If you're using blogs in your campaign outreach strategy, it's important you understand how to track the effectiveness of those blogs.

The following is a primer on how to track conversations in the blogosphere.

Permalinks, Addresses and URL’s:

The first thing to learn is your website URL. URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, and is the “address” of your site on the internet. http://techrepublican.com is an example. A permalink is the address, (or URL) of a specific entry, or blogpost. (The word blog usually means the main site, but some people mistake a "blog" for a "blogpost")

When searching, Type in your main or homepage url to find people linking to you. (A note: www.techrepublican.com is a different address than http://techrepublican.com. It goes to the same place, but for best results in searches, skip the www)

Technorati:

This is the big daddy of blog search. Technorati allows you to search by url, by tags, and in a directory.

Step1: Claim your blog. Technorati has to know you are there to track what you are doing. Claim your blog, sign in to an account, and list a bunch of keyword that people can use to find your site. There are 33,911 blogs tagged politics already in Technorati, so be creative with your tags.

Step 2: URL search:

Go to the advanced search section of Technorati and look for "Find Posts that link to:"

Type the URL of your blog into the box and click search. What comes up are all of the blogs that currently link to your blog. You can rank them by freshness, or authority, and it is the most comprehensive list. Not everyone is listed, but Technorati is a great way to find out who is linking to you.

Step 3: Searching in Tags.

Tags are labels that people put into their post. Wordpress and Typepad allow you to customize your site to add Technorati tags, and it is a powerful way to push your posts to a larger topic (in the Typepad screen for composing a post, look for customize the display of the page).

Check out “immigration,” as a tag, or “Lindsey Graham and amnesty” Thre are 1260 posts on Senator Graham and amnesty, but over 362,000 for immigration. The more specific you are in your tags, the better chance you have of being found.

Step 4: Search in Directory.

Back in the Advanced Search, look for the directory search at the bottom. The tags you wrote when you claimed your blog place you in categories in the directory. While a tag search looks for individual posts, a directory search looks for blog descriptions.

Advanced Users: To create an RSS feed of blogs that link to your site, type <http://feeds.technorati.com/search/www.yoururl.com> and add it to your RSS reader.

Google Searches: The simplest way to track your blog in Google, or any search engine, is to type [link: http://www.yourblogurl.com].This should bring up a list of all the pages cached in Google that link specifically to your website. This works fine for high ranking blogs, but it’s not complete, and doesn’t tell you a time reference. For great ways to use Google to search out all kinds of topics, check out their operator cheat sheet

Google Alerts: Login to Google (create a personal account if you do not already have one), and create Google alerts. These e-mails track keywords, names, and websites you enter and forward them to you when Google first caches them (that’s not a typo – caching refers to saving the page on Google serves (pronounced caaatch, not ketch). Google alerts work both to tell when someone is linking to you and when they are speaking of you without a link.

Search engines all have different algorithms, so for fun, type your name and blog into different search engines to get different results: http://Sphere.com, http://eprecis.com, (MSN Live) http://live.com, http://Ask.com, http://dogpile.com

Summary: There are literally hundreds of different ways to track yourself in the blogosphere. Sites like Talkdigger.com, Blogpulse.com, and services that can cost upwards of $10,000 a month are available. Find the ones that you like best, and join in the conversation.