The Art of the Pitch: How to Land Coverage on More Blogs

The key to successfully pitching blogs is to understand how the blog is going to benefit by posting your story.  Sorry to say, but bloggers don’t care about how much it would help you and your business if they post about you.  They want to know how your story helps them.  This is a perfect example of Law 13 from Robert Greene’s seminal book The 48 Laws of Power:  “When Asking for Help, Appeal to People’s Self-Interest, Never to Their Mercy or Gratitude”

Now blogs don’t mind if posting about you helps you too, but they are not a charity out there to provide free publicity.  They’re a business just like any other, so in order to successfully gain coverage you have to sell them on the fact that posting about you makes sense for their business objectives.

So, what exactly are a blogs business goals, anyway?  In a word: Pageviews.  Blogs make money by selling advertising, and the more pageviews they get the more ads they can sell.  In order to get yourself covered on more blogs, you need to keep this in mind at all times when pitching them your story.  Here are a few ways to do it:

Tell them why your story will interest their readers and get them to click.

If you’re going to pitch a blog, you should have a pretty good idea about what other kinds of stories they run and what their readers are interested in.  Do some research on their blog and find some similar posts to the one you’re trying to sell them, and then look at anything that will help you measure the success of that post.

Most blogs will have buttons to let people “Like” their posts on Facebook or retweet them on Twitter, so definitely look at those, along with anything else you can find.  That way when you email the blog you can tell them, “This story about my company is just like Post X, which got 1,000 retweets for you a few months ago, so I know your readers will respond to it as well.”  The blogger will now see the direct correlation between posting your story and getting pageviews, and he’ll jump at the opportunity.

Write a clickable headline.

The headline is the most important part of a blog post that determines whether or not someone will click to read it.  Usually people decide whether or not they want to read a post only by reading the headline, or at most the headline and a sub-headline.  This means you have to make sure yours will hook people and make them click.

Asking an open-ended question is one great way to do this.  At the extremes, you’ll see things like “Is this common household product going to kill you?” and “Could a new regulation bankrupt your business in 6 months?”  Typically the answers to these questions wind up being “No,” but they still get people to click.

You don’t have to go to this far, but you need to identify the biggest hook in your story and find a way to make it an interesting headline.  Besides using a loaded question that makes people curious, you can also make a bold statement that will make people want to find out more.  A quick Google search turns up plenty of resources for writing great headlines, so if you’re stuck give them a look.

Write your story to be copied and pasted.

Under the disguise of a press release, write out the entire story you want them to run about you, and in a way that makes it easy for the blogger to copy and paste into their blog.  The less work they have to do to get your post to fit their site, the more likely they are to post it because it takes almost no effort on that part.  If you have the technical expertise, you can even send them an HTML version of the post with all of the formatting and links coded as well as a Word document.  If done right, there is almost no downside for them to post your story since it’s not going to take them any time to do.

A story that is guaranteed to get pageviews, and that takes almost work for them to post, is a blogger’s dream.  Use your pitch to show them why your story will get them pageviews, and provide a story that they can easily copy and paste, and there’s almost nothing that will stop a blogger from writing about you.