Guest Article by Alan Goldfarb, wine journalist and media consultant
With apologies to Lettie Teague’s recent column of March 29, Wall Street Journal
I must be blogger No. 1451, according to Lettie Teague’s latest count of the number of wine bloggers out there. I attended the Wine Blogger’s Conference last year in Portland, Oregon. Given my media credentials, they put me all the way in the back of the conference hall which was inconvenient, but not as scary or difficult as it was getting to my hotel room in Gresham.
Anyway, I got there, I got to taste a lot of wine (some of which I stuffed into my computer bag), and got to meet a lot of you folks, the movers and shakers of the wine industry. I never had so much attention paid to me, at least not since December 2012, when I began writing my blog which I call “Freeloading in Wine Country”.
People. You’ve gotta pay more attention to vetting these bloggos; and by that I don’t mean making a special trip to your veterinarian. If you want to get your name out there in the blogosphere, you’ve got to quality online writers (just not me). To ignore them is to miss out – big time – to what’s happening out there, apropos the media. That’s not to say you should overlook the traditional guys (and you already know who they are. They’re the ones who make the big bucks whilst I struggle making about $15.75 a week writing Freeloading).
When you do vett us, look at the content of our writing. How often do we post? And most important, how many followers, hits, and readers we have. Me? I have two people who even bother to open their computers to look at site every so often – my mom and dad – and they have one machine between them, a Commodore Pet. But maybe since I’ve been to the Bloggers Conference, you’ll begin to read me now, too; and even send me samples. Thanks for the invite to the conference and all that free food and wine. Ergo, the name of my blog.