Marketing to bloggers can do wonders for your search engine rankings and PR efforts. Inbound links from blogs improves your Google ranking, which increases traffic from search engines. Exposure from bloggers can land a company's website on a social bookmarking site like Digg or Del.icio.us, driving thousands of new visitors to the site. A newsletter, white paper, or book review by an influential blogger could generate new leads for your services.

But bloggers are a more fickle bunch than most traditional media people. Marketing to them appropriately can yield great results; however, approaching them the wrong way can backfire.

As someone with a well-trafficked blog and a high Google rank, I get bombarded with marketing requests every day. "Your site would be great for my SEO, would you please link to it?" "You obviously love food. I would love to send you some of my ice cream for dogs and you could write about it if you wanted to." (Both real examples.)

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