Website Doctor

Here are my thoughts and suggestions for PR people should pitch stories to bloggers. Oftentimes when PR folks send a story to a blogger they’ll get a nasty reply giving out about spam, one saying “I am not a journalist”, or worse still, complaining about the PR person or their client publically.

How to prevent that happening

I think the primary thing for PR people is to understand that most bloggers really, really hate spam, and when approaching them you should avoid at all costs appearing like spam. That means not sending unsolicited form emails, press releases etc.

Some bloggers tolerance levels for spam can be quite low: after after receiving just a single unsolicited email they might decide to name & shame you (or your client!) as a spammer, vow never to purchase from your client again, etc etc.

Of course all bloggers are not alike; the blogosphere is very diverse. For example my spam-tolerance level is quite high – if I get spam I don’t like, I’ll usually just delete it and move on.

How can a PR person approach the blogger without setting off these sensitivities?

There’s a few options. If the blogger has their email address listed publicly on the site, see do they mention what kind of emails they want to receive. Send them a short initial email introducing yourself and asking if they mind if you send them on something for consideration. Maybe tell them why you picked them to contact.

If they don’t have email, you could leave a comment on one of their blog posts, saying you’d like to get in touch, and leave your email address for them to contact you.

You could call them if there’s a number listed- your mileage may vary. Speaking for myself here, I prefer contact by email 100 times over a phone call because I can deal with the email whenever I want.

Even better, but time consuming, is to genuinely develop relationships with the blogging community. Online social networking like Twitter is great for getting to know people better too. And possibly the best, but most time consuming, is to actually start blogging yourself.

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