Blank screen. Ready to write that blog pitch. Where should you start?
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that the most important thing is to match your pitch to the blogger. But what does that mean in practice?
It starts with developing a program that delivers something that will interest or intrigue the blogger, be it access, goods or information. No amount of wordsmithing can make a lame offer walk. The better your offer, the simpler your pitch can be. The best ones? They sell themselves.
To do this successfully, you need to get to know the blogs and the bloggers. What are their passions? Do they write about products? How and in what context?
You also need to be honest with yourself about your product. Are there natural points of mutual engagement intrinsic to the product or do you need to look outward for commonalities? Your goal is to get the blogger to write about you. You’ve got to give her something she wants to write about.
Let’s use laundry soap as an example. It is the rare blogger who will write about laundry soap in the context of how clean it gets the clothes. This doesn’t mean the blogger doesn’t care about clean clothes. It’s just not something she’s going to write about. At least not in a way you’d like. If you are pitching for a laundry soap company, you have to find another point of connection. One with meaning for the blogger. If you can’t find one, save yourself a lot of grief and buy some ads on the blog instead.
Finally, the pitch. Keep it short and simple. Clearly state the offer and relate it to the blogger’s interests. Don’t try to fake it. You won’t get away with it. People can spot the fake <insert a relevant comment from a recent blog post here> sentence structure every time and not just because these mail merge pitches often have typos and mixed fonts and all sorts of other graphical clues. It’s so obvious because the offer is irrelevant to the blogger’s interests or blog style.
A few more hard and fast blog pitching rules:
- Never send press releases as part of the pitch. It’s okay to include a link but the only time you should email a press release is upon direct request. As in please send me your press release or please add me to your press release distribution list.
- Never ask a blogger to write. Ever. Don’t ask for link exchanges either — that just shows you are an amateur.
- Don’t ask the blogger to let you know if he writes. He may, and that’s great, but it is your job to monitor for mentions, not his to tell you.
What does this look like in practice? Here are this week’s good pitches.
First, a pitch for Build-A-Bear Workshop. Sent to Julie Marsh, mothergoosemouse, by Celeste Lindell from BARKLEY, Kansas City. 
This pitch works because:
- Celeste is a blogger herself, and has met Julie in the past. As Julie noted when she forwarded the pitch: "reaching out to bloggers through bloggers – always a good bet."
- The simple pitch is appropriate for Julie’s family. The toy is something one of her girls might actually want. I’m more worried that they’ll both want one 🙂
- Doesn’t ask Julie to write, but makes a simple request for the picture to the Flickr group, if the blogger is so inclined. In the end, the overall impact of the Flickr group could be more powerful than any number of blog posts about the stuffed animal.
Nicely done.
The other good pitch is one from Jason Falls’ outreach for Jim Beam’s Stuff Inside campaign. Jason sent me a few of his pitches — including one custom done for me, as I mentioned in my previous post.
The basic premise of the campaign is that Beam is using its marketing budget to highlight people who "embody the spirit of the "Stuff Inside", — those who act with character, do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, help others who are less fortunate or persevere through a struggle." You can read more about it on their pages, and I’m sure you will be hearing more about it in the near future when the advertising campaign launches. The campaign clearly and cleverly ties into the company’s overall branding, but doesn’t seem too cloying. To me, but more importantly, as we’ll discuss below, also to a longtime industry watcher. And in the end, that’s what important. Not what I think about it, but what the customer does.
Jason’s pitch also claims that this is the first social media campaign by a spirits brand. I’ll buy that, and am not at all surprised that a spirits company understands the benefits of approaching people through their interests rather than the product features. After all, that’s how all alcohol advertising is done. They can’t sell too hard on the product features ("Gets you hammered faster than other tequilas") so liquor advertising is always about lifestyle, feelings, how your drink of choice affects how others perceive you. And so on.
Let’s talk about the pitch. Jason did custom pitches for each blogger. We’re going to look at one he sent to Chuck Cowdery, a well-known journalist and blogger in the spirits industry. Here’s the pitch:
And here’s the homerun: Cowdery has already written about the campaign, Jim Beam Launches Social Media Campaign. Among other things he says:
And that, my friends, is the true measure of success. Not whether I — or you — like a program. Whether the people for whom it is intended like it. In this case, it sounds like Beam is on the right track. Jason emailed me that he hasn’t had any other hits as good as Cowdery yet but he is working on a few things with various bloggers. I hope he’ll update us here with a comment when something interesting happens!
These two pitches, for very different products and with very different styles, have one important thing in common: they successfully connect with the blogger. That’s what you should strive for when you sit down to write that perfect pitch.
Don’t worry about the hit. Just think about connecting.
Batter up.
Tags: Build-A-Bear, Jim Beam, blogger relations
