7 Tips on Pitching Bloggers

This week, I added a piece on the homepage of the Ogilvy Blogfeeds with tips on pitching bloggers. This has been a topic on many PR and marketing blogs recently - generating almost as much discussion as the now tired declaration of the death of the press release .  The intention of these tips is to provide a good starting point of understanding for a wider base of PR professionals who are just now stepping into their first experiences of dealing with bloggers, and learning that they are, in fact, different from journalists.  Here is an excerpt of the 7 tips (full text is in the PDF download): 

1. Before you pitch them, read their blog
2. Two words: trackbacks and comments
3. Bloggers are experts
4. It's not always about their readers
5. Giving them free stuff is ok
6. Know who else is talking about you
7. Don't throw away your traditional media relations playbook

Get the "7 Tips for Pitching Bloggers" [2 Page PDF] - http://blogfeeds.ogilvypr.com.

There are also many other useful resources out there for PR pros interested in improving their skills when it comes to dealing with bloggers.  Here are a few I would recommend:

• PR Lessons of a Clueless Blog Pitch (BL Ochman)
• Don't be a bad pitcher (Anil Dash)
• The PR Wiki: Tips on Pitching Bloggers (Constantin Basturea)
• Blog Relations List (Tom Murphy)
• The Bad Pitch Blog (Richard Laermer and Kevin Dugan)

del.icio.us Tags: communications pr public_relations publicrelations blogs blog resources tools ogilvy blogfeeds

Comments

[Jim Durbin]

Excellent points. Bloggers are looking for authentic relationships with PR professionals. Using blogs to make money or market products is new to us, too. It wasn't that long ago that the very idea of making money off a blog would cause a storm of nasty posts from the blogosphere.

The other thing to remember is not all bloggers are eager to be contacted by PR firms. Reading their blog ahead of time will help you determine who is interested in listening and who will take your call, record it on their Vonage phone, and post it to the web as a podcast.

[Rohit]

Jim, thanks for commenting. You are right, every blogger is not a good candidate for "outreach" from a PR person. The trick is to read enough of a blogger's posts to be well informed about how they are likely to respond to your message. On a positive note, if you do the research properly, your success rate should be very high ... higher in many cases than if you do the same effort with journalists. The nice thing about bloggers is that most only have to answer to themselves when it comes to editorial filters.

[Christine]

Excellent post!

[Aurelius Tjin]

This is obviously one great post. The information are very insightful and helpful. Thanks for sharing all of these. :)

[CS Thompson]

Thanks for this Rohit, I was just talking to a client on Friday about reaching out to bloggers to market and promote their book.
Keep the good stuff coming!

[Wes - The Press Release Guy]

This is a great post and these tips can be used for much more than pitching bloggers. They work for pitching any type of media professional.