Become a professional wine blogger

Not only does wine blogging entail tasting a host of vintages, wine bloggers are in demand; here are some tips to make your wine blog a success.

 

CataVino, an online wine marketing company and organizer of The European Wine Bloggers' Conference, tweeted last month that "Social Media is Changing the Wine World!" and it appears to be the case as the traditionally closed industry has opened up by embracing the direct connection to consumers via transmedia platforms.

"There are people roaming the wine blogger conference looking to hire the right wine blogger to work for them. The industry is looking at the blogging community as a recruiting ground," wrote Tom Wark, a partner at Wark Communications and wine public relations specialist, on his daily wine blog Fermentation, highlighted by CataVino in their "links from around the web for the week of July 26, 2010."   

Wark was referring to the sold-out North American Wine Bloggers' Conference that took place June 25 in Walla Walla, Washington.

Its sister event, the European Wine Bloggers' Conference in Vienna, Austria, takes place October 22-24 (bloggers €154.50 and non-bloggers €307.50) and could be your chance to get your blog picked up.

"There is a strong sense of community among bloggers," Wark added, so if you would like to become a professional wine blogger the best thing to do is get familiar with leading wine blogs. There are hundreds of international wine blogs in a variety of languages that are ranked by differing criteria.

The blog Enobytes.com recommends visiting wine blog ranking lists including:

Local Wine Events blog list: http://www.localwineevents.com/blogs/blog_list.php

Wikio: http://www.wikio.com/blogs/top/wine

AlaWine: http://www.alawine.com/wine-blog-rankings.html

Alltop: http://wine.alltop.com/

Alexa: http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category/Top/Home/Consumer_Information/Food_and_Drink/Wines

Each uses "different methods and techniques for generating lists, and I strongly recommend using more than one source to find all of the great wine blogs on the World Wide Web," including country-specific Google.com searches using the terms "wine blogs " or "winery blog,"  explained a writer at Enobytes. 

AlaWine also began ranking wine tweeters based on "a mix of quantities and ratios of followers and friends, updates and those with links, retweets and retweeted, references to and from others, and Twitter lists (with some exclusions for noise, off-topic and similar factors)," here is a list of the top 100 to follow: http://www.alawine.com/topwinetweeters.shtml

Now all you have to do is find your niche in the wine world and get started blogging before October's European Wine Bloggers' Conference in Vienna. http://winebloggersconference.org/europe

Unfortunately competition might be fierce given "700,000 watch wine clips online monthly and 7,000 individuals tweet about wine daily," according to a wrap-up clip from CataVino's Access Zone at the London International Wine Fair in May.