Blogger Outreach: London Cyclist

Speedy Spotlight with Andreas Kambanis, author of the London Cyclist blog who has also created a host of cycling apps including Bike Doctor, London Bike Rides and Caveman Feast. Andreas spoke to us about how the subject of cycling is catching up on the blogosphere, why working with marketers is a win-win for brands and bloggers and best practices for PR to follow when pitching to bloggers.

Why should people read your blog? What makes it different? London Cyclist was started in 2007 to cater for the everyday cyclist. This has been an area traditionally ignored by cycling media, yet is the fast growing. With a uniquely friendly approach, it attracts an audience of new cyclists, who go on to learn a lot about great products, cycling events and routes in London.

How do you measure the success of your website? For the numbers, I track the growth of our social media, monthly visitors and subscribers to our newsletter. However, there are also a lot of subtleties that the numbers don’t capture, such as what kind of feedback am I receiving on posts and am I posting about things that really interest me as a commuter cyclist.

What’s your favourite blog and why?  I’ve always been impressed by http://road.cc/ and I try to think where we would be without them as cyclists. They are always there on the pulse of the news. I share links to their content all the time! Even if they did win the bike blog of the year award instead of me – grrr bitter rivalry!

What advice would you give to someone who wants to start a blog? The early overnight success stories and gold rush days of blogging are sadly over. Nowadays, it takes more time and effort to really build a blog audience. If I was to start from scratch now, I’d focus on building relationships with big bloggers in my niche, contributing in any way I can to their site. This would help me build up my audience and get those all important back links from their authority sites.

How do you work with marketers and PRs? I like when marketers use my contact form to get in touch with me with a simple short message that gets straight to the point. That way I can manage the overload of emails I receive. I try to be nice and respond to everyone, even if we can’t work together, but there are limited hours in the day. The ideal scenario for me is a win/win/win. My audience gets something that will really interest them, the advertiser gets to reach out to interested customers and the site makes money so I can keep running it!

 A typical example is a charity such as Cancer Research UK. They contact me, tell me they’re trying to get people to go along to their ride. I suggest we create a blog post, share it on social media and our newsletter and get people to join. They get £5000 of extra funding from my readers that take part. Everyone wins and it’s done in a genuine way!

Who do you work with in brand marketing? PRs? SEOs? Anyone else? I’m always happy to work with SEO’s, PR’s, Kickstarter campaigns, whoever – as long as they have a message that I think my audience wants to hear.

What can marketers do better in working with you? Be genuine, think about the win/win/win and send me a message that fits with my audience. Most of my readers are not avid followers of the Tour de France, but tell me about a cool new bike event taking place in London or a great new bike light and they’ll love it.

 What was your blogging highlight of 2013? In 2012 we published, What can an RAF pilot teach cyclists – just look at that amount of social sharing! In 2013, we published What can cyclists learn after the 5 recent incidents on London’s roads. This is content that it’s crucially important to get out there.