Advocacy Avenue

Rohit Bhargava’s recap of his "10 Easy Ways to Piss Off a Blogger" session is one of the interesting posts out following South by Southwest Interactive.  It’s all excellent advice; I particularly want to point out one of the ten irritants:

7. Ask for favors as part of your first outreach to them without building a relationship or earning the right to ask them to help you.

Sometimes this might be unavoidable: you have information for a blogger that they’ll be interested in (avoid 4. Send irrelevant information that exhibits no understanding of what they care about or fail to personalize it) but haven’t reached out to them in the past. Maybe this is a new area for you; maybe you’ve just realized as you’re ending a campaign that this person cares about your issues; maybe you read the blog in your spare time and they’ve now mentioned one of your projects. Then you’re stuck, and a cold pitch is the best you can do.

But since it’s far more effective to have an existing relationship, what are some of the ways to build that connection?

• Comment on a post (adding new ideas is better than just saying "nice post")
• Link back to a post and continue the discussion on your own site (trackback if their blog lets you)
• Email a comment about the site as a whole or a particular post
• Add a link to your blogroll (and suggest people check it out)
• Mention one of their posts in someone else’s blog comments, since that person (and maybe some of their readers) will probably go check it out
• Twitter a link with "great post on [whatever]," or add it to del.icio.us or StumbleUpon or Digg or….

I’m working on a blog now where we’re about to set up a blogroll and email the bloggers we’ve linked to. Some of them we’ve talked to before; some are writing on complementary topics. Hopefully we can begin to direct some traffic their way. Over time, we expect our list to grow, and our investment of time in finding appropriate links will let us offer more to our audience. Even if we never need to explicitly call on other bloggers’ goodwill, helping them is worth the effort – and if we do, a request will grate less on the ear of a friend.

This entry was posted by Jennifer Berk on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 11:44 am and is filed under Blogger Relations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.