I’m going to write a few posts on internet marketing. I generally like to avoid writing so directly on a topic, because it often comes off like a text book (and I was never a fan of school, so not being a fan of my own content doesn’t mesh to well with me). To be honest, with some of the information I want to share, I’m not quite sure how else to share it. I’ll make my attempt, though, and hopefully it will be valuable to you and something you can actually get through reading.
All of this, for the record, is sparked by the fact that I’ve found it incredibly difficult to find an internet marketer who is actually worth their weight. We need one here at National Speed, but half the time when I speak with consultants they go through a checklist of crap, often times asking me if I’ve done stuff that frankly either doesn’t work effectively enough for me to merit paying them tons an hour to set it up (which takes all of maybe 20 minutes if you are nice and assume they do their research). It’s also sparked by a few examples of research I received which, I’m sorry, were utter crap.
How to do a competitive blog analysis
Well start off with blogs. Before you even begin your blog, it’s important to analyze the competitive landscape for blogs in your industry. I think this as a first step trumps deciding on your target audience and deciding the purpose of your blog. The reason behind it is that by doing a competitive analysis, you will be able to better understand both the audience even is and the blogs currently satisfying them (and how). This allows you to find the gap that your blog can fill in your industry rather than just doing what you feel like.
When it comes to your competitive analysis, both in business and in blogs, you want to be as thorough as you possibly can. This helps you avoid being blind sided in business, and when it comes to blogs it will feed into your marketing plan. In the unique setting of blogs, your “competition” are actually your friends. They’ll be part of what organically gets you noticed.
Below are the steps I go through when doing a competitive blog analysis. As I go through each step, I add them to a master list for that industry. When I create a master list, my list includes the blog title, blog url, contact information (name and email), a comment rating, an activity rating, the number of subscribers to the blog, and whether the blog runs ads.
Finding blogs in your industry using Google Blog Search and Google Suggest
The first and most simple method is to use Google Blog Search to search for key words in your industry. For example, our company National Speed is in the automotive performance industry. So the first thing I did was a search for “automotive performance blogs”. From there, I did a number of other, similar searches such as “car performance blogs”, “autocross blogs”, and so forth. I also then took it one step further and used Google Suggest with the terms I just described to find other terms that people are using that I hadn’t thought of.
Finding blogs using tags on Technorati
Let’s face it. Technorati is not at all what it used to be. To be honest, soon this probably won’t even be in the equation. But in the meantime it still indexes blogs to a degree, and has still found me a few blogs I hadn’t found in my Google Blog Search run. Using Technorati to find blogs in your industry is different from a Google Blog Search because you’re using tags that relate to your industry rather than keywords. Think of tags like categories such as “cars”, “automotive”, “autocross”, “performance cars”, etc. In this case, you’re going to find blogs that wrote a post in respect to these categories. This is where the “second level” of technorati comes in to play.
Once you find a blog with a tag you were looking for, you’ve got your first piece of information: a blog in your industry (or that at least wrote one post that pertains to your industry). The second level of this post (or blog) is following the conversation. All blogs on technorati have a number of responses (people linking back to your post). When you find a blog that is in your industry that has responses, you also want to look at the blogs that wrote the responses. This allows you to dig down to a second level of conversational depth, allowing you to see a bit beyond what Google Blog Search allows (directly anyway) and find some potentially more niche but still valuable blogs. Each time you find a blog, add them to your list and include the number of responses they have (this will help you later in determining which blogs you want to look to as a source and for marketing purposes).
A quick side bit of information regarding responses: some blogs will have no responses, others will have a lot of responses. To give you an idea, if a blog has around 50 responses, they’re probably smaller in popularity. If they have 100-200 responses, they’re probably around medium sized in popularity. Around 500 is a pretty good sized blog in terms of popularity. It’s also based on the industry, however (tech blogs, for example, are usually larger thanks to the echo chamber).
Finding blogs using tags on Digg and Delicious
While Digg and Delicious don’t have the conversation option that Technorati does, they are still valuable sources for finding blogs through tags/categories. For example, Digg has an “auto” section which we follow at National Speed. The auto section lets us see what’s popular for the day (or several days since the auto section is a little slow on digg compared to some of the others). While I will cover marketing more in a different post, I would suggest that at the same time you start looking scanning for other blogs in your industry on digg, you also create an account and start using digg in relevance to your industry.
Note: by using I do not mean submitting your posts. I mean digging and commenting on what others have submitted. If you find something that you haven’t written, then submit it. Otherwise I would say hold off for a little bit before submitting your own content to be dugg.
Now, delicious is a bit of a different beast than digg. Where digg is broad categories, Delicious has a very long tail of tags that can pertain to your industry. In the case of delicious, it will be a lot like Technorati where you’re searching for tags that people may be using to save content that pertains to your industry. Delicious, like Digg, can also be used to spot the trends of what people are bookmarking/digging/searching for over the next few days. Using these sites to help you push out relative (and quality) content in reference to these trends will be part of your marketing plan and will help drive both organic search traffic and social media traffic to your site.
Backing into the blogs
Another method to finding the blogs in your industry (and especially those that have more “power”) is using a backlink checker to see what sites are linking to them. In this case, the process is very simple. Based on your list thus far, take some of the top blogs you’ve found in your industry thus far, and use the backlink checker to see just who is linking back to them. Realistically, this method is a less pretty but more thorough Technorati approach.
What’s next?
Once you’ve built your list of blogs (and forums if you find a few), the next step is to begin deciphering the value of each blog on your list. Ideally you’ve added enough information to your list as you’ve been doing your analysis so you don’t have to go back to each individual blog for evaluation. Really what your end goal of deciding the value of a blog is two fold: finding the blogs that your comments will have the most impact on (impact being the most exposure and social capital generation), and finding those blogs that you may want to build a relationship with or pitch in the future.
I’ll get more into the “What’s next” of deciding a value of a blog in a later post, as this one is already long enoug has it is. As you can tell, there’s no particular “magic” to it all. It’s really just being willing to put in the time, and really knowing how to use the tools to scour the internet in a more crawler kind of way. Also, if you happen to do something for your competitive blog research that works well for you and isn’t on my steps above, let me know. I’m always looking to strengthen my analysis : )
Update: Corrected blacklink checker link.