Over at DoshDosh Maki has a great article on using a prospect list for bloggers called The Smart Way to Get Traffic and Links: Creating a Prospect List for Bloggers. In it he covers ways to prospect popular bloggers with the objective of getting recognition from them and, hopefully, traffic. He explains it like this:

The primary reason for having a bloggers prospect list is to gradually get the blogger in question to send you qualified traffic or recommend you to his or her audience, thereby improving your business or personal brand.

A prospect list is an intentional system developed to help you enhance the ability to get a favorable response from specific bloggers on the list. You can determine the amount of time or energy to be spent on each prospect, according to its value as well as its relationship to you.

Read the whole article, it’s excellent advice.

I like his ideas on this and I think they’ll work well in most cases. But as I thought about it, I then thought of my earlier article, Got A New Web Site? Go for the Long Tail. What if you put the long tail strategy into play with your prospecting? And where would you get a list of prospects?

My idea was that there is a long tail of bloggers looking for recognition in every post by Maki, John Chow, and elsewhere on the A-List. They’re all hungry for recognition and are usually a whole lot easier to contact, aka prospect, than a famous blogger who gets many requests for their attention every day. That list is, of course, the comments on these blogs. That’s the long tail prospect list.

My strategy is to work through this list, find blogs where I can leave meaningful comments and do so. Bear in mind that I’m not trying to sell them on the idea of sending me traffic. What I’m trying to establish is a mutually profitable relationship between our sites. It’s simple, old fashioned, business networking taken onto the Internet.

The problem is that the numbers are greater and that more organization is needed with a larger prospect list vs. a smaller one. I’m certainly going to look into Maki’s suggestion of NetVibes but I’m open to checking out other ideas too.

Am I giving away a secret with this idea? I don’t think so. What do you think?

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