The Hartsock Agency

We’re starting to see several different companies including Cision and some new entrepreneurial folks building their own blog contact lists and selling them so I wanted to give my take on these.

I think these lists can be valuable in terms of doing some of the leg work for you and finding good blogs in a certain pitch arena, but they absolutely should not be incorporated into a mass pitch PR list.

The downside to all these “the most exhaustive blogger list” offerings - is that they also portend a giant potential for not using them in the best possible fashion.

If you’re going to purchase these lists, it does not take away from the due diligence and respect you should always employ when reaching out to bloggers, journalists and online publications. Don’t use these lists to do massive same as usual PR spam and I highly encourage you to read each and every blog you’re going to reach out to.

Timesaving? Not really. Respectful to the online world and bloggers? Absolutely, which will serve you much better in the long run.

And if you can’t afford to buy these lists, not to worry. Simply take one hour a day and build your own lists. There’s no magic in any of this! Use sites like Alexa.com, Technorati, you can even use this cool free PageRanker tool for the Google page rankings.

Go ahead and put your own page in there while you’re at it! The higher the page rank on Google the better.

With one caveat! Don’t completely judge a blog by its number on any of these tools. Just because a blog might have thousands of readers, are those the readers who are going to buy your book, and champion it? It depends and that’s why you need to be respectful and do your research.

Despite what all these new “talking heads” on the Web tell you there are no magical shortcuts to building a “tribe” as Seth Godin so aptly calls it.

Also, please keep in mind that the Web itself is full of actionable insight that is free! It’s on all the technology publication sites and has been vetted and created by technology journalists ( I was one for ten years), so before you BUY into all this new information and think you have to PURCHASE things to understand how this all works, take some time and research just as you would if you were purchasing a new car or any other big product!

Don’t take the word of a NEW Web Guru. There’s nothing like good old fashioned research and legwork to find the best answers possible. Be a social media learner (like I am) not a social media expert follower.

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