Summary: Consider these three tips for better blogger relations before getting your company caught up in a negative blog storm (or missing out altogether).

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Is your company reaching out to bloggers to spread the word or take part in larger conversations on the Web? If so, how are your blogger relations efforts going? Chances are that there’s room for improvement. Here are three simple things you can do to pursue even better  blogger relations for your business:

1. Stick to Your Market – Look beyond bloggers with generic “influence” and instead focus on bloggers who have direct influence over your existing target market. Building relationships with bloggers takes time, and you should invest it wisely. Be selective. Remember that blogger relations is about more than simply pitching bloggers about your next product launch. (Check out the two small-scale examples of authors exercising excellent targeting and blogger outreach I recently highlighted at All Book Marketing.)
2. Target Brand Advocates – Search for bloggers who are not only relevant to your company, products, or services, but who are already talking about you! On the surface you may think it’s best to start off targeting bloggers not yet writing about you, in order to increase the numbers. However, those who already promote your company (like happy customers leaving great reviews) run less of a risk. Remember, bloggers don’t generally have an editor to answer to. They’ll share their opinions whether you like it or not – and if you annoy a blogger by pitching them something irrelevant or something they simply don’t care for, you may get coverage albeit not what you were hoping for. Also, your brand advocates (or fans) are the most likely bloggers to want to hear from you–in fact, they may be completely tickled that you even took the time to look at their blog. These are people that want to build a relationship with you. At the very least, this is a good place to start.
3. Give Them What They Want – Bloggers are about more than getting free stuff. In fact, there’s a large segment of the blogging community that strongly looks down on anything that could be construed as trying to “buy” bloggers or their attention. Solely taking that approach is another risky move that could lead to negative coverage. Instead, think about what’s often important to bloggers. For example, many niche bloggers work hard to build and maintain an image as an authority in their field. Allowing them to break a small news story is extremely appealing to them (it can give them a traffic boost in addition to more credibility). Having respected members of their industry participating on their blogs is another way they can achieve that goal–consider offering to do an interview or write a guest post for them, or if you enjoy the blog enough to read it regularly comment publicly as often as you can (and as often as you have something of value to add to the post). These things allow you to not only initiate a relationship with relevant bloggers, but directly engage with their readers.

Before jumping head-first into a blogger relations campaign, do what you’d do when preparing to launch any marketing, PR, or advertising campaign–think about who you’re ultimately targeting. Understand what the blogger’s readers want, and then work with bloggers in your industry to give them that. The best thing you can do to ensure a good blogger relations campaign is help bloggers give their readers what they want–then everyone’s happy.

If you’re tired of promoting your business site or blog using the same old Internet marketing tactics everyone else is using, give these five Web promotion tactics a try.

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If you run a website or blog, you’ve probably heard of the typical list of marketing activities… submit your site to directories, submit your articles to article directories, submit your links to Digg, Del.icio.us, and other social media sites, target the right keyword phrases, comment on related sites and blogs, etc. However, there’s a lot more to Web promotion than simply doing what everyone else is doing, especially if you want to set your site apart from the competition.Here are five Web promotion / Internet marketing tactics that you probably haven’t tried (or perhaps haven’t tried very effectively): (more…)

Is Twitter marketing just another marketing fad, or is marketing via microblogs here to stay? Find out how people are marketing through services like Twitter, and what benefits or damages they may see because of it.

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Whether you’re a fan of microblogging platforms like Twitter or not (I’m not), you can’t deny that there is marketing potential there. There’s actually a lot of spamming potential there. I talked about this recently at NakedPR.com, and whether or not spam will lead to the death of Twitter. Today let’s take a look at types of Twitter marketing, and whether it’s just a fad or will likely be around for the long haul.

How it Works

One thing that makes it tough to evaluate any kind of social media marketing is that single tools (like Twitter) can be used in a lot of different ways for promotional purposes. Here are a few things people are already doing or talking about doing to leverage Twitter as a marketing tool:

• Simply adding links to your own products or sites to drive traffic.
• Adding a link to every site update you post (such as every new blog post) – again to build traffic (you’re not getting the Pagerank link juice, as the links are no-follow).
• Artificially inflating follower counts for more exposure (such as paying people to be followers, using bots, or exchanging friend status with others).
• Buying links in others’ tweets.

Fad or Fab?

FAD – Do I think Twitter or similar services will ever be marketing-free? Of course not. But if you’ve read past Fad or Fab features, you’ll know how I feel about marketing tactics that violate the terms or spirit of the tools or companies being used. It rarely proves to be a smart long-term marketing strategy (and that makes it a fad in my book).

Why? Because if your marketing tactics are going to be actively fought by the tool’s creators, your efforts may prove to be in vain in the long run. For example, all the time or money someone spends to artificially inflate their friend count is completely worthless once the service bans your account if you’re caught.

At the same time, being manipulative when using tools designed to foster a community atmosphere solely for your own benefit runs the risk of damaging your reputation (or that of your site or company). That would be counterproductive to good marketing, isn’t it?

As always, think about the ROI compared to other tactics. Chances are that you can do better. And if you can do better, Twitter marketing (or whatever you’re considering) just isn’t a “fab” option.