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DQ News: A Creative Way to Reach Out To Bloggers

Some small businesses would love to get the attention of bloggers in their niche, but don’t know how. After all, getting your business mentioned in a blog that covers your vertical or is influential in your market, can raise your business’s visibility.

The problem is, it’s your business and dozens, even hundreds of others vying for attention. Popular bloggers get bombarded with companies trying to get a piece of their mind share. If yours is one of those companies, how do you stand out so you can start to build a relationship with bloggers, as experts recommend, in a way that will make a lasting impression?

One enterprising entrepreneur has figured out a way to break the ice and get a conversation started — using word clouds in the shape of the blogger’s logo. His approach is so creative, we actually picked it as one of the 99 examples in my upcoming book, Visual Marketing.

In case you don’t know what a “word cloud” is, it’s nothing more than a visual representation of data. You’ve probably seen one common type of word cloud on a website somewhere: a “tag cloud.” A tag cloud is very simple — it just lists the tags (keywords) used on a site. The more often the tag is used, the bigger the word appears in the tag cloud. Here’s our tag cloud over at BizSugar:

Not visually interesting, is it? But a word cloud need not simply be a list of words. The words can be arranged in an interesting shape.

That’s where David de Souza comes in. He runs a popular tax-refund site called TaxFix in the U.K. and another site that’s a self-employment forum. He is very familiar with the blogs in his niches. Getting the bloggers’ attention was the challenge. So he came up with the idea of taking commonly used words on the blogger’s blog, and turning them into a word cloud — but with a twist. He uses a free online tool called Tagxedo to create the word cloud in the shape of the blogger’s logo.

To illustrate, he created a word cloud of Small Business Trends using our logo:

Here’s a closeup just of the “ball” in the Small Business Trends logo. Due to our logo’s shape, the ball is where the tag cloud is represented:

Bloggers and site owners who receive an email with their logo as a word cloud will be intrigued. It’s obvious the sender spent some time on their blog. The sender stands out.

The point of this article is:  take that extra step.  Find a creative way — make it your own “signature” way — to break through the noise when doing blogger outreach.   Once you’ve broken the ice, you can start building a relationship with the blogger.  But first, you must get the blogger’s attention.

From Small Business Trends

A Creative Way to Reach Out To Bloggers

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