One of the planned promotion channels for my site are the blogs. However, from the research I have done I see that blogs are one of the least effective tools to promote a site. I mean this not in terms of a specific blog related to the site, but independent blogs who you'd have to contact and somehow solicit to post about the site (when the site is relevant to the blog context). If you guys have any experience, please share.
I'm not sure that attempting to solict posts from other blogs is really an effective way of going about things in relation to promoting your blog.
If your blog discusses something interesting that other people want to share, they will, naturally. Post your blogs to sites like Digg and Kick.ie (for an irish target market) and people might pick up on your blog story, find your blog to be interesting, and post about it because your blog is of interest to their visitors as well.
If you find blogs that make interesting reading and you contribute posts to others then there is a good chance that the blog owner will check out your site/blog as well. After that they might want to write about your blog because they feel that their visitors might be interested in it, or benefit from shared knowledge.
To be honest, I really don't think that approaching blog owners directly is a very time-effective technique. But social networking through blogs certainly has its benefits.
The problem with blogs is that there are so many damned junk blog sites now. All the bogus marketeers screwed up the valid benefits of blogging by spamming the hell out of them and making junk sites that offer no real content.
There should be rules, but there are none. So if you are planning on blogging, blog ethically, else you are just screwing up the world for everyone.
The worst are the a**holes that create the blogspots with the Google adsense systems integrated and just spam the hell out of every blog out there that they can get a hold of. I 'd like to beat those jerks with a wet stick.