Micro Persuasion: The Underground Blogosphere

Steve Rubel has an interesting post on bloggers pitching their posts via email in the hope of getting a link.

The Underground Blogosphere is an intricate web of hundreds of thousands of emails that bloggers send to each other every day. In essence, they are "pitching" their latest posts in hopes of getting a link. Sometimes, bloggers are genuinely looking for good feedback, but more often than not all they are just looking for traffic.

Source: Micro Persuasion: The Underground Blogosphere

There are divergent and equally interesting viewpoints in the comments.

Here I want to share my own experience with emailing links:

1. I've done it exactly twice to bloggers, because I blogged about what they had written. (One linked and both responded via email. The one who did not link, and neither was expected to, responded again about a later post via email!)
2. Have also occasionally emailed links to people I know. Mostly these have been ignored, but not the mail itself! (Several attempts to interest my wife, for instance, have completely failed :-)

My point is that there are bloggers (who almost always also read blogs, at least in their own area of interest). And there are other "normal" people, who don't.

The former are interested in links to posts they want to read. So it is fair, if you send them a mail, but only if you genuinely think they would be interested. (There can be no chance of a link, if they aren't interested. And even future possibilities would be closed if your email is put on the blocked senders' list. So it is a self-limiting problem.)

Finally, I've found that most influential, widely read and respected professionals are extremely nice people. And unless provoked to the extreme, are gracious in their response. Steve is one of them.

There is no point in testing their limits. They know how to deal with spam.

Technorati tags: blogosphere, links, traffic, email