How to Evaluate Blogs for Blogger Outreach Programs
June 22 2011 by Stephanie Ryska ~ 1 CommentBlogger outreach can be crucial part of an overall social media strategy. As of February 2011 there were over 156 million public blogs in existence. Many people use a blog as a platform to display their opinions and passions or establish their expertise on a subject. Blogs tend to attract readers with similar views and interest. 71% of readers say that blogs affect their purchasing decisions “somewhat” or “very much.” Therefore, it’s important that brands try to build relationships with bloggers that cater to your brand’s audience. Successful relationships can lead to your brand being introduced to readers, more traffic to your brand’s website and hopefully more customers. To create these relationships, brands need to think strategically in creating an effective blogger outreach program. First you need to decide how you are going to evaluate blogs/bloggers for your program. At this stage, you’re just doing the initial research; after you do the research, you’ll want to identify some baselines so you can rank the blogs and see which ones are the best fit for your outreach program.
Passion
The most important thing to look for is passion. You want to find bloggers who are passionate about the subjects they write about. This can be a subjective thing, but there are also numbers (discussed below) that can help you evaluate this passion.
Blog Metrics
You want to find bloggers who have an audience and that update their blogs regularly. You’ll look at metrics such as the blog’s PageRank, monthly site traffic and Technorati authority. You should also spend some time evaluating the blog to determine how many blog posts were posted in the past week and month, and to calculate the average numbers of comments per post. Traffic numbers and post frequency numbers don’t always correlate.
Other Numbers
Although, blog metrics are important they don’t always tell the whole story about a blogger. You may also want to take into account some of their numbers on social networks. They might be very influential on Twitter and Facebook. They might have a ton of followers, high Klout Score and great interactions with people. The same goes for Facebook Pages. You might find a blogger that only posts on their blog a few times a week but spends all day engaging with their Twitter followers and Facebook fans. This may still be someone you want to get to know.
Fit With Your Brand’s Image
Lastly, you need to evaluate bloggers subjectively to see if they fit with your brand. The numbers don’t really matter in this case. If you approach people with blogs (or writing styles) that don’t fit with your brand, a few things could happen. First, they probably won’t respond or want to build a relationship with you. Or, if they do respond, they may end up writing a blog post about your brand for an audience who may not care or be interested. Working with bloggers who are not a good fit for your brand is a waste of time and can reflect poorly on both parties.
Put It All Together
Now that you have done your research on blogs in your niche, you need to think critically about the criteria that you want to use to select bloggers for your outreach programs. For example, maybe you decide to pick blogs that are a solid fit with your brand (4 or 5 on a scale of 1-5), have a least 1,000 monthly unique visitors, 5 blog posts in the past month, an average of 2 comments per post and are written by a blogger with a Twitter account. The criteria you decide to use will vary based on your goals and the blogs in your niche.
What do you think about these basics for evaluating blogs for blogger outreach programs?
If you’d like to explore how a blogger outreach program can benefit your brand, send an email to jason@ewaydirect.com. We’d love to help!
Related posts:
