Bloggers can be an important part of your marketing plan. If you use a blog on your company site, hiring a blogger makes sense. Your blog stays regularly updated in a professional manner. And yes, you should absolutely give fair compensation to a writer in this capacity (as you would in any other business writing situation).
But what about when you try to get a blogger to write about you on their own blog? Or when you ask them to do a giveaway of your product? Do you compensate them at that point?
Think about this — do you compensate any PR …read more

Bloggers have a reputation for being a pretty prickly bunch as far as PR and marketing folks are concerned.  I don’t think we’re too much different than other media folks, though we are more likely to broadcast your gaffs to the ends of the Earth–I guess that makes us a scary bunch.
Regardless Cory Doctorow wrote a guest piece in InformationWeek on how to connect with bloggers (in terms of do’s and don’ts) the points are summarized here:
Have a link.
Have a permanent link.
Have a link for everything.
Use real links.
Use links that go to pages.
Flash sites stink.
PDFs stink. It’s not a Web …read more