Performance Communications | November 19, 2015
Now I’m fairly opinionated at the best of times, and often on topics that I’m perhaps not qualified to comment.
But for this blog, How to Pitch a Blogger I think I’m pretty well placed. Why? Well, because at the moment I sit on both sides of the fence.
2015 has been a good year, my work in PR meant I was listed in PR Week’s 30-Under-30 and my lifestyle blog The Dapper Chapper, was shortlisted at the 2015 UK Blogging Awards. I also became a style contributor at the world’s biggest blog, The Huffington Post.
So, on this occasion it’s worth listening up.
Putting my blogger hat on here is 10 points a PR should consider when you pitch:
1. Relevance – Don’t put bloggers in the bracket of ‘might as well chuck them on the distribution list’. Some PRs send me every press release they write and now, unfortunately, I tend to delete their emails before I read them. Make sure what you are sending is relevant – as a PR you don’t want to lose credibility & get blacklisted – less is definitely more.
2. Images – An average post of mine uses between 5-8 stock images. People spend more time looking at the visuals than reading our beautiful words, so make sure you have a good library of pics to send over. Also, I know it’s pedantic but I’ve wasted so much time this year re-sizing images. Don’t send images over 2MB, they don’t upload to WordPress. Re-size them and then send web resolution images.
3. The Email – If you can’t be bothered to write my name at the top of the email, why should I be bothered to read it? To publish your story I need to read it, re-write it, upload it and promote it. That process can take between 30 minutes and 3 hours depending on the work that needs to go into the story. So if you haven’t paid the blogger or sent them shiny things, you should be grateful that they’ve run your content – writing their name in an email is just basic.
4. The Exchange – This is the main point to get across. Blogging takes time and rightly or wrongly, the way I see it is that usually the blogger is working for your brand for free. As a PR, before you ask for coverage think to yourself ‘would I run this’? Not just that, think about whether you’d set time aside from your busy day to go through the read-rewrite-upload-promote process because nine times out of ten you wouldn’t. In this instance you need to up your offering. Nowadays it needs to be a seriously good story to get coverage without a value in kind exchange on a good blog. Most of your competitors are sending product or paying for a sponsored post: gone are the days when bloggers work for free.
5. Think ahead – When the Dapper Chapper started our engagement with ‘premium’ brands was a lot less. I remember when our online community was around 1,000, most of the brands we worked with perhaps had a lower profile. But a couple of clever PRs saw the blog’s potential. I remember two PR teams; the chaps who represent luxury Italian lifestyle company Acqua di Parma and the girls that look after the Michelin starred Hakkasan Group. At the time, they could have responded and said ‘err, no thanks, come back when you’ve got 10,000 followers’ but instead I was dealt with professionally and received generous value in kind offerings. Now, my reach is far greater and because they got in early and helped us when we were getting started I always feel more incentivised to run things that comes from their inbox.
6. Read the blog – Most bloggers are part time. I edit the site and have 13 contributors most of whom lead a particular section. So if you read the blog and identify the section you think your story should appear the likely response will have the relevant writer cc’d and the conversion to coverage for you will be much quicker.
7. Follow up – I must get 40 pitches a day. Four or five we’ll take up and at the moment we run two blog posts per day. So if you quickly do the math, you’ll conclude there’s a bit of a backlog of posts. Sometimes things we’ve been sent slip through, this will always be unintentional so it’s always worth following up.
8. Support social – If you look after the brand’s social channels then it doesn’t take much to engage with a blogger’s posts when it goes live – it goes further than you think. If the social is run by another agency give them a heads up!
9. Meet in person – Despite reputation, most PRs are nice people. On top of that, most bloggers are nice people. When nice people meet each other usually good things tend to happen. The PRs who I’ve met in person, had a coffee with etc have earned more air time on the blog than others. Trust me it’ll be the best £2.95 you’ve spent.
10. Get to the point – I’m busy, you’re busy so get to the point in the email. Make the subject line interesting and relevant and keep the pitch to three paragraphs if you can.
Happy hunting!
