Blogger relations is a lot like Alice's ventures!
A few weeks ago, Entreprenette Sarah Shaw called and asked if I would share some tips with her readers on working with bloggers. We did a short call (details here) and then had a follow-up conversation.

We do a lot of blog tours at MLMC (so many, in fact, that I co-founded the Blogger Black Book, an opt-in directory of bloggers who want to talk to marketers, but I digress...)

There was a phrase Sarah kept mentioning: Going into the rabbit hole. This is exactly what it's like to find new bloggers.

The number one question clients ask me about working with bloggers is how to find the *right* one.  The answer is fairly simple: the right blogger for your company or product mirrors your target buyer.

You'll need to do research on the Internet (google your target audience and the word "blog" in quotations) and that's when you'll find yourself in the rabbit hole. Even after years of doing these tours, I still get sucked in. Reading a blog is like visiting another world. It's like finding someone's diary and stepping in their shoes for an afternoon. It's fantasy but real. Click on one blog and that leads to another and then another and before I know it, an entire hour is gone!

After you find your first blogger, look around on that blogger's site. You'll often find he or she belongs to a network (or several). Contact those networks for future reviewers--aim for working with 10-15 at a time so you don't get overwhelmed. You'll find that bloggers lead to other bloggers.

In that case, it's more like a trail of breadcrumbs. But that's a whole other fairytale!

~ml

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