The Wrong Way to Talk to Bloggers

During the course of marketing a business online, you’ll likely want to reach out to some key bloggers who are already talking about your industry. There are some keys to doing this successfully, which I’ll cover soon.

But first, I’d like to explore the wrong way.

Here’s an email I received this morning:

Hi! Thank you so much for opening this email! I’m looking for a few good bloggers who are ranked well within Google to write a paid posting on their website for IrrelevantCoUSA. We’d love it if you could write an article for us on your blog: http://yourblog.tumblr.com/

The article itself would have to contain four to five specific keywords that would be linked back to pages within the website.

Before you say no to this opportunity, please consider that 60% of all adults need products from IrrelevantCoUSA and most of them are over paying for those products. We’d like to change the way people buy these products!

Please get back to me if you’re interested! If you’re not interested, please send a kind reply back saying as much.

Thank you for your time!

Sincerely,
Some PR Intern

Every single part of this email is poorly written. This is not uncommon.

1. It’s not personal. Bloggers, like any other human, are not comfortable being cold emailed and asked to do something if the person on the other end doesn’t really care about them or their content.
2. It’s irrelevant. I changed the company in this email to IrrelevantCoUSA, because the actual company was completely irrelevant to what we cover on the blog she was asking us to post on. If your company isn’t a great fit for my blog, there is no reason to even reach out in the first place.
3. It’s too demanding. You start off by asking me to do something for you. You continue to explain that you are asking me to do this for the nobel cause of increasing your sales. You give me specific criteria for the ask. Why am I doing this for you again? This is like meeting someone at a party and before even getting their name, asking “Hello fellow party-goer! Can I borrow a couple hundred dollars?”
4. You request that I reply to the email, regardless of whether I’m interested or not. Let’s think about that. I get this email and think “Ok, I’ll do this faceless corporation a personal favor for some reason. Let’s see, how do I get started…ok she wants me to email her. But she wants me to email her even if I’m not interested?” Who would do that? Is this a real person, or an emotionless unsocialized PR robot?

Bloggers hate this crap. If you have a popular blog, you’ll get at least 10 such emails a week. Luckily, you’ll also get one or two good emails. I’ll explore those next.

It’s really as simple as being genuine, kind, and reciprocal. But people like lists, so I’m going to write up a short list of best practices for blogger outreach, and post them here as well.