Blogger Outreach is About the Permanent Record

One of the least important reasons for doing online messaging and blogger outreach and brand ambassadorship is to actually solve problems. The real mission of a online messaging and blogger outreach campaign is to share the experience, hope, expertise, and story.Since the blogosphere is not local at all, one shouldn’t care where these folks are — even if they’re outside the distribution channels of the magazine — when you plan out a online messaging and blogger outreach campaign.

Getting links from Europe or Asia is just as valuable, since what we are  doing, partially is “viral and buzz marketing”

In addition to just getting the conversation going, working towards a promotional “tipping point,” there are other things going on here.

LINK POPULARITY AND PAGE RANK:

Part of what is going on here as part of the outreach is to persuade bloggers to cover and recognize you, your upcoming and future announcements and your news .  The more organic blogger-based mentions, especially from within your target topical community, the better for your reputation on Google, as reflected in PageRank.

One thing folks don’t generally know too much about is that Google PageRank ranges from “excommunicated”(removed from the Google indices) and from 1-10. Most sites have appalling PageRank, which you can check on the Google Toolbar. If a bunch of PR 6 & PR 7 sites, such as newspapers and magazine and top blogs, link to you, you’re likely to increase in PageRank. While High PR sites can confer Google Juice to your site, they can also get you out of the Google Quarantine in short order — sort of like getting vouched for.

If you have lots of incoming links from a vertical market (autoblogs, gossip blogs, enviroblogs, celebrity blogs, or marketing blogs) then you are going to get a better PageRank than if you receive all of your inbound link from all over the board — too broad a cross-section of blogs and sites — then you will not receive the same boost. This is done by Google to judge what the site is about (New Marketing) and if the site is participating in link farms (a “black hat” method of search engine optimization), for which you will become quickly excommunicated.

GOOGLE AND SEARCH ENGINE INDEXING:

The messaging is primarily a person-to-person promotional strategy, but humans aren’t the only readers of the Internet: search engine bots and spiders are, too. Getting your properties deeply indexed into Google usually takes a while as Google has had its heart broken again and again. As a result, Google places new and unconnected sites into what is called the Google quarantine. This is the protected staging area where new sites need to live while Google gets to know you. Picture is sort of like being kept outside on the front porch at the end of a date until your date figure out if you’re a gentleman or not.

THE GLOBAL CONVERSATION: 

This entire thing is not about a blogger from Denver or a teacher from Baltimore.  It is about the echo chamber, the passion chamber — it is about the “buzz.”  Each mention is less important that the total mention. At the end of the day, the metrics don’t really care about the particular mentions so much as the volume.  In a perfect world, there would be hundreds of mentions from PR5 sites.  To be honest, a lot of this has to do with “standardized testing” — these are finite algorithms and we are trying our best to match them.

ON PERMANENT RECORD: 

At the end of the day, this is all about getting into permanent record. Second Life may be cool, and so may be IM, but these are all ephemeral — the web and the blogosphere is indexed and exists much longer and to greater effect the longer and deeper the penetration a site has into Google’s, Technorati’s, and Ask.com’s site indices.