What to do when a PR Company Pitches to your Blog Badly
What to do when a PR company pitches to you badly
Every day I get 5-10 emails from PR companies trying to pitch me with one of their client’s products or services.
In my estimate – 1 in 10 do it well.
The rest clearly either don’t know how to pitch to bloggers or don’t really care.
Common mistakes in pitching to bloggers include:
- impersonal emails – emails that are clearly being sent to hundreds if not thousands of people
- incorrectly addressed emails – emails addressed to the wrong person/blog – I regularly get emails where it’s clear someone forgot to copy and paste my name in and delete another blogger’s name
- irrelevant pitches – where the product being pitches has nothing to do with the blog being pitched (for example – today ProBlogger got pitched to link to a newly released cufflink!)
- long press releases – long slabs of text don’t really inspire most bloggers
The list could go on and on.
I know most bloggers simply bin most of these ‘pitch’ emails (or respond with a snarky one telling the person where to go) but I’ve decided to do something a little more constructive and have been replying to the 90% of bad ones with the following email:
Dear XXXX (insert person’s name).
I appreciate you reaching out to bloggers but wonder if you’d have more luck with a different approach.
Please accept my humble suggestions:
I hope you find these helpful in pitching bloggers.
Darren Rowse
OK – some of you are thinking that this is a complete waste of time – and it may well be, although it takes all of 1 seconds using TextExpander – but what I’ve found is that a large percentage of those that I send this to respond with a thank you and in a couple of instances it’s actually led us into a fruitful exchange.
On one occasion the PR person that I sent the above email to re-pitched their product to me with the opportunity to give the product away to readers (the ensuing competition was a big success) and on another occasion the company behind the pitch became a paid sponsor of the blog. Neither of these things would have happened unless I’d responded in the way that I had.
While it might be tempting to simple delete such emails – perhaps responding constructively might actually lead to something positive – for me in these two instances it led to both increased traffic and income for my blogs.
Original post by Darren Rowse
great share, great article, very usefull for me…thank
you