I often get asked, “How does one find small business blogs, so my company can reach out to the small business community?”

There are a number of techniques for identifying small business blogs that attract the audience you want to reach.

The technique I am going to cover today is called “Follow the Leader.” If you can locate a handful of the “leaders” that blog about a particular topic regularly, you can almost always backtrack from there and find other blogs of a similar niche or interest area.

The reason this technique works is that we bloggers manage to find one another. We seek out like-minded bloggers.

Follow the Leader is not a hard technique, although it can take an investment of time.

The “Follow the Leader” technique works for finding bloggers in just about any niche or special interest topic. Want to tap into scrapbookers, CPAs or lawyers through blogs? This same technique will work.

But in this article I will focus on small business blogs. Here are 5 steps to locate small business bloggers:

(1) Identify the leader blogs – Your first step is to find those blogs that have emerged as the leaders in the small business niche or space. Why do we start with these? Because they command a large following and are a path to find like-minded souls.

To find those leader blogs, start at a high-quality blog directory site that lists blogs by topic. Look for a blog directory that is human edited, because they have already done some of the work to identify the top blogs. There are two that I recommend:

An excellent one is Alltop.com. Alltop lists collections of blogs and other conversational sites by topic. It even includes the top five RSS headlines from each blog, so you can do a quick scan for the type of content they cover. The Alltop Small Business section is well fleshed out and you should be able to choose blogs from it. Alltop also has a compilation of startup blogs.

Another excellent human-edited blog directory is Blogged.com. Blogged.com also has a dedicated section on small business where you can find some of the leader small business blogs.

You could also search for other blog directories and RSS directories besides these two. However, most don’t do as good a job of categorizing blogs by subject or quality or authority, and you can quickly get overwhelmed with noise.

Skip the blogs that are captive publications of media companies and organizations. What you want to find are small business blogs that link out to other bloggers — and the media companies rarely do that. Your best bet is to identify 6 leader blogs among independent bloggers.

Now here is the trick: pay attention to the nuances of small business blogs. Small business is an incredibly broad category. Some blogs focus on established, mainstream small businesses. Then there are “entrepreneur” blogs which often focus on startups or technology businesses. Some small business blogs are focused primarily on marketing. Some are focused on wannabe business owners, who may still be employed in the corporate world and haven’t quite made the jump. Some are focused on freelancers in creative industries. Some focus on franchises. And some business blogs are for “Internet marketers” or “pro bloggers” — they attract those looking to make a living from running blogs or running Internet sites.

The list of specializations goes on. Be clear on what aspects of the small business market you want to reach, up front. It will save you a lot of time in the long run.

(2) Search for Blogrolls and Link Pages – Once you have identified, say, 6 of the leaders among suitable small business blogs or any other niche you are looking for, you want to visit those blogs and look for their blogrolls. A blogroll is a list of links to other blog, usually appearing in the side column. In lieu of a blogroll in the side column, some blogs have a separate page with links to other blogs. Just start clicking through those links and you’ll soon discover new blogs of a similar vein.

(3) Read the Leader Blogs to see who They Write About – The best blogs are not navel gazers. They don’t spend all their time talking about themselves or their own sites. They will frequently link out to other blogs, especially blogs in the same niche.

Carefully read their blog posts, including their archives. Visit other blogs that they write about and link to.

Check their comments, too. Often their visitors are from other small business blogs. When you see a comment and the commenter’s name looks like a link, click through. Usually you will be taken to the commenter’s site.

Then once you arrive on a few of those other sites, rinse and repeat. That is, do the same thing — start clicking. They will lead you to discover even more blogs.

(4) Find Other Blogs Linking to the Leaders — You can also do a search to find other blogs linking to the leader blogs. Again, this will lead you to other blogs that tend to follow or write about the same topic.

There are a number of tools that purport to track blog links (including Icerocket, Bloglines, and Technorati search). But I find Google Blog Search to be the most thorough and reliable today.

Go to Google Blog Search. Google Blog Search is a vertical search engine run by Google that searches just for blogs. Type in the following: link:http//www.inserturlofblog.com (insert the correct URL, of course). Do this for each of your leader blogs to identify other blogs linking to them and covering the same topic.

Not all the citations returned will be on point — sometimes a blogger will link a little off topic. But you should be able to find numerous other small business blogs to add to your list.

(5) Keep Track of Relevant Blogs – As you are doing all this detective work, you want to keep a list of the blogs you have identified as small business blogs via steps 1-4 above.

If you want to keep track in a detailed way — making notes to yourself and including contact information — then a spreadsheet works best.

If you just want to monitor the blogs and don’t need to track a lot of information about the people behind the blog, then you can simply add the RSS feeds to a feedreader program such as iGoogle. Or you could bookmark the sites using Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia.com or another bookmarking tool. Both are easy tracking methods.

What about specialized tools to track blogs and blog conversation? There are tools on the market that purport to track conversations and topics, such as BlogPulse.com. I’ve never had much luck with BlogPulse or similar types of blog tracking tools when it comes to finding small business blogs. I find tools like BlogPulse.com tend to be better for the larger parts of the blogosphere such as politics blogs or technology blogs. For small niche topics they are seriously hit or miss — mostly miss.

The same goes for Technorati, a tool I used to recommend, but which has slipped badly. Take, for instance, the Technorati Small Business Channel. As of this writing, the top story is about a branding iron for barbequeing steaks from a gadget blog. Of the remaining handful of stories, several were from technology blogs and barely had a passing acquaintance with anything small-business related. Another was from a celebrity gossip blog, for heaven’s sakes. Even worse, the top “news” item in small business was an NBA story! Irrelevant — I rest my case.

Finally, you can certainly hire a firm to perform extensive analysis to identify blogs. For instance, Cymfony.com is one of the players that offers such a service — and I’m sure it’s pricey. But with the above method I am writing for those of you without unlimited funds … i.e., most of us.

Good luck, and if you have other tips for identifying suitable small business blogs to track, please leave a comment and share.