Finding the Right Bloggers and Communities
Not all bloggers and communities are created equal, and more important than the head-count is the power of influence with your target market. To maximize the return on your investment (and time), you'll need to identify the "right" blogs and communities and win their support.
Three Kinds of Blogs
The author categorizes blogs as personal (belonging to an individual, in the nature of a diary); topical (devoted to a specific interest area, in the nature of a magazine); and corporate (operated by a specific company, or a team/project within the company).
Topic blogs should be a prime target, especially those that cover your industry, a specific geographic area, or a lifestyle/profession that matches your desired market. They reach a valuable audience, are generally more regularly maintained, and are often hungry for content.
Personal blogs may be of value, though it takes a greater effort to get their cooperation and the payback is often less unless the individual in question is a recognized expert (in which case, the blog may have the character of a topic blog) or has a sizable audience and considerable influence.
Company blogs are he least valuable. They tend to focus only on themselves and their products, and are not inclined to write about the competition. (EN: the author overlooks the potential for collaboration with those whose products/services are complementary to your own.)
It's a Popularity Contest
The author asserts that the largest sites should be your primary goal. Being recognized by the sites that have large audiences and considerable influence adds to the cache of your own, and have a much greater return on your marketing efforts. Getting a link from a "major" blog will send you more traffic and garner more notoriety than links from a dozen smaller ones.
(EN: I balk a bit. A "big audience" is not necessarily the right audience, and your interests might be better served by pursuing a niche audience of opinion leaders rather than the masses.)
Finding "Good" Blogs
The author summarizes some of the resources that can be used to locate and compare blogs, but concedes that all of these tactics are "imprecise" and require a great deal of intuition. Most importantly, you should personally visit blogs and monitor them over time rather than accept a quick list.
Google is an excellent tool: as a search engine, it lists many Web sites and ranks its results by popularity as well as relevance to search keywords (though you have to be cautious of paid placement and spamdexing). It's also noteworthy that Google "owns" Blogger, the most common blogging platform, and the two of them dovetail neatly.
To find blogs with Google, search for "
He also mentions Google Page Rank and Google Trends as ways of assessing a site. Page Rank is an attempt to assign a numeric value to the popularity of a site (the company is secretive about its algorithm, but it considers an array of factors). Trends compares multiple Web sites to determine their popularity with its search engine users over time.
There are other sites that attempt to list and evaluate blogs: Technorati, Blog Pulse, Ice Rocket, Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, Feedburner, and more. (EN: He provides some general descriptions, but a better approach might be to just visit those sites and snoop around, so I'm skipping it).
The author has been engaged to compile lists of blogs for clients, and generally uses a spreadsheet with the following fields:
- Name of the blog
- Blogger's name, if available
- Blog URL
- Contact details (email, plus other if it can be found on the site)
- Topics the blog covers
- Regional range of the blog, if applicable
- Google PageRank
- Technorati Authority
- Alexa ranking
- Compete visitors
- Pitch policy describing how the blogger likes to be approached
- Notes
By considering and comparing each of these metrics, you can get a fairly good sense of the value of the blog.
Returning to his earlier disclaimer, he advises you to "be skeptical." The various models for ranking and assessing blogs are all works in progress and don't mean much in and of themselves, only when comparing multiple sites by the same (imperfect) metrics. And all of the tools are based on their own audience: it shows which sites are most popular among Google users, or users who installed the Alexa toolbar, which may not be an accurate representation of the demographic you're targeting.
Don't Overlook Anecdotal Evidence
Aside of the attempts at objective metrics, the subjective assessments of value are worth considering. They are less "empirical" but can uncover valuable resources that the more general methods overlook.
Checking "blog rolls" is useful: look through the lists of links on each blog to see if you can find other blogs on the same topic, and if a lot of sites seem to be linking to the same blog, chances are it is influential and/or popular. However, it comes with a note that some feel blog rolls are going out of style. (EN: the term "blog roll" has had better days, but sites still present links to other sites that are in the same genre.)
It's also worth asking around: find out which blogs your colleagues are reading, make it a topic of conversation at industry events, and consider adding it as a question on marketing surveys
The author also provides a list of other subjective indicators of a blog's popularity and influence:
- The number of comments each post receives indicates how "involved" the readers are
- The frequency of updates (how many posts per month) indicates the blogger's level of involvement
- The age of a blog (how long it has been online) speaks to its value
- The amount of "stuff" in the sidebars (widgets, blog rolls, followers, etc.) may be a sign of how much effort the blogger puts into promoting the blog to the community
- Indications that the author participates in other community sites is evidence of the author's level of exposure in the community at large
- A custom design, as opposed to an off-the-shelf skin, often indicates a higher elvel of involvement
As with the formal metrics, none of these is a definite indication of anything, but they are sings that point toward conclusions, and are generally (though not perfectly) reliable.