| HN Mirror

I wrote a chapter in a book on blogging on how to approach this subject (getting bloggers to link to your project). Here's the short version.

* You'll have a better luck pitching things to people who you have a pre-existing relationship for. Your business has a blog. That blog's purpose in life is to generate pre-existing relationships with people similarly situated to your customers (and, relatedly, to talk about what your customers care about). Talk about what they are talking about and link to their posts. Comment on their blogs. Then, when you email them about your project, you don't get sent straight to the spam box.

* Pitch your product as something their readers will be interested in, with a specifically tuned pitch that reminds them that you are a) already trusted by them and b) know what they want. People almost always end up getting links out of me when they send me an email that demonstrates they really have been reading for as long as they say they have.

* Free licenses are the best money you've never had to spend. Give them out liberally.

* Focus on blogs one step up the social pecking order from you. TechCrunch gets probably a thousand emails a day. Bob's File Format Blog probably gets one every three weeks. Guess which one of these is absolutely dying for anyone to pay attention to them? That's right. This gets you a bit of exposure. Gradually work your way up the exposure chain -- after you get X level of renown, start mailing bloggers at X+1 rather than 10 * X. Get mentioned on the blogs that are read by the bloggers you want to influence and you might not even need to mail them at all.