Over the last several years, bloggers have become the new reporters, living day-to-day on the front-lines of their niche. Many of these passionate bloggers have built large loyalty followers who anxiously wait to read and comment on the blogger’s next post. And many of these influential bloggers in your niche want to know about your products.
Learn how to find these bloggers
Here are my favorite tips to find influential bloggers.
- Type in “blog” and another relevant keyword from your niche into your favorite search engine. For example if you sold organic food online, you could type in something like “organic food blog” into Google. Don’t forget to try the same search in the other top search engines like Yahoo.com, MSN.com, AOL.com and Ask.com. Each of these search engines will present different results.
- Search Google Blogs – this is a specialty search feature on Google.com found here. You can do a keyword search just for blog content.
- Search for niche blogs at some of the top social media sites like Digg.com, Technorati.com, delicious.com, Gather.com
- Search the sites that allow anyone to maintain a one-page about a certain topic – sites such as Squidoo.com and Hubpages.com
Getting bloggers to comment on your products
Remember the expression…”You never know unless you ask”?
Well it is okay to ask bloggers to review your products. Sometimes, you will be required to send them a sample for the review and sometimes not. Hopefully, the review will be positive (or somewhat positive) and maybe you will even learn something from some independent constructive criticism.
Here are some reasons to get bloggers to review your products:
- This is cheap publicity – permanent one-way links
- There is a trust factor – those who have an affinity to the blogger
- The blogger has a built-in audience – you will reach prospects quickly, remember the sales funnel no longer starts at the search engines
- Get people talking about your product/service – bloggers, by nature, are writers and they are always looking for good products/services to share with their audience
- Extremely, profitable sales – a positive product review from an influential blogger could lead to sales without any additional marketing costs
SEO benefits of links from blogs
By getting several one-way links from blogs, you will increase the amount of in-bound links to your online store. The more in-bound links from other quality sites (not sites that are link farms or built for SEO purposes only), the better your site will do in organic search results.
At the end of the day, you are looking for that all important one-way direct link from their blog to your store. The search engines love blogs. They think of them as authorities in their niche. So, make sure to ask for these product links. Ideally, you would ask for the blogger to link to the particular product (or category, etc.) versus the homepage to help build deep links to your online store.
Remember, these links help your search engine results. The more of these links, the more FREE traffic you can expect to get to your store.
Another benefit is that this free traffic can often offset increasing pay-per-click costs in your Paid Search program leaving your more money to bid more aggressively and potentially outbidding your competitors.
Two main ways to ask for bloggers to review your products.
1. The first technique is FREE. You can simply identify bloggers in your niche and contact them usually via email and let them know about your products and store. You would be amazed at what you can get by simply asking!!!
2. Pay Bloggers to Review Your Products
There are entire ad networks dedicated to helping online businesses find bloggers who are willing to write product reviews for a fee. Why do bloggers do this? Well, they might be running a for-profit business or they might want to cover their expenses of running the blog or others might want a little spending money. If paying for product reviews seems sneaky, it is not. It happens all the time.
Now, there is a cost involved, which is generally low ($15 and up per review, depends on what the bloggers are now charging really). From my experience, this is an effective use of your marketing dollars.
Remember, you are getting a quality product review to a built-in audience that has a passion in your niche market. This will generate discussion and other online chatter both on the blogger’s site and potentially other sites, where the blogger’s audience frequents. It can lead to direct sales and exposure for your online store.
Some ad networks that specialize in this market include PayPerPost.com and ReviewMe.com.
SUPER TIP:
One more super-easy tip to get the attention of influencers in your niche is to link to them on your site or within your social networking posts (or Twitter tweets).
NOTE: As of December 1, 2009, the FTC requires bloggers to make it clear if the blog post is a paid review or if compensation was given for the product review. So now it is required for the blogger to note that what their audience is reading is a paid review.
Here’s to your online (blogger outreach) success,
David
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