In today’s public relations environment, it’s important to include the online media when developing a PR campaign for your company. This includes blogs. Below you will find several tips to help you seek out and find relevant blogs and successful strategies for pitching bloggers: 

Determine Your Target Blogs
Before pitching bloggers, determine which blogs are relevant and which ones you should target. You can do this by searching Technorati, Google Blog Search, or IceRocket for specific keywords relating to your pitch. Technorati’s “authority” rankings can help indicate the relative value of links to a specific blog. The higher this number, the greater the reach the blog receives.

Look for Advertising
This may seem like an unusual strategy for determining which blogs to pitch, but it can work. Blogs that are selling advertising quite possibly have more influence than those that don’t. This isn’t always a good indicator because many times bloggers, like me, don’t want advertisers…but it’s a good way to begin the process.

Read The Blog First
There is no getting around this. Read the blog before you pitch the blogger. This way, you will know exactly what the blogger is writing about. If you fail to read their blog first, then you will more than likely fail to receive any coverage from your pitch. Just review the latest 10 postings on a blog and you’ll be all set to pitch its blogger or move on.

K. I. S. S.
We’ve all heard of Keep is Simple, Stupid. This strategy applies to pitching bloggers as well. Most bloggers make very little money from their blogs and therefore don’t have much time to commit to reading through long press releases or pitches sent to them. By sending them a short and simple email that is smart and striking and quickly explains how the topic is relevant to his or her blog, your pitch will be more effective.

Make Sure Your Story is Blogworthy
Similar to traditional PR, if your story is not newsworthy, then forget about it. Bloggers only care about timely and blogworthy stories that they can react to. If your story doesn’t accomplish this, then don’t waste your time pitching them.