Email Pitching A Blogger? Try This –

The perfect pitch. Any public relations practitioner has scratched their head a time or two when it comes to reaching out to bloggers. For awhile it was touch territory, but there has been great progression in peoples understanding of contacting bloggers with content that might be appealing for them to cover. However, there is still a lot of poor practice going on. i.e. mass pitching, irrelevant content, and always exciting content waterfall pitch.

A lot of the best practices (for a lack of better words) of contacting bloggers has come from trial and error – resulting in blacklisting – advice from bloggers, and practitioners starting to “just get” how you reach someone online as part of a normal social setting. Generally, you wouldn’t talk to a person/prospect friend about car parts at a party when you know they hate cars. It doesn’t make for good conversation and nobody benefits from the inevitable awkward silence.(I realize this does happen…)  Now traditional social circles are finally playing a role in online interactions thanks to growing blog communities and Facebook.

I came across a blog post by Alex Wilhelm (thenextweb.com) that delivers the point about pitching to tech bloggers. The post is full of sound advice in a clear message that every one could benefit from when preparing to contacting a new blogger. The scenario doesn’t have to be tech bloggers only, and industry applies because the post gives social context to interacting with bloggers. Like it or not bloggers are like you and me – they have social interactions and circles of friends. They are more that happy to interact with you if you take the time to understand their interests, provide valuable information, and treat them with respect. Interesting how that sounds more and more like building a bond/friendship, well ultimately it is.

This issue has been around for a while now, but like mentioned earlier progress in evident. Thanks Alex for a great post.

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