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Are you a company who would like to have their products and services featured by leading bloggers or podcasters who connect with your target audience?

Well here’s a quick lesson on what not to do.

I get pitched with stories every week by PR agencies and companies and I possibly give the pitches more consideration and attention than many bloggers and podcasters. I do try to reply to emails where I can but with hundreds of emails arriving each day, some I am afraid get the big D key.

This week  received one of the worst pitches ever from an Irish company.

The company just emailed me a one sentence email with a link to an articles where they had been featured in the main stream press.

Here are three of the many mistakes they made in the pitch:

• there was no personal connection in the email to me about why the story may be of interest to me and my readers
• they did not give me anything of value to bring to my readers – no inside scoop so to speak or an offer of speaking to me to answer any questions
• they made me click through to read the article in the press – many bloggers won’t take that extra click – and what’s more the article in the press was at best boring and certainly not newsworthy.

Busy blogger’s are like journalists – they want an inside and unique story that is going to be of value to their readers and they don’t have time to have to go into hours of research.

On this particular occasion I did email a list of questions back to the company for them to answer and will consider writing about their product dependent on their reply. Believe me most other people would have given them the big D – I take the approach that I’d like to help people understand how to pitch a story so that they won’t have similar problems the next time.

What I think I will do is have some links to articles about how not to pitch to bloggers on my contact page.

What would you advise someone who is going to pitch you?

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

How to pitch to bloggers and podcasters - creating a blogger outreach code of ethics

Why businesses should appreciate bloggers