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shown. Trim the results further and get more targeted by changing
the topic as well. These features may come in handy when you
re
looking for a person who manages a blog that has many readers
and that has posts talking about your client
'
s brand. After finding
those individuals, you can proceed to contact them through e-mail
to find out if they are interested in writing about your client
'
'
snew
microsite.
ALERT!
When contacting a blog owner about potentially writing a piece about,
or including a link to, your client
s new microsite, always be up front
and honest about the fact that you work for the advertising agency that
created the site (if you created the site on your own and don
'
tworkfor
an agency, you should still inform them as to who you are). Not only is
it better business to be honest about such things, but also the blog
owner will appreciate that honesty and will be more likely to want
to help you out. If you decide against informing the blog owner about
who you are, you run a high risk of him figuring it out later down the
line. If that happens, not only will he probably remove the story/link,
but you can bet he will never trust you again after that point. Addition-
ally, it could end up completely reversing the blog owner
'
s thinking
about your client.
'
In addition to contacting other blog owners, you can also write
to your own blog to help promote the new microsite. For example,
I maintain a blog in which I talk about Flash Platform
-
related
topics and one of the things I
ve blogged about in the past is
Flash-based projects that my employer has launched (regardless of
if I personally worked on it or not). Although my intention is
simply to share the work with the online community, there have
been times when people have read my blog, visited a site I wrote
about, and subsequently wrote about the site on their own blog.
From that point, this scenario can very easily turn into the classic
“
'
I shared it with two friends, they shared it with two friends, those
friends each shared it with two friends, and so on
scenario. With
that, you can see how it can spread quickly without much effort on
anyone
”
'
s part. As a matter of fact, it
'
s that virus-like spreading that
gives it the name
“
viral marketing.
”
Targeting Specific Blogs
Another way to advertise your microsite on blogs is by actually
targeting them individually. The difference between using a con-
textual network and using a blog-advertising specialist such as
Blogads (www.blogads.com) is that you can choose which blogs
your ads will appear on. You can start out by sorting through a
list of highly visible and influential blogs and then you can
