MarketingSherpa Blog

PR misses the mark when it comes to pitching bloggers. It’s a complaint I’ve heard over and over again in almost every blog-centric interview for MarketingSherpa’s Fame newsletter.

Complaints range from how much bloggers hate receiving cut-and-paste press releases to how often the press releases are off topic. I think this confirms the conclusion: PR isn’t about pitching press releases any more. It’s about building relationships.

How do you build good relationships with bloggers? Here are a few simple tips:

-Read the posts written by the blogger you’re pitching to

-Send two- to three-sentence pitches that tell bloggers why you think the information is important to them

-Include a link to the online press release

-Make sure you can provide all the resources the blogger needs, including specific sources, stats, and photos

-Contact them only when you have new information you know they will find interesting

If you really want to win the heart of a blogger, give them an exclusive or tell them you’re pitching 10 of their competitors with the same news up front so they don’t find out after the fact and get angry because they would have altered the angle for their blog had they known.

About Natalie Myers

Natalie Myers writes for MarketingSherpa’s Great Minds and Content Biz newsletters. She covers a broad array of topics for Great Minds, regularly interviewing thought leaders and experienced marketers about innovative or highly successful marketing strategies. For Content Biz she focuses specifically on online subscriptions models, including anything you pay for to read, listen to, watch, rent (as in Software as a Service models), etc.

She writes blog posts about topics relating to her beats, including useful information from interviews that doesn’t make it into an article.

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Categories: PR Fame Communications, Social Networking Evangelism Community Tags: blog, pitching, PR