Last night I met three other bloggers at the Publicity Club of New England’s “Blogger Relations for PR Pros” event.

You can read the Tweet stream to see some of the questions and comments. The questions were really good and everyone was engaged.

It was good for me to get out and meet other bloggers and to hear what PR pros are trying to accomplish. The one thing I learned, that wasn’t brought up at the meeting, is this: When you’re pitching bloggers, you definitely need a strategy.

You need to determine what your news is and which type of blogger you should be pitching. A huge difference exists between a blogger at a news agency or publication and someone like me. The news agency blogger needs content all day long. This person is following Twitter all day looking for trends and breaking news.

Someone like myself, on the other hand, needs a post or two a week — or maybe even less than that. I’m definitely not on Twitter all day because if I were, I’d never get any work done. My blogging objective isn’t to post breaking news.

To be successful at pitching bloggers, you definitely need to take this into account when developing your strategy and your objectives.

The panel, of which I was a part, featured four bloggers: two from actual news agencies, a food blogger who blogs at night after her day job, and myself — a crazy busy marketing consultant who blogs when I can squeeze it in.

All of us love blogging. All of us want to feature great content and great stories.

But all of us have different objectives and focus and needs, which is why it pays to develop a strategy first. This doesn’t have to be time consuming or even difficult. You’ll want to answer the following questions:

• What is the real news and who is our target audience?
• Why is this news important to them and what benefit is it to them to read it?
• What action (if any) do we want them to take once they read our news?
• Who are the bloggers and reporters in our space who might find this news of interest and who either reach or influence our audience? What is the best way to contact them? (This doesn’t have to be a huge list to be effective, by the way.)
• What will constitute success and how will we measure it?

That’s it.

Thank you to the New England Publicity Club (@PubClubofNE) for having me as a guest, and thank you to my fellow panelists, Jason Keith (@jaykeith), Rachel L. Blumenthal (@blumie), and Greg Gomer (@sliggity). This was one of the better events I’ve attended, mostly because I learned a lot, plus I came away with a great deal of respect for bloggers and PR pros alike.

And a special thank you to Jennifer McDowell, my rep at BusinessWire, who rescued me. I left my wallet at home; she graciously loaned me the cash to get out of the parking lot.

Bloggers (well-known and not so well-known) are prime influencers in your market. Although a blogger may not use your product or service, he or she may track influential trends, companies and events. Get on a blogger’s radar — and follow a few simple rules — and you can easily build a relationship and garner some favorable press.

So how do you win the ear of influential bloggers in your market? I put this question to Mary Sullivan of SHIFT Communications, a PR firm with offices in Boston, San Francisco and New York.

Sullivan is a senior account executive with the firm and the only PR person whose emails land in my Gmail Priority Inbox — which is saying a lot. I receive dozens of pitches each week, all of which end up in the “everything else” part of my inbox, which is basically the “delete without reading” section.

(Priority Inbox is Gmail’s relatively new tool that sorts your emails, separating the most important from the rest, based on your usage patterns. It’s what has motivated me to provide quality, targeted content — but that’s another post!)

According to Sullivan, your messages have to be targeted and genuine to get a blogger’s attention — as most of us are great BS detectors and can spot a “dash and blast” email a mile away. Sullivan recommends that you use whatever tools you have to customize each message to each individual blogger.

Yes, this means you actually have to get to know individual bloggers.

Because individual pitches take more time, Sullivan makes sure she’s cultivating the right bloggers. In deciding whom to pitch, she reads each blogger’s most recent posts and selects (or not) based on what she sees.

When she finds a blogger she wants to engage, her account team follows the blogger’s posts and looks for opportunities to comment and add value. Over time, she and the blogger develop a mutually beneficial relationship: She adds value to the blog by engaging in conversation, providing information, and even (indirectly) generating blog topic ideas. In return, the blogger learns more about the products or services Sullivan promotes and may choose to write about them.

Sullivan prefers Twitter, blogs and LinkedIn as relationship building tools for her B2B clients over Facebook.

What methods have you tried to win the attention of bloggers? What’s worked and what hasn’t? Leave your comment below.

Full disclosure: Neither Mary Sullivan or SHIFT Communications asked me to write this article nor was I paid to do so. Eloqua is SHIFT’s client. I have written and Tweeted about Eloqua’s content in the past because I think they produce content that’s relevant and helpful to marketers. (Especially loved their Wikipedia Grande Guide.)