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Identifying good bloggers

On LinkedIn one of my community groups is discussing how to find "good" bloggers. I'll share some of the ideas below from that discussion. I'm curious what this group thinks: where do you go to find great bloggers in your clients' industry(ies), where and how do you search out for the best blogs by your peers?

Blog search and blog review sites

Google, Blog Search, Technorati, BlogPulse (by Nielsen), Best of the Web, LeapFish, IceRocket, Trendpedia, BlogScope.net, Twingly, and blogcatalog.

Microblogs

TweetScan, Topsy, CrowdEye, TwitScoop, and DailyRT, etc.

Social-media sharing, recommendation & aggregation sites

Digg, Delicious,Reddit, Sphinn, and StumbleUpon.

Discussionboards

BoardReader, BoardTracker and Omgili.

Social-media search and "realtime" search engines
SocialMention, OneRiot, Scoopler, Collecta, Wowd and LeapFish.

Subscription-based (paid) searching

One person also mentioned that they use Radian6 "so we can find exactly who mentions what topics, and more importantly access dashboards... to show who actually gets comments back, re-tweets, linked-to, etc."

Tags: Blog, LinkedIn, Rankings

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Permalink Reply by Emily Roemmich on July 1, 2010 at 8:54am

I think there are many definitions of "good" bloggers. I know in the mom/food blog niche, a lot of people associate "good" with rank (technorati, alexa, google pr, etc) and recognition (featured on top news sites, Nielsen, etc). I think that is a little skewed because a lot of mom bloggers are just review/giveaway sites and most of their visitors are coming just for the giveaways- not for content. I consider a "good" blogger someone who has interesting content, updates frequently, and who interacts with their readers.

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Permalink Reply by Dan Johnson on July 17, 2010 at 1:24pm

In my mind, search is just the first part of that. You don't need Radian6 or similar pricey tools if you can work with blogsearch.google.com and technorati together with RSS feeds. Most of the top bloggers in that industry probably also tweet, so find a few of them who are active with significant large followings. Then it's a matter of checking out each of those blogs, pull them into your RSS feed and you'll quickly get a feel for who the better ones are. Do they publish entries on a regular schedule? And hit the actual blog pages to see what comments they're getting, and who's making those comments. Engage them there and on Twitter if appropriate.

This is where it gets subjective: do the views of this blogger seem consistent with your client's position or more contrary? As you scan their blogs, you may find some who are experts in their field but simply can't write very well at all. I'd probably pass on those because their deficiencies might reflect poorly on your brand. The better bloggers will often have guest posts from their peers in the industry who may also be worth reviewing. Good luck with it.

Identifying good bloggers

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