Using Google to Target Bloggers & the Mainstream Media with Search Queries

Just how one does market research to see how competitive a marketplace is, you can also do market research to view how important some ideas have been historically.

Google Trends shows historical search trends and Google's experimental history search will show published pages based on associated reference time. Google News also allows you to search by timeframe.

Services such as the Yahoo! Buzz Index show what is hot right now. Social bookmarking sites, social news sites, and meme trackers show what stories are hot right now, and were hot in the recent past. When you want to gain access to the media, use the above sources to research what they thought was important in the past. Either look at your exact field, or look to a more mature market to predict what issues will become important in your market. You are basically going to target an idea to create what some people term as link bait. Link baiting background available here.

Once you get an idea, spend whatever is necessary to create a piece of content (text, video, whatever) that is the best piece of content on that topic. It can be history of x, don't get scammed by y, or z do it yourself tips. Heavily integrate that content into your site's internal link structure, and make no attempt to directly profit from it...simply make it easy to link at or want to reference. Consider this content as a cheap marketing cost.

Ask a few friends what they think of your content's title. Ensure it sounds authoritative and/or buzz-worthy (one or both, depending on your target market and story idea). Promote your article to friends, email a few popular bloggers who might like the story, and if you know someone with powerful social media accounts ping them too.

Ensure your site appears credible.

If you are in a new field or have a trusted domain doing all the above might be enough to garner top rankings. If you have a new site in an old field there still is hope, but you may need to create video content that you can post on sites like YouTube or venture into PPC ads. :)

If you buy PPC ads use my keyword list generator or a similar tool to generate a list of various permutations of the targeted phrase. Create an ad campaign with ad groups and ad copy for each relevant keyword basket.

I did this for an affiliate site that is less than a year old, and bid 50 cents a click on AdWords. I was the only advertiser for most of the targeted keywords, got a 25% ctr for high volume search terms at 8 cents a click.

Some members of the media also contacted us wanting face time for television and national radio exposure. As the site ages and gets more exposure we will get a lot more of that.

One could use the same idea to target key bloggers by using AdSense's site targeting function on their blogs.