Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Sara,

As a blogger who deletes requests often, I thought I would answer.

First, bloggers are in the business of cultivating relationships with people that read their blog. They have a clearly defined primary audience. They probably also care about a clearly defined secondary audience. He knows his audience well. If your product or service does not interest the blogger's audience he will never post an article about you. So find the right blog/blogger.

Second, remember that bloggers are busy. Keep this in mind when creating your pitch. Help them by showing them why their readers would be interested in hearing about you and your product.

Third, most bloggers will respond better if there is already some sort of a relationship between you and the blogger.

Your first step is to get on their radar.

The best way to get a blogger's attention is to leave insightful comments on their blog. Think person to person comments. Not business to blogger comments. Avoid comments where it is obvious you want to push your website/products.

In your comments try to show the blogger and his readers how your activity links to theirs... again without self-promotion.

On some popular blogs you should aim to comment several times.

Next, it's a judgement call. Just how busy is your blogger?

With some bloggers you could now send them a private message and make your pitch and they will take (find) the time to read it.

With other bloggers, the more solicited ones, it's more a questions of timing.

In addition to making a connection between your activity and the blogs topic, you should also try to link your pitch to something of current interest to the blogger. Remember he is busy and gets many requests: he simply does not have the time to read everything. So you need to make your request stand out from the crowd. Make it an easy decision for him and you will find it easy to get in.

...These are the similar tactics to what I would use for a job search.

If you go about it right, find the right audience match, with the right pitch, you can catch the interest of popular bloggers. It is not difficult. They are on the look out for good stories that interest their readers. Just make sure your audience and his audience are the same.

Don't drop the ball with the first article though - remember to comment on the post, promote it and cultivate the relationship further.

And just to let you know, here are some reasons why I automatically delete requests:

- Too self promotional, i.e. nothing my readers could possibly relate to and too off-topic for my blog.

- No real person name, no company link, or a link to a website with so little information on it that I cannot understand what it is about in the first 5 seconds.

- Lack of full contact information. I cannot tell where they are located. If I cannot quickly identify the country and there is no real person name or it's a free email account, I usually don't read further no matter what my level of interest is.

- Sent by the webmaster and so impersonal it looks like part of a massive mailing - usually off-topic.

- The email is only about how great their product/service is and does not actually say what their product/service is or does; i.e. it is all about them and shows me no reason why I should spend my time to do them a favor. And links from a "bad" website are not enough to be enticing. Most bloggers learn quickly how to do link building marketing.

Hope this helps.

It may sound like a lot of work. But if you allocate a little time for networking like this every day, you will rapidly see it pay off. All you need is to find the right crowd of people and then create the relationships over time.