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Finding Influencers

After you compile lists of bloggers you would like to target, you can begin to break the list down and determine who are the influencers in your niche, including people whom I like to call hidden influencers. Hidden influencers are people that have a large social imprint that doesn't necessarily show up on their blog. For example, some bloggers don't have a lot of commenters on their blog but their Twitter feed is followed by tens of thousands. Here are some ways to determine whether a blogger is an influencer:

• Subscriber count: A lot of bloggers who have large audiences display their subscriber numbers on their blogs. (See Figure 1-2.)
• Comment count: An active community and commentary group on a blog usually shows that the blog has a large readership. Be wary of blogs in which the author interacts with only two or three people. When an author only pays attention to a couple commenters, they usually have a pretty narrow vision. You want to target authors that participate with more people in their audience.

  Figure 1-2: Blog subscriber count.

  

• Alexa/Compete: Alexa (www.alexa.com) and Compete (www.compete.com) measure traffic to a site. They aren't 100 percent accurate, but they do a decent job of giving you a picture of the amount of traffic a site gets. I usually create a column on my list of bloggers where I record either the Compete or Alexa score, and how that ...