I’m lucky enough to love my job. I have a job that encompasses content creation, SEO and Influencer Marketing. Essentially, what I do is ‘Digital PR’. I work with bloggers, influencers, journalists and editors to improve awareness of a brand and to boost their position in the search engine results.
I’ve been doing it for about five years now and I’ve worked with some amazing bloggers. I love liaising with influencers, discussing terms and seeing the final result, whether it’s in the form of a blog post or a beautiful photo on Instagram.
Sometimes I hunt down bloggers myself, but sometimes they find me, which is great. I’m always happy to meet another blogger. But the way in which bloggers pitch PRs genuinely matters. It’s the start of your working relationship and it sets the tone — your initial pitch makes all the difference between a long-standing working relationship and the ‘delete’ button.
Below, I’ve laid out my top tips on how to pitch to a PR if you’re a blogger looking to collaborate with exciting brands.
Tailor your Pitch
With any luck, this is the start of a long-term business relationship. It’s best to get things off on the right foot. Make sure you use your PRs name. If you know the PR has worked on a few campaigns you’re interested in, mention them — this will show you’ve not just copied and pasted a generic pitch. Tell us how you found our information. If a fellow blogger has recommended you pitch to us, let us know. We love to know how bloggers find us.
What Type of Collaboration Are You Looking For?
There are a lot of ways PRs and bloggers collaborate. You might like hosting guest posts on your blog, you might be offering link insertions or banners. You might be looking to review products and organise giveaways. Let us know what type of collaboration you’re interested in, because we know not all bloggers will be interested in every type of collaboration.
Don’t Worry About Being Overly Formal
It’s nice to be polite, but the relationship between a blogger and a PR is an interesting one. We usually have a friendly back-and-forth. We’re able to build a relationship — it’s the best part of our job. We also want to see your personality shine through in the pitch because in many ways, when we organise collaborations, we’re investing in you, as a person and your overall brand — not your website.
It’s Not All About Domain Authority
We all know about domain authority, and, let’s be honest — we’re all a bit obsessed. We’re all interested in building our domain authority and constantly improving. But I’ll let you in on a secret — domain authority isn’t actually the most important thing to us. It might be an element, but there are other aspects that are much more important.
When organising collaborations on behalf of our clients, we check out your DA to make sure it’s equal to, or greater than, our client’s DA. But that’s usually all we care about — and sometimes even that rule goes out the window, if we’re dealing with a niche client. We are much more interested in things like your page views, your followers, how engaged your following is on social media and the look and feel of your website, to name just a few.
It’s useful when bloggers pitch to us and let us know their domain authority, but don’t leave it at that. A media kit is always useful for us. Consider including:
- What you write about (your niche)
- Your demographic
- Your average pageviews
- Whether you have worked with big brands before
- Information regarding your followers on social media
- Links to your social media accounts
- Average entries if you run giveaways
- Average shares on sponsored content posts (this one is important — we don’t want a post to be published just to be ignored. We want eyes on that content, and if your sponsored content is well-received, this is a big perk)
- Your fees! This will save us time with back-and-forths. We’d much rather know how much you charge so we can discuss with our clients up-front. If we need to negotiate, we’ll let you know.
Demonstrate Your Know your SEO
If you know your stuff as far as SEO is concerned, you’re a much more attractive prospect to us. Personally, I love visiting a blog and seeing appropriate use of internal links, a well optimised slug and great meta descriptions. We check out whether you’re using effective anchor text and whether you’re making common SEO mistakes. It’s also important to us that you write content that is a decent length. We always check out your blog after a pitch, so it’s important to make sure everything’s in order.
Keep Your Pitch Short and Snappy
Don’t get me wrong, we love a good chat, we love to cultivate relationships with you, but we also have a job we need to do. You’re busy, we’re busy, everyone’s busy — so a short, friendly and to-the-point email is best.
Your PR Is Your Middleman — Don’t Shoot the Messenger
What you might not know is that sometimes, as PRs, we’re put in awkward positions. Of course, we always want to get the best deal for our clients but genuinely, we want to keep bloggers happy, too. We can’t always get you the amount of money you want or deserve because most of us are dealing with small, growing businesses. This means we’re doing what we can with a limited budget.
Most of the time, our clients expect miracles, even with a small investment, and we have our hands full keeping their expectations under control. So if we come back at you with a smaller figure than you expected, please be kind! We’re only doing our jobs. We’re happy to hear a ‘no’, we’re happy to negotiate further, but it’s not uncommon for us to sever ties completely if we feel an influencer is just plain rude. On the other hand, if a blogger is more willing to work with our budget limitations, we can almost guarantee we will come to him or her first when we have another opportunity. And remember — it’s in our best interests to get you a price you’re happy with, because cultivating a long-term, happy working relationship makes our work life easier (and more pleasant!).
Drop By and Say Hi
Feel free to drop us a line from time to time — it’s not pestering. We love to hear from you and if you are offering deals on sponsored posts or if you’re organising a gift guide, we want to be the first to know!
Follow PRs on Social Media
Often, the first place we go to when we start a new campaign is Twitter. The #PRRequests hashtag is great. It allows me to meet new bloggers and reconnect with old ones. Following us on social media will also give you a good idea of what type of clients we work with, which will help you personalise your pitch.
If You Don’t Hear Back…
You might not hear back from the PR you’re pitching to, but that doesn’t mean you’ll never work together. Try again in a few months when, more than likely, you’ll have some new, impressive stats you’ll want to share. It might be that the PR you approached had nothing relevant initially, but a lot can change in three months and they might have something perfect for you now!
About the Author: Samantha Lyon is a digital marketer and one half of the creative team at Enchanting Digital, a digital marketing company that helps children’s brands thrive.
Pin It!
This piece has some valuable tips and helps bloggers both rookies & experienced alike. Cheers