Each week the HubSpot blog honors one company -- the Inbound Marketer of the Week -- that provides a good example of inbound marketing . This week we're focusing on Technorati , which is publishing its State of the Blogosphere survey this week.
OK, marketers, here's a pop quiz: Suppose you build a web-based product used by serious bloggers. What's the best way to get their attention?
Spam them with email? Nope.
Fly across the country to drink expensive vodka with them at conferences? Uh-uh.
Buy access to slow databases so you can send them junk mail? Wrong, again.
This week Technorati, the blog search engine and advertising network, showed us how it's done.
They published their annual State of the Blogosphere report, an analytical look at the blogging landscape that's getting a lot of attention from bloggers.
The report itself is very interesting. It reveals the global nature of the blogging (Technorati tracks blogs in 81 languages), the increasing permanence of blogging (most bloggers surveyed had been blogging for an average of three years), an extremely heterogeneous range of content and much, much more.
The reaction to the report is even more interesting. TechCrunch wrote about it , questioning its finding that the mean annual revenue for bloggers with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month is $75,000, as did Fred Wilson . ReadWriteWeb also wrote about the survey , publishing a long piece that included a critique of the survey's conclusion that blogging is now mainstream. Those are the pieces I stumbled upon yesterday morning. There are a lot more.
Despite a few questions from top bloggers, Technorati's survey is a fantastic piece of inbound marketing. Instead of spending gobs of money interrupting bloggers, they created a meaty piece of content that lots of bloggers are digging their teeth into. It's earning the site a slew of new inbound links from influential sites (this will increase their search engine rankings), and their name is being discussed as a source of fresh new data about the blogosphere. This enhances their reputation as blogging experts.
So what are the key lessons from Technorati's survey?
(1) Create Unique Content -- Bloggers gravitate to new content like Technorati's survey. They want to publish fresh information, especially fresh information they can comment on. Surveys are perfect because there's a lot of data and many possible angles.
(2) Create Lots of Content -- Technorati launched its survey on Monday and is publishing a new piece of it every day this week. That's a lot of material for bloggers to link to and discuss.
(3) Be Edgy -- Bloggers are like lawyers -- they love to argue and pick nits. If they have nothing to disagree with, they'll have nothing to write about. By publishing slightly controversial data, Technorati gives bloggers something to discuss.
(4) Give Shout Outs -- The Technorati survey mentions, links to and features many of the bloggers they surveyed. People like being mentioned, and often reciprocate.
Do you know of a company that should be the Inbound Marketer of the Week? Suggest it in the comments. If we use it we'll send you a HubSpot t-shirt.
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