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What to do when a PR company pitches to you badly

Every day I get 5-10 emails from PR companies trying to pitch me with one of their client’s products or services.

In my estimate - 1 in 10 do it well.

The rest clearly either don’t know how to pitch to bloggers or don’t really care.

Common mistakes in pitching to bloggers include:

• impersonal emails - emails that are clearly being sent to hundreds if not thousands of people
• incorrectly addressed emails - emails addressed to the wrong person/blog - I regularly get emails where it’s clear someone forgot to copy and paste my name in and delete another blogger’s name
• irrelevant pitches - where the product being pitches has nothing to do with the blog being pitched (for example - today ProBlogger got pitched to link to a newly released cufflink!)
• long press releases - long slabs of text don’t really inspire most bloggers

The list could go on and on.

I know most bloggers simply bin most of these ‘pitch’ emails (or respond with a snarky one telling the person where to go) but I’ve decided to do something a little more constructive and have been replying to the 90% of bad ones with the following email:

Dear XXXX (insert person’s name).

I appreciate you reaching out to bloggers but wonder if you’d have more luck with a different approach.

Please accept my humble suggestions:

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/10/30/how-to-pitch-to-bloggers-21-tips/

I hope you find these helpful in pitching bloggers.

Darren Rowse

OK - some of you are thinking that this is a complete waste of time - and it may well be, although it takes all of 1 seconds using TextExpander - but what I’ve found is that a large percentage of those that I send this to respond with a thank you and in a couple of instances it’s actually led us into a fruitful exchange.

On one occasion the PR person that I sent the above email to re-pitched their product to me with the opportunity to give the product away to readers (the ensuing competition was a big success) and on another occasion the company behind the pitch became a paid sponsor of the blog. Neither of these things would have happened unless I’d responded in the way that I had.

While it might be tempting to simple delete such emails - perhaps responding constructively might actually lead to something positive - for me in these two instances it led to both increased traffic and income for my blogs.

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Original post by Darren Rowse