8 steps to perfectly pitching bloggers
If you scroll down you’ll notice I recently added a blogroll-ish type of feature to bizhack: Autoroll. I don’t add a lot of flare to my blog because I like to keep it simple and clean and fast-loading, but I kinda wanted to this time. You would too if you got a nice email like the one I got.
So nice, in fact, that it’s an example of the perfect pitch for bloggers in 8 simple steps:
- Suck up (a little)
From what I read, your blog seems to cover a lot of interesting topics around technology,marketing and corporate blogging. Your blog is quite visible (I found you in the first results of Technorati), so I guess you must receive loads of messages.
Sucking up is always good. (By sucking up, I just mean being polite and maybe, just a little, exagerating on the positive side when commenting on someone else’s accomplishments.)
- Be humble
We are just a small tech startup running a beta test for a new widget for blogs.
As the topic of your blog fits pretty well with the type of high end blog we are looking for, it would be very interesting if you could join our AutoRoll beta test.No-one helps jerks or egomaniacs, so even if you’re achingly hip and working for the most blood-spatteringly cutting-edge sexy startup in the world, pretend you’re just a couple of guys in a garage fighting hard to do something cool.
- Simply explain the widget
What’s all about? AutoRoll is the blog roll of your readers. It’s a widget that displays links to blogs your readers are visiting the most often.
Nothing confusing here. Perfect. But intriguing enough to make me continue to read.
- Simply explain what it does
How does it work? We trace the number of visits of each unique reader on each blog that has installed AutoRoll. The more often a reader visits a specific blog, the greater his affinity is with this blog.
Hrm … the possibilities …
- Simply explain the benefits
What are the benefits for you? First of all, you will provide your readers with a very entertaining blog roll, based on other readers with similar reading habits. Moreover, you will get highly qualified incoming traffic for your blog. Indeed, as other similar blogs display your blog on their AutoRoll, they will feed you with new readers with a strong affinity with your blog.
Entertaining my readers is a top priority, of course (as I listen to Nirvana’s Teen Spirit). And getting fed with new readers is delicious and nutritious.
- Include a strong close
It takes 1 minute to install: http://autoroll.criteo.com/
Almost true, too yet. Impressive.
- And suck up just a little more
I would be really interested in your personal feedback on this widget.
Thanks for your help.
Regards,
Peter
Project Manager CRITEOOK, I like to help people out when it’s possible.
- Include a link to your blog
So easy to forget this elemental element of pitching to … bloggers.
Cururu what?!? Has Technorati gone nuts?
Either that or someone is gaming the system.
I just took this screenshot of Technorati’s popular blogs page. Somehow this blog I’ve never heard of has rocketed to the top.
And not just to the top, but to more than 5 times the number of links of the erswhile reigning heavyweight champion, Engadget.
The blog is a Japanese site, Cururu, and Technorati says that 187,670 blogs link there.
One of two three things is correct:
- Either Technorati’s ratings or methodology has been so lousy that it somehow didn’t noticed an amazingly popular blog for months and months and months as it rose to almost 200,000 inbound links, or …
- Someone is really, really, really gaming the system but good, or …
- Technorati’s algorithm has just gone completely farking mad
Come to think of it, I can’t really say which I think is more likely. That might be a sad commentary on Technorati’s technical prowess - or my cynical nature.
You decide.
. . .
. . .
Update:
Cururu appears to be some kind of social bookmarking site … at least as far as I can tell from this very Chinglish-y translation. The site is copyrighted by a company called NHN Japan, which seems un-bloggish. Seems to be a company that builds web communities, actually.
Perhaps (double, triple perhaps) they submitted their non-blog site as a blog. Ditto the perhaps’s but it may really have approximately 50 million inbound links.
Further elucidation, anyone?
Tags: technorati, Cururu, blogs, popularity, links, rank, john koetsier
Kontera: creating in-text irrelevance
Checking the score on the big game? You must be looking to buy a football. Reading a review of a new movie? You must be interested in picking up a new flat-screen TV. Getting the news of a heavyweight boxer’s murder in Jamaica?
You must be interested in buying crayons for your restaurant.
You’ve run across Kontera - a contextual text-link pay-per-click network focused on “creating in-text relevance.” There’s only one problem: irrelevance.
When you focus on individual words as the unit of relevance, you generate irrelevance, as seen above. Only by focusing on the entire post, story, or page can you have a hope of generating anything but the most accidental form of relevance.
Such as an advertising network assuming that if you see the words “Don King” on a webpage, you must be interested in locating this individual.
Perhaps he’s a long-lost classmate. And it’ll only cost you $9.95.
. . .
. . .
Note: Kontera competitor Vibrant Media can probably be put in the same category.
Tags: kontera, advertising, PPC, adsense, adwords, john koetsier
Technorati just dumped 2000-4000 splogs
It’s really very nice to have your Technorati ranking jump 2000 spots in a day. But there’s something odd about it too. I think Technorati is weeding their index of blogs this week, and some interesting things are popping up.
Yesterday between noon and 9:00 PM:
- bizhack jumped from 14,800 to 12,330
- twopointouch jumped from 16,500 to about 12,500
- Chip’s Quips jumped from 35,000 to 28,712
- Orbit Now! jumped from 31,000 to 25,523
In my case, the number of reported inbound links and the number of blogs reported to be linked in has not changed, although I know some new blogs have linked to bizhack in the last week. I’m asking Ian Delaney, who runs twopointouch, if the same is true for him.
(Update: it’s not - Technorat is indexing his blog just fine right now)
However, what we might have here is a major effort by Technorati to clean its index of splogs, which might account for a less-than-satisfactory job of spidering existing blogs and updating them in their index … they have failed to take note of my last 15-20 posts, in spite of my pinging them.
If the numbers that I’m seeing and that Ian are seeing are correct, it’s possible seems likely that between 2000-4000 blogs were tossed out of the index - splogs, flogs, and who knows what else.
Interesting.
We need more data before we can make any really firm conclusions, though. Anyone else have similar experiences?
(Update: Please continue to post your experience below!)
Tags: technorati, index, splogs, ranking, twopointouch, john koetsier
Now I’m confused, Technorati
As I’ve been vocal about on this blog, Technorati rankings are odd. And yet, somehow, I’m moving up:
Technorati hasn’t spidered my site in 6-7 days. Hasn’t noticed my last 15-20 posts. Hasn’t updated the number of links or blogs linking to bizhack even though I know more links have been inbound.
And yet … the ranking is about 3,000 higher than a week ago. If that’s not just an illusion, the top 10,000 is not too far away.
I won’t hold my breath.
Tags: technorati, ranking, blogging, problems, john koetsier
Calacanis: most bloggers suck
Update: see Jason Calacanis’ comment below. He was misquoted or quoted out of context, and does not believe that non-top-ranked bloggers suck. At least not automatically. (Check his comment!)
Quick question: are you in the Technorati Top 100? If not, I hate to break the news, but you suck. If it makes you feel any better, I suck too.
Why?
Well, according to Jason Calacanis’ recent keynote at Blog Business Summit, if you don’t rank high on Technorati, you suck. Simple.
”Blogging is the biggest meritocracy in the world. It’s not broken. You don’t rank? It’s because you suck. … How well you do is up to you.”
However, there is a simple way to not suck:
He said all you have to do is look at the top stories on TechMeme, say something intelligent about the story, link to the other five top bloggers talking about it, and do that for 30 days straight, then you’ll be an A-list blogger.
Do most bloggers suck?
Obviously, most bloggers are not in the Technorati 100. Some us can’t even get Technorati to index our blogs regularly (see the last updated “4 days ago” nonsense).
Do we suck?
No! Some of us talk about things that are not mainstream. Some of us just haven’t gotten the break that pushes us out of the millions and into the thousands. And most of us just don’t want to do something as silly as blogging reflexively about the top three stories on Techmeme, day after day after day.
That said, I have to be careful here. I haven’t heard the keynote myself, and am just going on what other bloggers are publishing about it.
One more caveat: it sounds like he’s saying the way to be popular is to …
- write well
- write often
- write on topics other people care about
- and comment intelligently on other people’s blogs
Fundamentally, I have no disagreement with that at all. That’s all true - as far as it goes. I don’t think doing that guarantees that you’ll hit the Technorati Top 100, but it’s all good advice and IS going to get you higher ranking, more traffic.
What I disagree with is saying that bloggers who don’t rate high suck.
. . .
. . .
Update 10:24 PM:
This post just hit the home page of Techmeme. Also available here.
Tags: calacanis, technorati, ranking, blog business summit, keynote, sucking, john koetsier
Technorati not indexing blogs properly: blogosphere in shock
I’m almost in shock: Technorati admitted on their blog that they sometimes don’t index sites properly:
The good people at Strumpette contacted us [... ] told us that we hadn’t been processing updates from their blog for a few months, even though they’d complained about it. We looked into this more closely, and it turned out they were quite right.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen an admission from Technorati that they have issues spidering. Kevin Marks explained the problem:
If the feed is not full content, we correlate posts between the feed and the HTML of the main page, to see if there is more there (many sites have brief summary feeds, and full posts on the main page; some have the opposite).
However, until yesterday, this code had a problem with sites that appear with and without ‘www’ in front of them. For example Strumpette’s permalinks start with ‘http://www.strumpette.com’ in the feed, but we were indexing the HTML from ‘http://strumpette.com’, seeing relative permalinks from the page, and missing the correlation between the two. This bug is now fixed, and we handle this case better, so Strumpette and others will see better indexing of their posts.
Why, then does Technorati processing seem so random? This blog has had periods of a week to two weeks where Technorati stops indexing, and then spontaneously starts up again. In fact, many people have had similar experiences. Just read some of the comments on these posts:
- Technorati, Technorati, Technorati
- Bloggers care enough about Technorati to want it to be better
- Will Technorati ever come back up?
- Sound of one blog clapping
- Technorati having issues
- Is Technorati broken?
- Somebody, anybody, please buy Technorati
- Technorati and Google: What’s taking so long?
Time and again, after I post on Technorati, pinging, searching, and problems, bloggers come forward and say: yup, that’s happened to me to. Frequently, it’s still happening to them. And it’s happening right now on this blog.
I publish full feeds, and Wordpress supports both Atom and RSS - Kevin mentioned in his post that Atom was best. Here’s what I’d like to ask Kevin Marks (or anyone at Technorati):
Why are there always problems with Technorati’s pinging?
. . .
. . .
Posts discussing these issues:
- Technorati Issues Apology for Problems with Data Integrity
- Technorati in trouble with the blogosphere?
- Problems with your posts showing up in Technorati?
- Technorati: how to get your posts indexed; www blogs bug fixed
- Technorati Recalculates
Tags: technorati, problems, ping, kevin marks, strumpette, john koetsier
technorati, technorati, technorati
How I love to hate thee:
Update: oh how they lie:
Tags: technorati, sucks, lies, john koetsier
whoosh
With pride and joy and humility: under 15,000.
Thanks to everyone who has linked to bizhack - the last 5 who linked and tracked back are in the sidebar under the Text Link Ads non-text link image. 
Err … don’t let the “whoosh” title of this post deceive you. It’s been a long, hard, slow process. But very, very fun and rewarding.
Tags: technorati, 15000, bizhack, john koetsier
Slumming 90’s style with geocities & tripod
Remember Geocities and Tripod? Remember how huge they were in the late 90’s?
I saw a blah.tripod.com address on the back of a beat-up pickup truck on the way home today - a cheap web hosting account for a small business, of course. Brought me back a decade or so, when Geocities and Tripod were the MySpace and YouTube of the day.
The funny thing is, when you go to their pages right now, they’re basically selling hosting. Only Tripod has a mini, after-thought, bottom-of-the-page listing of member sites.
Just imagine what these properties could have done if they would have had the foresight to be a Digg, a Newsvine, even a Bloglines or Technorati. If there’s anything those companies have taught us, it’s that there’s gold in the long tail.
Tripod and Geocities traffic shows just a slight downward trend over the past half a year, but that’s misleading. When the rising tide that should lift all boats is not lifting yours, you probably have a leaky hull.
How the mighty have fallen.
Tags: geocities, tripod, long tail, social, aggregator, john koetsier
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Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
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