Here are the steps I take:

1.

Round up the competition sites. At least 3-5.

2.

Go to: http://tools.seobook.com/link-tools/backlinks/backlinks.php and type in each of the competition sites one by one.

3.

See who linked to the competition and try to get a link back from there.

That's so obvious, yet I never would have thought of doing that in a million years! Thanks.

I've never had much success with this. Can anyone who has comment on how they approach the blogs? Maybe even a copy of a successful email sent to the bloggers?

Hi,

I recently read your article entitled "Where's the Money in Casual Web Game Development?". Our firm, Plura Processing, provides a really easy way for online games to make money through grid computing. If a game developer embeds Plura on his site, we will pay him up to $2600/month for every 1000 concurrent users. This revenue source is a completely new and incremental source of money for game sites, which means it does not have to replace other revenue sources, like advertising.

We entered beta a few months ago and currently have a handful of online games as affiliates, including the game you highlighted in your article, Desktop Tower Defense. When people come to these sites to play games, a Java applet is initiated, which connects the user's computer to our grid computing network. Our customers use that computing power for a variety of fascinating problems.

A game site owner just has to include 1 line of iframe code in the HTML body to use Plura. An example of this is:

<iframe src="http://ourserver.com?affiliate_id=xxx&cpu=0.7 scrolling="no" frameborder="0" width="150px" height="100px"></iframe>

The parameters you see in that code can be adjusted, so site owners have pretty much complete control over how Plura is run.

We've designed our applet to be very lightweight and secure. It follows and is restricted by the Java sandbox model (http://java.sun.com/sfaq), so it doesn't touch anything on the user's computer and runs completely in memory. We understand that player perception may be a challenge, but we feel the security and control we provide to site owners helps mitigate this.

I can share a lot more detail with you if GigaOm is interested in discussing this more. You can go to http://www.pluraprocessing.com for more info. Because we're currently in beta, we're working with site owners on an invite-only basis, but we do consider people that are interested in Plura and would be a good fit for us.

We feel that Plura is a great opportunity for game developers to boost their revenue and profitability. We would also love to hear what the GigaOm community has to say about us, considering your focus on computing technologies. If GigaOm is interested in discussing Plura, please let me know - thanks!

---------

N.B. Keep in mind that some of the technology has changed since then (Plura now focuses on desktop apps).. also, I now work for Plura's sister company, 80legs.

P.S. This email resulted in this article: http://gigaom.com/2008/10/27/more-money-i-game-developers-wi...

Plura sounds pretty cool. I had the vague notion a while ago that society could benefit by somehow using games to solve real-world problems (somewhat like on Stargate Universe). I'm glad to see this is being explored.

I like the idea too. Luis Von Ahn has done some work on tricking people to do useful things through play. 2 examples I can think of are Google Image Labeler(http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/), in which people provide useful metadata about random images on the web, and reCaptcha (http://recaptcha.net/), where captcha solutions are used to digitize parts of books where OCR fails.

Show you read the blogs.

Show you actually read the blogs. (Comment on them, get to know the different authors, etc.)

Identify a writer (someone recently said to pick a junior writer - this is probably a good tip!) and contact them directly, rather than emailing the entire blog. If you can't grab them directly then email the blog team but 10 busy people reading a mailing list/filter with 100 messages a day means you really gotta keep it short and sweet.

Depending entirely on the blog, the blogger, and what you're pitching: Keep it short and to the point. Make it newsworthy. Make it interesting and relevant to their readers. Point out why. Give the bloggers something - exclusive preview, beta access, free trials/discount codes to give away. Make yourself available to talk further. Point to a lowdown page about your product/news item that the blogger can link to. Don't sales pitch them to death.

Bloggers are humans, they have needs (pageviews and daily quota), they have access points (Twitter, etc) and by understanding them and what they want, rather than just focusing on what you want, you can get far. Another approach is to sweeten the bloggers by going to events etc and make yourself known to them as an authority/someone to watch, maybe dropping them the odd line about stuff NOT your own; then when you launch, they'll jump on it like rabid monkeys.

Great Question.

I use delicious to find tags for blogs that would like to write about my product.

I wanted to write about going after the mainstream press. Why just focus on bloggers?

1. Do not use a PR firm. If you are on HN you are probably a startup with out funding. They will charge you an arm and a leg. You can do better on your own. Be passionate about your product - people will respond more to that, then anything else.

2. Make your product sexy. Sexy sells. A new way of using mobile phones is more interesting than a new DB model. If it is not an inherently sexy product, make sure it looks professional. People want to write about companies that 'feel' professional.

3. Come up with a story. "we are two guys who sold baseballs for 3 years and worked on this in our spare time." "the recession hit, and we both lost our jobs, and this was the result."

4. Reach out to reporters. Every newspaper/magazine/tv news show now lists reporters emails. Reach out to them; tell your story. Find them, and buy them a drink. They are often young and looking for cool stories.

5. Network your face off. Go to places where new startups launch, and launch there. Meet everyone. Get business cards. Tell people you are looking for press contacts. You should be doing this stuff anyway.

6. Use http://www.helpareporter.com/ Journalists need stories to write about. They need new (sexy) material. Craft your story to fit theirs - don't lie, but if you started in a recession and they are talking about new businesses in the recession, make your story fit.

7. Leverage your friends in PR / make friends with people in PR. If you are based in a major city, if you went to college, if you know anyone in marketing - you have a friend or friend of a friend in PR. Leverage them to write Press Releases (which I don't think work in the beginning) and to send you out the emails they get looking for stories.

8. Make an awesome product - at the end of the day, if your product sucks, nothing else you do will matter. No one will write anything about it (unless your FB)

Ok, just a bunch of quick thoughts from a guy who has had a little luck with this.

In the past, I have emailed blogs that have just written a story about a topic relevant to my company.

For example, when GigaOm wrote a store called "Where's the money in casual gaming?", I emailed them saying "Hey, we've got a great way to monetize casual games." Their staff picked up the email and forwarded it to one of the writers.

Since then, we have relied on a PR firm to get press. It costs money, but it can be very helpful. We are fortunate enough to have found a local, well-connected, and relatively affordable firm.

Go to Alltop.com, Select your industry. Bam, I just saved you hours and hours. Tip me.

Don't just rely on Technorati. My blog has an engaged subscriber base of 20000+ yet we do verrrry poorly on Technorati (somewhere in the 5-6k range, I think) because we don't many inbound links from other blogs ;-) Googling for "[your topic] blog" and "[your topic] blogs" will bring up even more options.

I have had an easier time with applications for the Mac then websites. There doesn't seem to be the website version of MacUpdate, rumor sites, or Apple Downloads. Maybe it is the difference between blog and community site.

How exactly would this work? The idea of doing a macupdate for web apps is somewhat intriguing, but with rolling updates, most web apps don't publish a version anywhere.

The delta is a lot less (webapps still add new features), but I think you would need to go the gdgt.com route and add a lot of search / categorization and community features.

You were downvoted because you are intentionally misusing HN. Get a delicious account. I type "g delicious ENT" to bookmark a site with delicious; it couldn't be easier.

I will admit that I agree with your "I can afford to lose the points" sentiment. I always read the -4 and +20 comments first, so when I get downmodded to -4 it means that I get more eyeballs than I would at +1. An occasional joke that gets modded to +60 means that I can afford to troll as often as I like.

</cynical observation>

(Incidentally, you and I have the lowest average post score among the top 30 users. I think I just made a friend :)

I saw that there are a lot of people used to post just to take track of discussions, like some form of bookmarking. This is especially a plague on reddit. What about opening a delicious account? It's better both for you and for the community.

What about just bookmarking it? I don't understand how this approach is any better.

It also causes comment spam and it's clearly not sustainable at scale. If everyone interested in a comment thread posted there just to be able to find it later, I think we'd quickly find ourselves buried in bookmark comments.

Since you are the creator of the story, you could also settle for going to your list of submissions.

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vaksel