Pitching to Indian bloggers – how many are worth pitching to?
By Editor on Jul 3, 2006 in mediarelations
I have been writing about blogger relations as an essential PR tool in these days of media 2.0. But the question was how many serious blogs are in India that command big readerships? There are blogs on stock markets that top the list of Indianbloggers.com – business category (By the way, this IndiaPR blog is hovering between No. 4 & 5 currently). Some of them from the top 10 are Interim Thoughts, Sensex, Rtotla, S&Y Market View India, Investment guru, AC Investor blog, Stock Picking-Art or Science, and Life is beautiful (Get the links for these sites from the above link). Last seen, the No.1 in the list, Interim Thoughts had received 1,140 unique hits in the last reset (read that: one week). Is that number good enough for a pitch? You decide. My point is if you are doing any investor relations for your clients, these blogs are worth a visit. Also, in this list, there is New Projects India, if you are want to reach out to business associates and investors.
How about the other industries? Check out the other categories like food&drink, technology, computers, health, etc. Ring any bells for your clients in these sector? It does to me 
Another directory of Indian blogs is India Blogstreet.
How many Indian bloggers are on the blogosphere today? To get a quick summary, get to bLogic. There, Mitesh Vasa says there are a total of 40,128 Indian bloggers. (Only people who have declared India as their country on their Blogspot profiles).
He has put an interesting analysis out of this figure:
Indian bloggers are mostly from the Technology sector – about 20% of them. But students are not far behind, forming 16%. If we consider the 4% from Education as students, then they too are 20% (but note, Education sector can include lecturers, staff, etc.). The number of people not declaring any industry is 6492 (thats 16%). Technology: 8059 (20%)Students: 6557 (16.3%)Engineering: 5125 (12.8%)Education: 1711 (4.2%)Internet: 1613 (4%)Consulting: 1454 (3.6%)Communications/Media: 1291 (3.2%)An interesting thing to observe is that globally, there were 81,000 bloggers from the Technology sector and the above figure says 8000 are in India – which means one in every 10 Tech blogger on average is in India.
Just remember the above statistics is from Blogger only, there could be more from typepad and other Indian blog service providers like Sulekha and Rediff. Not to forget those who are hosting blogs from their own domains.
Now suppose we manage to find our target bloggers from all these entire lists, how do we start? I have a great PR resource, which I have using constantly. It’s called the NewPR Wiki by Constantin Basturea. You will find all the tips and advice on pitching bloggers as a PR exercise. (There is also a project called Open Source PR project in this site, which has just jolted me completely. I’ll write aboout it next time.)
Technorati tags: PR, Public Relations, India Public Relations, Media Relations, Open Source PR
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On Feb 2, 2007, mohammed said:
You presented a very thought thru point.But how many of these 8059 tech bloggers you mentioned would be active?..Just a fraction.Now again how many would be professional and good enough to pitch a corporate client..? a decimal..!!
I reckon corporate blogging is still in a nascent stage in India and its way too early in the day to cut the cake.
Had an international online client who recently asked my client to leverage TA 18-30 class A in India.I didnt suggest them blogging.Let it catch up as it will.Its too early and risky now.
On Feb 2, 2007, hobbithob said:
Hi mohammed, thanks for your comments. Yes blogging in India is still catching up. However that ‘decimal’ are making some noise.We should not counsel blogging to every client, but selectively.