Krishna De just wrote an article called How Not To Pitch A Blogger and it is brilliant and useful — “here are three of the many mistakes they made in the pitch:”
- there was no personal connection in the email to me about why the story may be of interest to me and my readers
- they did not give me anything of value to bring to my readers - no inside scoop so to speak or an offer of speaking to me to answer any questions
- they made me click through to read the article in the press - many bloggers won’t take that extra click - and what’s more the article in the press was at best boring and certainly not newsworthy.
Busy blogger’s are like journalists - they want an inside and unique story that is going to be of value to their readers and they don’t have time to have to go into hours of research.
I personally don’t agree with the third bullet point if what Krishna is saying is that the entire pitch has to be inline. We find that all of our most successful pitches are as long as three brief paragraphs and as brief as one, with an “extra click” in the form of a Social Media News Release (SMNR). Here are some examples we have for I Will Not Be Broken, Survivor Corps, and Life Changing Box, for example. When it comes to email pitches, you have to have the blogger “at hello” and the trouble with big, annoying, inline content (inline in the body of the email or, egad, offered as an attachment) is that it is stuck in the INBOX and isn’t readily available to the blog — inline graphics can’t be copied and pasted to a blog post, but if you copy and paste something from a web page, it easily posts.
Offering content in an attachment or an inline pitch makes it impossible for simple posting — images and graphics break because they’re often locally hosted and not available online.
If you off-link to an SMNR, the blogger can readily copy and paste the content and also, in the copy-and-paste, include the inline graphics, images, and links in the blog post itself.
When we create a pitch and then link off the blogger pitch to an SMNR, we try to KISS — every extra link and extra paragraph and extra “rich text element” such as HTML and inline graphics that a pitch includes increases the change — the probability — that the pitch isn’t even going to get to the blogger and will end up either in the SPAM box or, even worse, stuck in the maw of the ISP itself.
The more brief and plaintext the pitch is, the better. We absolutely refuse to include more than one link from our pitches, even killing all hot links from the signature or anything else.
If you don’t have the blogger at hello, you’re done for, no matter how you do it: inline or linked-out.
Via Krishna De’s BizGrowthNews
Comments (4)
Chris - thanks for refering to the article.
On the third bullet there was literally no information about the service they were pitching to me.
Just a line to say and I quote “Interesting article about our company….” then a link to the article in one of the major Irish press.
I agree with your comment that you can’t necessarily convey everything in the email.
But make it easy and compelling for us to quickly assess if we are interested in reading on and then make the additional information accessible.
Love the idea of making sure you get the blogger at hello!
Thanks for picking up the conversation here.
Krishna De » You’re welcome! You’re in my feed and I am happy to read you!
Agree with this: “If you don’t have the blogger at hello, you’re done for, no matter how you do it: inline or linked-out.”
I’ve been writing about this stuff for two years and am amazed at how slowly the PR sector is learning.
James Joyner » Well, it is also nice to know that we finally agree with each-other
Even if you don’t have someone at hello, however, people also need to know that if your first hello goes un-noticed, then it probably wasn’t your fault — that it could have just been circumstances — I need to write a whole heck of a lot more about all of this.