Promote Your Campaign in the Blogosphere

Technorati
Google Blog Search
If you don't find ample blogs in those 2, consider a simple Google search
Additionally, you'll find that each blog has a "blog roll," which is a list of blogs they like. More often than not if the blog is relevant to your campaign, most of the blogs in their blog roll are going to be relavent as well.
Finally, check out The Point's del.icio.us account for the blogs we've bookmarked to help you promote campaigns. We've tagged each bookmark with relevant keywords, which you can see a list of on the right & sort by category. So if your campaign is about the global warming, search for the blogs tagged with terms like environment, green, or global warming.

In reaching out to the blogosphere you're first hoping to find bloggers who may consider writing a post or linking to your campaign, but if their contact information is unavailable or it they won't write a post, you can always leave a comment on any posts relevant to your campaign topic.
In order to quickly and efficiently reach as many blogs in the right way in the shortest amount of time, we recommend organizing all the blogs you find into blogs where you can only comment, and blogs where the bloggers contact info is listed.
You can do this with your browser's bookmarking, or we suggest creating an account with the social bookmarking site del.icio.us to tag the blogs you find with tags like "comment only" or "contact available" to help you distinguish.
Only save the blogs that look like the audience would be interested in your campaign.

Once you know which blogs you are going to contact and whether you're going to leave a comment or email the blogger directly, go through and do all the emails first.
Ideally, its great to be able to react to a specific post of theirs & relate it to your campaign.
Politely recruit them to support your campaign in whatever way they are able. Some suggestions you can make include: > * Write a post about it
Link to it
Add the campaign badge
Link to your campaign page withing the comment.

Sometimes, a well-placed and timely comment can be even more effective than getting through to the blogger themselves. If you are one of the first comments on a fresh post that gets lots of attention, you could drive a lot of traffic to your campaign. If you are comment #78 on a two-month old post, you're much less likely to reach anyone - but its always worth the try.
The key to leaving a comment is that you have to contribute to the ongoing discussion with thoughtful insight. If you're just leaving your link anywhere & everywhere without contributing to the discussion, your comment is likely to be viewed as spam, and may be deleted or ridiculed. Read the previous comments, find a way to integrate the ongoing discussion into what you have to say about your campaign.
On many blogs, you'll be asked to enter a name and a url in addition to your comment. For the url, leave the link to your campaign page. Keep in mind that if you can, within the comment you still want to provide a link to your campaign.

changed July 1, 2008

The Point Campaign Manual