One of our largest tasks for the last 2-3 weeks has been contacting bloggers to get the word out about Edit Huddle and compel them to sign up for beta testing. We've currently segmented our audience into 3 sectors: Republican blogs, health research blogs, and female blogs. We decided upon these sectors based on the response we got from our initial probes of the market. There are hundreds and hundreds of blogger niches, and Technorati's State of the Blogosphere was helpful in giving us an idea of growing blogger demographics. At the outset, we reached out to a diverse mix of bloggers: college admissions blogs, foreign bloggers, mommy bloggers, tech bloggers, politics bloggers. For each of our 3 sectors, we had an early adaptor agree to beta test: Guns.com (Republican), Sportsmedresearch.blogspot.com (health research), and various mommy bloggers (female). Guns.com is a particularly significant tester to have on board, with 200,000 monthly unique visitors. Once we got these testers on board, we spun out along 3 axes, contacting similar bloggers: gun owner interest blogs, medicine and health blogs, and female bloggers with a large female audience.
A tactic that I’ve found extremely helpful in reaching out is going to the blogroll of beta testers to find new blogs. This gives me a good way to begin my email—explaining that I came to their blog via a peer blog linking to them that they’re likely to know. Similarly, I mention a recent post of the blogger’s that I liked or found useful. The idea is to make the email seem more personalized and less like a blast or spam email. Additionally, if they know that a peer blog is testing the tool, they’re more likely to sign up for the beta as well. This is social proof in action. It’s also advantageous to us because 2 blogs that link to one another are likely to share some readers, and the more we saturate similar blogs with our tool, the more likely we are to gain active users of the Edit Huddle tool. If I saw a new utility like Edit Huddle on one blog I read, I might not pay much attention to it, but when it’s on three of them, I’m more apt to check it out.
While the majority of the people we’ve reached out to can be slotted into one of the three categories I mentioned, we have also ventured into other sectors, in order to have breadth as well as depth. We have some professional blogs (http://www.webworkerdaily.com, http://younggogetter.com), some marketing blogs (http://www.ducttapemarketing.com, http://www.nonprofitmarketingblog.com), and even an inquiry from the largest blogging platform in the world. All told, we have 25 blogs on deck for the Edit Huddle beta. We plan to continue pursuing bloggers along our three prongs as we build more traction, and we will also the test the interest of other blog sectors.
