Another rant I am afraid. I am sick of coming across extremely poor blogs that are being used as dumping grounds by SEO people to leave links and point them towards their client’s main websites. I really don’t see the longevity in this process – it’s wrong and Google and Bing will get wise to it and stop you in the end anyway. Yes blogging can be used to help SEO but please god don’t write terrible, dull content just because it includes your client’s brand name all of the time. Surely, you want these new links to mean something and good quality content is going to have much more longevity than a dull written post. For instance, if you ...

I was reading my feeds this morning and came across this little gem from our friend Darren Rowse at Problogger. He has put together a nice infogrpahic on what makes the perfect blogger outreach campaign. I have worked on a lot of blogger outreach campaigns over the last few years and one of the first things I ask the client is what is in it for the blogger and his/her readers not just your marketing campaign? If there isn’t anything in it for both of them and the company then I tell them that it isn’t right for blogger outreach – it’s that simple. I get a lot of PR approaches myself, some good, some bad ...

I have been writing online conversation reports for clients for a number of years now and during that period of time it would be understandable to think that we have seen significant changes in the social channels that are influential in these reports. However, in almost all of the 60+ online conversation reports I have written, blogs are still the most influential sources for brands, whether it is business-to-business or business-to-consumer. It is for this reason that I decided to share some quick tips on how to identify an influential blog. I should add a caveat that I would use all of these tools together to give me a feel for a blog, so I wouldn’t recommend using one ...