Should I send a product sample to this blogger?
I would love to feature your product with a product review and giveaway! My blog is receiving 18,000+ unique visitors per month – additional stats and information are available on my media page. I am happy to answer any questions and set up a review and giveaway for you.
Beth, marketing/sales director, consumer product company
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By Jennifer Manocchio
With millions of blogs on the web it can be a challenge to determine what blogs to invest your time and money. This is precisely why we created a three-step approach at the agency to evaluate blogs prior to committing client’s products for reviews and giveaways.
1. Review the blog content and consider the following: content, voice and interaction. Is the blog well written? Do you like the approach the blogger is taking with product reviews? Do you see other major product brands being reviewed on the blog? Are readers posting comments and interacting with the blogger?
2. Check http://www.compete.com or http://www.quantcast.com to see if the web site statistics are available. Traffic to blogs varies greatly so you want to be sure there is significant traffic coming to the blog. However, Quantcast and Compete will not show statistics from some blog publishing platforms like WordPress and Blog Spot. So don’t rule out blogs on WordPress or Blog Spot even though you cannot get an accurate number of visitors.
3. Get the blog’s authority and ranking on http://www.technorati.com. Technorati is a database of more than a million blogs. While not all blogs are included in Technorati’s database, it is still beneficial to check because most credible and widely read blogs are in the system.
When you enter the blog into Technorati, you will typically get two numbers in the search results – the authority and the ranking. The authority is the number of other blogs and web sites that are linking to that particular blog. The higher the authority is, the more credible the blog. The ranking indicates how well a blog compares to other blogs in the Technorati database. The lower the number is, the higher the ranking, the more credible the blog.
Once you have the data, the next step is to determine whether the blog is a good fit. Blog traffic and Technorati authority and ranking vary by industry. For example, if you are evaluating mommy blogs they tend to get more traffic, have a higher Technorti authority and lower Technorait ranking than a blog focused on a specific topic like diabetes. It will probably be beneficial to evaluate a few different blogs in a specific category to determine if the numbers are favorable.
If you have any questions about evaluating blogs or our approach to conducting blogger relations, please contact me at jennifer@sweeneypr.com or 910.772.1688.
