About This Blog:
The Influential Marketing blog focuses on sharing useful marketing, advertising and PR ideas to help anyone promote their business, products or services better. The topics I cover include social media and blogs, the role of marketing in our culture/society, global marketing trends, marketing in a recession, small business marketing strategy, personality and humanity in business and general advertising and PR trends.
Past posts have ranged from effectively launching a blog to marketing lessons you can learn from landlocked mangoes. Back in August of 2006, I wrote a post called The 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization, which inspired a new practice of marketing (SMO).
What kind of reach does it have?
This blog reaches an average of about 55,000 visitors per month via direct visits to the blog, and has over 15,000 RSS subscribers and over 3000 email subscribers. After six years and over 900 posts of content, the blog has received more than 1.2 million views. In addition, my blog content often syndicated to other sites (including Digital Media Wire, American Express, USA Network and others) and depending on an individual post could reach several hundred thousand readers and sometimes even more.
Who reads it?
The majority of readers to this blog come from the United States, followed by the UK and India. Readers tend to be a mix of marketing professionals, small business owners, entrepreneurs, and general "googlers" looking for information. As a result of my blog being live for 5 years and frequently updating with posts that use relevant keywords, I tend to rank well on Google for marketing and business related searches, as well as for the brand names that I write about.
How can I get my brand mentioned?
I do read pitches by email or Twitter if you think you have a campaign or marketing tool that would be of interest to an audience like the one I describe above. What I love to get information about are new campaigns or beta releases of new and interesting services (especially those that I can get a "sneak peek" at before a public release). I can hold an embargo, if needed and the easier you make it for me to have something exclusive or interesting to talk about, the more likely I'll blog about it. Oh, and one final tip - never try to call me by phone ... I don't answer my phone for unrecognized numbers - it's a waste of both of our times and email is much more efficient.
Don't be a flack ... it's not good for any of us.
I don't believe I'm too good or popular for your pitch, and I never "out" PR people for sending me something, but there are a few things I have never written about and are a total waste of time for you to send me. Those include "news" about hiring someone and announcements about something that has nothing to do with marketing or no connection to something I would reasonably write about. If you send me pitches like that, I may not share your name publicly, but I will privately think you are lazy and/or an idiot. And your reputation should matter to you more than that - especially in an industry like ours where the people you "pitch" today could be your colleagues tomorrow.
If you're new to pitching blogs, you might want to check out the suggestions that our team at Ogilvy follows in our Blogger Outreach Code Of Ethics. Stick to those and you should be fine, even when approaching bloggers that are way "snarkier" than I am.
Do you accept advertising or endorse products/services?
In addition to writing stories on this blog, I am sometimes asked about advertising or promotion opportunities. While I don't accept advertising on this site in terms of banners or links, I will often do product reviews and endorsements if I authentically believe that a product is worth promoting. For more details on what sorts of products and services I would consider, visit my endorsements page.
