Most of the time when people think of getting PR, they think of coverage in traditional media like magazines, newspapers, TV and radio.
However, with the explosion of blogs, it’s definitely a form of media you can no longer ignore. Don’t get intimidated by consultants or agencies who pitch you on a “blogger relations campaign” in order to get pr for your small business.
Bloggers are people too, and I find them much more approachable than a reporter simply because they are not *usually* as overloaded on emails and voicemails. Newspaper reporters can field hundreds of requests a day, and your pitch can often be lost or buried if it’s not hard news.
Bloggers on the other hand, can be just as influential as a reporter and we often hear of news ‘breaking’ on the blogosphere.
How to get coverage on a blog? Pick a few favorite blogs to follow, make sure the blog targets the same audience you do, build a relationship by commenting and when the time is right, see if there is a way to be featured on that blog. Most likely the opportunity is a product review, interview, giveaway or contest or even a guest blog post or video post from you.
If you’re a mompreneur, a few Mom blogs I have been featured at lately are here. Contact these great mommy bloggers to see if there is an opportunity to help promote you.
By subscribing to Jessica Smith’s free Buzz Cooperative, companies or PR people can ask for bloggers to review their products (and vice versa where bloggers ask companies for particular products they want to review for their readers.
Also check out Stephanie Elie’s (@bizziemommy on Twitter) post on 10 Influential Mom Bloggers.
Elena is founder of a technology PR agency that works with startups to billion-dollar companies. She is passionate about helping marketers and small business owners with practical publicity strategies.
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I have had both great and not-so-great responses with publicity through blogs. THe thing I find difficult is how to assess whether the blog has the kind of exposure that I am looking for,as my product is expensive and I cannot afford to send a free bag out to each blog who requests one.
I usually check out the traffic stats on Compete, do a Google ranking search, and also look on Alexa. But even with that, there were a number of blogs who checked out really well on all these pointers, claimed to have 20K plus visitors a month the their site, and so I would make the investment to send them free product for review and forget getting any sales out of it, I didn’t even get 10 visits to my site! I couldn’t understand this – and it has happened a few times! (Of course the opposite has happened as well.)
Any thoughts on how this could be happening? Is it solely that lack of interest in my product that would cause such a thing to happen? Is there a better way to research the stats on a blog?
Thanks very much for your post!
I think the thing to remember about a blog’s statistics – is they are just one tool to measure whether the blog is right for you.
Bloggers are great about helping each other out, so why not pitch a profile about yourself, that indirectly brings exposure to your product? Lots of mom blogs are looking for profiles.
Also, perhaps instead of pitching your product for a ‘review’, ask that it’s featured as a cool or new product. In my PR in Your Pajamas ebook I tell readers NOT to send out a product but instead send out good photos that illustrate how the product is used. This saves money and when I had my own product-based company, we were able to obtain lots of media coverage this way.
I’ve found that you need a mixed approach in terms of publicity to generate sales – we tended to get more sales from PRINT or traditional media like magazines or newspapers, but more hits to our site from blogs. Blogs can generate buzz pretty quickly but it can take months to get into a magazine or paper which is why working with both helps build an overall momentum.
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If an influential blogger with a very specific market niche is looking to monetize their blog, what do you think about charging for advertorials for products?
Hi there, FTC guidelines that came into effect this year state that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers.
In other words, you would have to disclose your relationship to the vendor. I’ve seen many bloggers put a disclosure statement on their blog, something to the effect of “I may get paid to promote some of the services and products you read about here.”
If you want to learn more about the FTC guidelines, here’s a link for you http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm
[...] pitching a blogger, they usually don’t have an editorial calendar so make sure you are familiar with the type of [...]