How to Best Pitch Bloggers - a Virtual Group Interview
Most bloggers with a fair number of readers and especially a prominent ranking in Technorati or Google experience been pitched by fellow bloggers, pr firms or companies who want to gain exposure for something or someone more or less frequently. You may even pitch bloggers yourself. In fact practically everyone does when they first start out I believe. Anyone having something to sell or promote including themselves or their writing should thus be able to benefit from the answers provided by the participants in this virtual interview: Roberta Rosenberg, Anil Dash, Lee Odden, B.L. Ochman, Steve Rubel, Jeremy Wright and Nick O’Neill.
Since everyone is here let us begin. Regardless whether you are the one pitching or the recipient are there certain things you need to keep in mind when writing or reacting to a pitch, which leads me to ask all of you:
“How should you ideally pitch a blogger if you want something from him?”
Leave the hard-hitting hyperbole at home when marketing yourself to authority bloggers. Remember what your mom said about old-fashioned courtesy and kindness. They work especially well in the post-modern blog universe.
Lead with the link. I’m a blogger. I read links. It’s what we do. I might skip the rest of your poorly-written email if there’s a URL at the top with full info about your product or service, and then if it’s interesting, I might even link to that page.
Be relevant. It seems so simple and obvious, yet it is the biggest mistake made when pitching bloggers. Look at the categories of the blog and look at previous blog posts. Is your pitch REALLY relevant for the blog? With a lot of the pitches we get, you can tell there’s been no attempt to look any further than the title of the blog.
Bloggers aim to provide a personal view of the news. They write in conversational style as an antidote to the canned news of traditional media. Why would you send a canned PR-speak pitch?
Just give ‘em the facts and let the pitch stand on its own. Be proud! If you feel you’re not offering high value information, go back to the drawing board and re slant your pitch until you come up with something truly compelling.
Make it short and sweet: Generally, the shorter and more concise, the better. I don’t need your full 500 word press release. Tell me why I should be interested in 50 words or less, and then link to it. If you can’t communicate why this is worth my time in 50 words, you’re unlikely to be able to do so in 500 words.
The goal is to build a lasting relationship with people. So reach out to them and sympathize with their problems and find ways that you can help them. Helping people is the best way to build contacts.
Thank you for your answers. You really gave some great answers and offered a lot of insight… Yes, Lee, did you want to add something?
Don’t be offended or give up if a blogger doesn’t take your story the first time. Be courteous and smart about repeat attempts though. Watch to see if they really do pick up on your story before sending another pitch. Of course, this is not a problem if you actually read their blog.
Thanks Lee, it certainly does pay to be persistent doesn’t it. Regardless of whether you are a blogger reaching out to other bloggers or a company looking for exposure for your products or your clients is there a lot you should pay attention to and take the time learning provided you want to do well. None of us appreciates being spoken to by strangers raving on about things we have little or no relation to. Ideally we want to buy and get advice or suggestions from someone who we know and respect just as we want to pass on what we know and like to them. Hence would my advice be not to speak to people, but to speak with them. It will be a whole lot more rewarding for everyone.
You can learn a whole lot more by reading the rest of the posts quoted above as well as by reading Bloggers: An invaluable communications channel, which will give you more of a background while The PR Wiki: Tips on Pitching Bloggers and The Bad Pitch Blog all are full of good advice and examples of both poor and great pitches and pitching.
The inspiration for this post came from reading Liz Strauss’ Writing Challenge: Joanna’s Thematic Link Post! I was both taken in and carried away about the circularity of it all. Seeing how my first guest post on Lorelle on WordPress Why A Link Post Should Be Like Mingling at a Party was picked up by Joanna Young in her post How to write a links post and then turned into a writing challenge, which now circulates among the readers of Successful Blog.
In addition this post can be seen as trying yet another way of writing a link post combining my usual way of writing link posts with how I normally write quotation posts as well as my idea about the virtual interview.
Related Articles
Comments
10 Responses to “How to Best Pitch Bloggers - a Virtual Group Interview”
Leave a Reply
What a great idea for a link post Jan.
I feel like the bloggers you’re quoting are talking directly at us!
It’s been fun doing linking and thinking - so much so that now I’m finding it hard to stop (is this an element of circularity?!) - but maybe there’s a lesson in there somewhere
Thanks once again for the inspiration to get this whole writing challenge caboodle going
Joanna
Thanks for including me in the virtual group interview! Yours was a very clever and informative approach - and one I’ll remember!
Believe me Joanna life consists practically of nothing, but circles when you start thinking like me and I think you are catching the bug too
Roberta - You are welcome. Having enjoyed your writing many times was it a pleasure featuring you even if it was only virtually.
Great post, Jan. Just curious how many prominent bloggers did you approach to get the answer to your question about the pitch? And how long did it take you to get the answers from them?
Vivien, this was a virtual interview and not an actual one. I guess I should have made that more clear. Having had to edit the post after publication I guess I cut something out that I should have left in after all
If you read my virtual interview with Lorelle and Liz Strauss do you get the full background, but in essence a virtual interview is a link post using quotes appearing as answers to bind it together.
They are thus not really answering me, but I still found answers from them. It does eliminate some of the problems with real interviews such as those you suggest, but it still requires just as much work to put together I afraid
I have seen people saying that I invented this way of writing link posts, but I am sure that somewhere in the millions of posts written before I even started blogging there is something similar.
That’s an interesting post. But what I do to pitch a local blogger, I’ll just bribe him with money or a good link on my blog.
I’ll follow what Anil Dash would do. Lead with links. Surely, bloggers want to rank so give them good links so you can get something from them Its a give and take relationship.
Yes, links are so important. Better to have them right up front for all to see.
[…] How to Best Pitch Bloggers - a Virtual Group Interview by Jan […]
[…] here wants the “How to Best Pitch Bloggers - a Virtual Group Interview” Speech. Are you the guy who does […]