Using bloggers to help promote your business has become an integral part of marketing campaigns. The key, however, is knowing the best way to pitch your content ideas to a blogger – by following these few simple steps, you should receive a higher success rate with your collaboration requests.
Ensure the content you are pitching is relevant to the blogger’s audience
First of all, you should always examine sites you are looking to pitch to, to ensure that your ideas are relevant; most bloggers’ sites are categorised to make this quick and easy to do. Always read the authors’ bio so you can personalise your pitch, and also take a look at the publishing/advertorial guidelines to ensure that they are open to collaborations.
Look at this blog: you can see that the blogger has created clear categories for content, an ‘about’ section, and information on advertising and how to get in touch.
Once you’ve done this and believe the site to be a good fit for your marketing campaign, it’s time to plan the pitch.
Depending on the level of exposure you want for your marketing campaign, sourcing numerous relevant sites is a time-consuming task – using a blogger outreach agency to do this for you can save a lot of time and resources.
Make sure your article is newsworthy
Creating informative, well-written content is a vital part of your campaign and will help you pitch your ideas. Remember that your article is there to create awareness of your business or product, but must be relevant to the topic. By checking what is trending at the time will help you be on top of your game and create great content that bloggers will want to publish for you.
Tailoring your pitch
Always address the blogger by name, rather than ‘Dear Sir/Madam’. This not only helps build relationships but also shows the blogger you have taken the time to find out about them. Try to pitch your idea as a story if possible to get maximum buy-in – this helps the blogger understand the inspiration for your campaign. And don’t give the full article away just yet – just send the title and key points as a teaser.
You should be direct in your approach and be open about what you are after. You should include information on the type of link you want, how you want the post marked (for example, ‘sponsored’, ‘collaborative’, and so on) and the preferred publication date.
Google the title
Make sure your content is unique to give it maximum strength. If you use a title that’s already been used before, your campaign will blend in alongside your competitors. Creative catchy titles are what will make your blog post stand out, but checking that the title hasn’t been used before is vital. To do this, you should use a search operator. There are many search operations you can perform depending on what you are searching for.
For example, for an in-title search in Google you should type:
intitle:How to pitch great content ideas to bloggers
Write, read and edit your pitch
Spelling mistakes are a no-no. Always write your pitch, read it back to yourself and edit, then reread to ensure it is correct before sending. No publisher will want to collaborate with someone that cannot put together a coherent pitch. And it’s the same with the content you’ll be sending them to publish. Making sure your content is edited to a high standard will encourage bloggers to collaborate with you.
A good motto to follow to ensure your pitch and content is on point is: write once and read twice.
By following these simple steps when pitching content ideas to bloggers, you’ll notice a higher success rate with your replies, making every campaign easier and quicker to complete and get published. Bloggers will also remember you and your methods of practice and be more likely to carry out future collaborations with you, too.
