5 Great Marketing Blog Lists And What You Can Learn From Each One

As a marketing blogger with a fairly decent audience, I tend to make it onto a lot of marketing lists. And they are pretty popular these days. Sometimes it seems like each month I get placed on several of these new lists (along with the accompanying requests to include a list to the lists on my sidebar). Recently I got yet another one over the weekend and realized that this tactic is likely to get more and more popular as companies continually try to find ways to connect with prominent bloggers. If you are considering coming up with your own list, you might want to take a look at a few relatively successful marketing lists and what you can learn from each one:

1. Todd Andrlik and the Power 150 – This is probably the ultimate marketing list example, because it led Todd to a partnership with AdAge magazine where his original Power 150 list is now the standard used by the magazine to rank all marketing and advertising blogs worldwide. Early on when many marketers were still trying to build a good metric for influence, Todd created a wieghted system using a combination of factors, from Technorati rank to number of Bloglines subscribers. This led him to a more detailed rating system that was ahead of its time, and now has become the standard for rating marketing and advertising blogs.

The Lesson: Create a truly authoritative way of measuring influence, and let others share it.

2. Guy Kawasaki and AllTop – Guy Kawasaki’s latest entrepreneurial effort is getting a lot of attention among bloggers, in part because he has managed to appeal to the blego (blogger’s ego). Each category of Alltop blogs are chosen by a group of individuals invited by Guy and his team to help select the blogs that should be featured. Once you make it, you have access to a host of great badges to include on your blog, including the one you’ll see on my sidebar which indeed does offer confirmation that I kick ass.

The Lesson: Involve leading thinkers in the development and promotion of your list.

3. Mack Collier and the Viral Garden’s Top 25 Marketing Blogs – Mack has been publishing his list of top marketing blogs for several years now and does get credit for being among the early ones to publish a list of marketing bloggers. He has the added benefit of having a personal connection as an individual with most of the bloggers featured on his list … so as a result the Viral Garden list feels more like a club than pretty much any other marketing blog list out there.

The Lesson: Get to know and build personal relationships with the bloggers on your list.

4. Joe Pulizzi and the Junta42 Content Marketing List – I had a chance to review an early version of Joe Pulizzi’s new book on Content Marketing which will be out in a few months and I share his enthusiasm for the idea that content is the new standard for smart marketing. As part of his site, Joe has created a new metric for rating marketing blogs based on how often the talk about content marketing. As a result, his is one of the few marketing blog lists where you’ll see the order completely shifted around, and new names on the list that are not on every other list.

The Lesson: Find a niche for your list that you can own.

5. Lee Odden and the Biglist Search Marketing Blogs – Lee’s list will likely be one of the most comprehensive you will find anywhere, because the list includes just about every site under the sun that talks about marketing. Instead of ranking all these blogs, the list simply organizes them alphabetically. As a result, it is a less useful list … but makes for brilliant "linkbait" as all the blogs included on the list now know about Lee’s list and several have included the Biglist badge on their blogs.

The Lesson: Create the most comprehensive list possible if your goal is to increase your "link love."