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Wine Retailers and Local Wine Bloggers – an opportunity for both

6 September 2010

I believe a local wine retailer has a huge local advantage over large and online wine retailers in the internet world. There are many ways a wine retailer can take leverage this. One of these is to cooperate with local wine bloggers. Sure they’re not going to be as large as the top wine bloggers I’ve been reviewing. But you have some overlapping interests not the least of which is a similar passion for wine.

How to Rank Wine Blogs – a DIY rough and ready approach

5 September 2010

1. Choose a blog you want to rank yourself against – perhaps it’s one of the top blogs, or just another local wine blogger
2. Go to compete and enter your blog and the other blog address.
3. Go to Open Site Explorer and enter your blog, and then the other blog address.
4. Go to PostRank and add up the last 10 scores for your blog, and then the other blog.
Now you have comparative figures for volume, authority and engagement. You could weight them depending on your priority.

No one knows you? Wine blogs a wine retailer could advertise on

31 August 2010

Wine blog advertising is one way to boost awareness, if that’s your objective. Using Google’s advertising tools the only ones (from my list) are vinography.com and drvino.com. And to be fair they also usually come up near the top of the 15 tools or blog lists I’ve been using. I wanted to make this my advertising recommendation (for free blogs) and yet… half of the rest also accept Google ads. So an initial recommendation is to advertise on these two and do some investigation into the rest.

Social Media Objectives and Wine Blogs

27 August 2010

I’ve created a diagram of the interplay between social media objectives, success metrics, the Paid/Owned/Earned continuum, types of media, and the marketing funnel. In the end I decided that my social media objectives covered the lot: branding, engagement, information gathering, purchase and customer service. Each has its own success metrics. The conclusion is I should start to put wine blogs against objectives rather than have one list.

Wine Blog Traffic – some big differences between blogs

24 August 2010

Estimating traffic volume using Compete. Compete has a 2,000,000 member panel but it’s not completely accurate so I’ve used their ranking system to come up with relative sizes of wine blogs. Wine Library TV, Vinography and Dr Vino do well but I have some gaps in the data because I can’t get data for subdomains. However a pattern is starting to emerge.

Wine Blog Engagement Scores – a surprising result

23 August 2010

PostRank analyzes the “5 Cs” of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting, and clicking. Using this method each wine blog is given a score for their last 10 posts, which is added up to give a total engagement score. The highest possible score would be 100 and I’m impressed with how many are scoring well. The stand out is “another wine blog” with a score of 75 – holy cow they’ve beaten Wine Library TV!

Websites votes for wine blogs

16 August 2010

What I’m looking to do is replicate Google’s successful ranking process to rank wine blogs. SEOmoz offer a free tool called the Open Site Explorer which measures Link Popularity very similar to the way Google does. This tool gives anyone the ability to see external links and their worth to any site or page on the web.

The Ranking Method. I have put the list of 28 wine blogs that I selected from various Blog Search Engines and have sorted them by the SEOmoz Page Authority. The Pour (NYT) and Wine Library TV are clearly at the top with DrVino and Vinography close behind.

Tapping into the Long Tail of Wine Bloggers

6 August 2010

One of the things I’m doing is trying to work out the long tail of bloggers in order to find good writers and audiences for wine retailers. Rand Fish from this SEOmoz video explains some of the background of a way to create content.

Wine Blogger Audience and Blog Quality Factors

6 August 2010

The Social Media Brief, some initial thoughts but only partly completed. By writing a brief I’m forcing myself to set some objectives and specific measures of success. Here are some sections of the brief (I tried to, and still intend to, write): Background, Business Objective, Social Media Objective(s), Target Audience, Success Metrics or KPIs, Deliverables, Budget, Mandatories. Some of this is easy and some needs some more work.

The Top 28 Free Wine Blogs – an initial list based off Blog Search Engines

4 August 2010

An initial list of the top 28 wine blogs for a US wine retailer to be associated with. Used Google Blog Search, PostRank and Yahoo Directory plus some medium authority blog search engines to come up with an initial list for further research. Full list is included here in a Google Doc spreadsheet with all the rankings.

A first, but failed ;), attempt at making a list of the best wine bloggers (for a wine retailer)

2 August 2010

The first step in coming up with the top wine bloggers is to compile an initial list. I want this to be objective and transparent, not subjective or using hidden algorithms. The first attempt at finding sources of these lists include: Google Blog Search, Yahoo Directory, Alexa, Wine Blog Awards ’10 and ’09, Cellarer, Top Wine Blogs, Food & Wine, Ala Wine, Wikio, blogs.com, BlogBridge, Blogged Directory, and Technorati. Here’s the initial results. In short more work needed.

Does a wine blogger’s audience overlap with a wine retailer’s shopper base?

1 August 2010

I’ve been looking into what wine blogs would be best for a wine retailer to be associated with. “Associated with” could mean anything from advertising in their website sidebar to commenting on their posts. I’ve outlined the start of the criteria. It outlines a target audience, initial thoughts on the process and some restrictions.

What do you think are the best wine blogs?

28 July 2010

I’ve been looking into what blogs would be best for a wine retailer to be associated with. “Associated with” could mean anything from advertising, commenting, linking to, inviting to guest post on your own blog (probably paid as many seem to be journalists). Here’s some initial thoughts including the industry’s Wine Blogger Awards.