions of people to easily and instantaneously publish ideas to websites, most weblogs incorporate interactive features that let others easily comment to those sites, thus transforming the static web into millions of dynamic conversations. Weblogs are increasingly making their way into the professional communications arena as evidenced by FCC Chairman Michael Powell’s blog which he recently started to help generate public discussions around often-controversial FCC policy. Companies are beginning to use weblogs as an internal tool for knowledge sharing. Intuit has created a weblog to open lines of communications with its QuickBooks customers. Technorati tracks over 3 million weblogs, a number that appears to be doubling every 6 months, giving weblogs growth rates that we saw in the early days of the web. Weblogs cannot be dismissed as a fad; they will change the very nature of how we connect and communicate.

Weblog Tools

What does the blog tool market look like today? Weblog tools can be distinguished along two dimensions: fee vs. free and hosted services vs. standalone software (although this distinction is blurring as standalone application companies are beginning to offer hosted versions). The vast majority of blogs are hosted on services that offer weblog building tools and server space for free, for a small fee, or as a feature of a more comprehensive service. Blogger.com, an early-to-market free ad-supported service bought by Google in 2002, is the big guerilla in the market with most likely the largest market share. Live Journal is a hosted blog community with over a million active accounts, 90% of whose users are 25 years old and younger, and two thirds of whom are female. Live Journal weblogs often look more like forums or chat sessions than web pages with structured content. DiaryLand has a large base of teen webloggers and the look of its website suggests a female skew as well. AOL launched its AOL Journals in 2003 as a feature of the AOL service. Typepad, a fee-only service offered by Six Apart, is the most professionally oriented of the hosted consumer services and attracts a broader demographic than the other services.

Continue reading "An Overview of the Weblog Tools Market"

Posted by elise on August 6, 2004 to Blogging | Permalink | Email to a friend

October 17, 2003

What is Blogging?

All about blogging.
If you are twenty-something or younger, you probably don’t need to be reading this. You’ve probably been happily blogging away for what seems like years, all your friends blog, you read their blogs, and they yours. But for those of us over forty, or with families to care for and busy jobs to do, or perhaps our attention has just been someplace else for the last two years, we may not have even heard the term, or if we had, it sounded like "flogging" and not wanting to go there, we just ignored it.

But blogging is growing and for very good reasons, much like email took off ten years ago. And like ten years ago when I found myself repeatedly trying to explain email to people and why they really did need an email address, now I’m explaining blogging and why it matters.

What is blogging? - the act of producing a blog. What’s a blog? That’s a little bit harder to answer, but bear with me. The term blog is short for web log, a "log" of diary-like entries published on a web site. This is how it started, people publishing their daily thoughts for all to read on their website. Often the blog entries occur as short, quick snippets – a link to something cool found on the web, an opinion, an idea, a rant. And sometimes they are longer, thoughtful essays. Sometimes new entries are produced every few minutes, and sometimes just once and a while. It all depends on the author and what she or he wants to express.

Continue reading "What is Blogging?"

Posted by elise on October 17, 2003 to Blogging | Permalink | Email to a friend | Comments (5)