Fortunately, the level of spam blog pitches sent to my e-mail inbox is low. And when the messages do reach me, I typically skim and delete them.

But occasionally, I get fired up enough to respond with an electronic tongue-lashing, and this past Wednesday was one of those times. A company asking for me to blog about its product, even though — get this — “it might not be very pertinent to [my] site” deserves to be told off.

Here’s what I wrote:

Dear Staf [sic]:

You just sent me a terrible pitch. You have obviously never read my blog, or you would know that your pitch was completely irrelevant to me. I also don’t blog on topics/products in exchange for something.

If you’re interested in paying me to teach you how to run a good blogger relations campaign and send better pitches, then let’s talk. Otherwise, please don’t waste my time.

I also made sure to send a copy of my reply to Kevin Dugan, co-author of The Bad Pitch Blog.

The right way to pitch bloggers
As I and others have written and said before, good blogger relations campaigns should include the following tactics:

  • Identifying the goal(s) of the campaign before starting it — raising awareness? moving people to take a particular action?
  • Reading the bloggers’ blogs well in advance of pitch time (certain cases of crisis communications excepting)
  • Sending personalized and content-relevant messages to the bloggers
  • Pitching more than just the A-listers

And if you’ve already built a genuine relationship with the blogger prior to sending your pitch, even better.

More resources on blogger relations

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