Alan Draper
Getting digital media coverage can be extremely important for your business or startup as it helps increase online visibility and boosts SEO, ultimately giving you ROI and increased traffic to your website. While you may be impatiently eager to tell everyone about your startup, it’s important to prepare your pitch with the correct elements that interest and incentivize a blogger to publish your story. Below are three essential tips to create an effective e-mail pitch for blogger outreach.
1. Don’t Bury the Lede
One of the biggest mistakes that many pitch writers do when writing (myself included at times), is burying the ‘Lede’, otherwise known as burying the lead paragraph/most important information of your pitch. For example, if you’re writing something for a mobile geolocation app and your goal is to get new users, you’ll really want to push that idea when writing your pitch for bloggers. Write about how it’s supported worldwide (if true) and is dependent on crowdsourcing/user contributions to become successful. Add in some statistics to help back up your credibility – all the while not going too off track by talking about how awesome it is (bloggers don’t care about that, they’ll find out for themselves if they like it or not). Ultimately, you want the editor to know right away what you’re getting at without all of the fluff and BS.
2. Keep it Short and Sweet (Not Hot and Sour), and Personalize
This tip somewhat goes along with the above – keep your pitch concise and to the point, with no more than 200 words. Your lede paragraph should intro the blogger to your goal, a second paragraph to give a quick informational and non-biased background of your startup, and a third paragraph consisting of a call to action (which I’ll mention later). You really don’t need much else in your pitch – too long of an email and the blogger will probably not read it – and if they want more information you can follow up to provide press releases and other materials. Your pitch should also include some personalization so that the email doesn’t sound like it was blasted out to 500 random bloggers. This can be taken care of by including the blogger’s name, title of the blog, and genre in your pitch – and of course if you’ve reached out to them before, include a quick sentence or two thanking them for what the’ve done in the past or mention a quick “Haven’t talked to you in awhile, how have things been for the blog lately?”.
3. Incentives, Giveaways, and Freebies
Obviously you’ll want to ask your blogger to post about your startup, which is one of the most important pieces to a pitch. Many times though, they’ll want some sort of compensation or contribution to provide to their readers besides a self-promotional article, which just looks like an advertisement. There are several was to get around this and help the blogger create a balanced article, and one of them is offering giveaways and exclusives to their readers. If you’ve got pro accounts, discount codes or extra products, offer them to the blogger as a giveaway. If your products are of too high a value to just hand out, at least offer a sample for review. Bloggers really appreciate the little things like this, and most of the times freebies are the selling point to getting media coverage depending on what your key verticals are.
Conclusion
There are several other elements to creating an effective pitch depending on your goal, but these three tips should help give you a general start. I’ll go over some more creative and strategized tips in the future – what do you find most effective when pitching a blogger?
Read more: Blogger Outreach Tips: Understanding The Latest FTC Guidelines
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Alan Draper.
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You missed the mark with this. Digital media done well takes effort. You are, in this post, apparently more invested in spending time on avoiding paying bloggers than in generating genuine interest for your client. I wouldn’t think many of those campaigns are successful.
Paula Schuck
Thrifty Mom Media
Digital Strategy and Blogger outreach programs
Here’s why that doesn’t work.
http://www.thriftymommastips.com/2013/04/before-you-ask-bloggers-to-write-for.html
This article made me roar laughing at the crazy insinuation that you can pacify a blogger with a free sample.
I run an online marketing company in Canada and it’s amazing to see the amount of companies that will fork out $5,000 for a full page print ad with magazines that are not even audited. However, at the same time, they will expect a blogger to receive free stuff in exchange for promotion. What companies don’t realize is that most bloggers can produce quantifiable measurements, provide an increase in SEO rank (most bloggers rank at a Google 3 or higher), and deliver the company’s message through human to human interaction. Human to human interaction is what sells today.
It really is people like you that gives new media initiatives a bad name.
There are many extremely funny points in this post. enough to make it almost comedy.
The problem is that it is sad and scary that you would sell this concept to a client.
The unfortunate part is that, when you are done making a mess (or teaching others how to make a mess) those of us who are familiar with bloggers and blogger marketting will have to go in and clean up the damage you have caused to the brand and it’s relationship with the very people they need to work with.
These were very, very general tips – strategy obviously plays the largest part, before all of this, and as such the needs vary per client. Maybe I conveyed a one-sided “everything should be free” view in this article, which wasn’t the intention.
Every lead and contact I’ve work worked with has been through a relationship creating process, taking time and going over their specific needs, questions, interview, issues. It’s public relations after all.
The third tip should be not be a first option, obviously, when strategizing and conducting marketing campaign. Always exhaust creative and newsworthy options before that – I should’ve made that clear.
If it works for the blogger and the client, I don’t see an issue with offering them a compensatory incentive. I won’t hound you if you tell me that a review is X amount of money – I’ll simply say thank for your time, the client doesn’t currently have a budget and I’ll keep it in mind for the future when they do.
Now what I do have a problem with is pitching bloggers, editors, reporters newsworthy and creative news, and in response I get an automated media kit with pricing – they don’t even consider to look it over.