This morning I recevied yet another “pitch” from a company asking me to write about their new product or service. My usual response is to either ignore the pitch or (more likely) to wish for a giant shard of bamboo to find it’s way directly through the motherboard of their computer. I’ve decided to take a more constructive approach by putting together a few guidelines for how to pitch bloggers. Keep in mind that you may all have your personal preferences so I tried to keep my guidlines rather general.
- First of all do not start your e-mail by saying “Hi Jacob” and then paste your press release. That is going to arouse the inner demon in me to summon the bamboo gods towards your computer. Make your message personal and make it relevant
- Try to build somewhat of a relationship with me, pretend it’s out first date. What are you going to just pick me up and then make your move? Come on now, get to know me a bit first. Find out what my interests are, heck I have a blog, read it and tell me why I (or my readers) should care about your pitch.
- Make it easy for me to understand what your pitch is about, chances are I have no idea what your company does or who you are. Give me a brief intro and then list out some bullet points for what your product/company does and why I should care. If you send me an e-mail using jargon that I don’t understand then you might as well send me your e-mail in funny shapes and characters. Also, if your press release looks like an e-mail version of “War and Peace,” I’m not going to read it.
- If you fail the first time try again. If you pitch a blogger once and he/she doesn’t respond, it doesn’t mean the blogger is ignoring you or thinking of ways to destroy your computer. Perhaps the blogger didn’t see your e-mail or perhaps it went into the spam folder. Try again. If the blogger did receive your e-mail and cursed you for spamming them (yes I may have done this) then the next time you have a press release try again, but this time change the way you pitch them (read this list!)
Lee Odden has a list of 5 ways to pitch bloggers and Darren Rowse from Pro-Blogger has a 21 tips for pitching bloggers (a bit too much in my opinion). Marketers should respect bloggers but bloggers also need to respect marketers, and quite frankly expecting every marketer to follower 21 steps is a bit extreme.
If you are a blogger what other tips do you have on how to be pitched? If you are a marketer how can bloggers help you with your pitch?
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