It's Day 2 of the new Affiliate Management Days conference and I'm stepping into a session called How to Effectively Reach & Engage Bloggers presented by Jenny Williams of Skimlinks.

Here are my major takeaways from this session:

• Skimlinks has over 20,000 publishers that use the Skimlinks technology to help monetize their blogs and content sites leveraging "skim words".
• Who is a blogger? There are hundreds of thousands of blogs about every topic you can imagine (entrepreneurial bloggers, marketing bloggers, community bloggers, etc)
• Bloggers are valuable because they create a huge long tail of influencers who can account for a large portion of your affiliate sales.
• You can use google analytics, Alexa, google alerts, competitor back links to find potential blogging partners
• You can engage bloggers by matching your brands and target demographics, speaking to them like "people" vs a company
• "Don't just get in touch with us when you want something. Talk to us on Twitter, engage with us. Be kind to us. Have manners. Thats all we want"
• The #1 influencer of a blogger is other blogs they read followed by conversation with their friends followed by the media.
• 81% of bloggers use Facebook to promote their blog
• Help amplify your bloggers by reposting articles that your bloggers have written about you. It helps you both.
• Go beyond written content - Video blogs are becoming more and more popular. (ie: @HannahRoseKeys)
• Feel bloggers with opportunities (ie: competitions, samples, unique codes, increased commission rates, tools such as widgets and store fronts, videos, high res jpegs, attractive banners, etc)
• Not a lot of bloggers are tech savvy, so working with Skimlinks is a great solution for them to monetize their links