Disclaimer: Not every blogger is journalist. In fact, there's really only a handful — respectively of course, since there are now more than 126 million blogs circulating the Interwebs — of top-notch, well-read and well-respected blogs and bloggers that fall into this category.

Whether you want to call them online journalists, media writers or curators of content, bloggers have a significant pull. People, lots of people, read them. People trust them. People share them.

Just look at Mashable or Tech Crunch. Both started (coincidentally in 2005) as small, one-person blogs that have grown to be two of the most trusted sites for information in the tech and media industry. Even though Mashable is the only of the two labeled as "independent" there's no denying the power that comes with getting your business, product, service, or what-have-you mentioned on these sites.

Obviously, that's an exaggerated example, but the point is to show just how influential blogs can be on people's lives. If you're smart, you're not going to let that influence go to waste. Enter the blogger outreach campaign.

Blogger outreach is one of the latest methods creeping into marketing and PR strategies. It's about targeting the most online influential people in your industry and partnering with them to get some exposure about your business or your brand. Thanks to the power of social media and RSS feeds, your brand doesn't just appear on one site: It has the potential to get tossed around the social media-sphere and picked up on a number of different sites, making more people aware of you and bringing more valuable links back to your website.

Blogger outreach isn't without its controversy. Some say it's the blatant corporate advertising seeping into one of the last remaining unmonitored channels of information we have. Even more say it's shady practice paying bloggers, whether that's in actually cash money or free products or services, to write some gushing about your business. Both are relevant concerns. But both of which can also be mediated. Good bloggers are transparent about if something was sponsored or advertised. Good bloggers are going to write their honest opinion about your business, regardless of whether you compensated them or not. Those are the ones that you want to partner with.

To learn how to sift through the ever-expanding number of blogs to find the ones you want your business mentioned in, pop on over to finish this article on Wordstream for ways to build a blogger outreach campaign.