A friend of mine recently emailed me to say that she has a new client but they’re wary of doing a blogger outreach program, and do I have any metrics about outreach ROI, especially for driving sales?
I wrote back: You’re asking for the holy grail.
However, while linking ROI to blogger outreach is not simple, it’s also not impossible. Think about the decades (centuries?) of PR people who have gone before us. How did they determine ROI on media outreach when all they had was “impressions” (a very fuzzy number that was, and is: self-reported from print and broadcast media)?
If you’re a public relations or communications person who works with bloggers, you’ve probably figured out by now that every blogger is unique. Pitching bloggers is not the same as pitching traditional journalists, because every blogger is motivated differently, whereas journalists are generally motivated to write because they’re being paid to do so and with a (usually) clear editorial direction.
Bloggers, on the other hand, work mainly for themselves. (For the purposes of this post, we’re talking about non-corporate bloggers – those that create and maintain blogs for their own personal use, or as a small business in and of itself.) So determining the motivation of an individual blogger is the key to pitching them successfully, because if you can address their needs, you can often get them to write about your product or service.
Tomorrow I will be a part of a panel discussion at the 
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