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