PRBC has talked a lot about blogger outreach from the PR side (see: Pitch Problems and Need Blogger Outreach? A Case Study in How NOT to Do It.)
This post is about bloggers reaching out to PR professionals.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that there are unscrupulous content producers in content farms looking to get as many clicks on their links as possible. Some of the content creators have gotten more and more sophisticated in their techniques, some might even go so far as to call some of these techniques deceptive.
For example, you might have seen pitches similar to this one:
“This is (NAME), I went through your site (YOUR BLOG SITE) while surfing in Google, am very much impressed with your site’s unique informations.
I work as a content writer in many educational communities and love the opportunity to guest post for your readers. I would like to give you a unique article on any education related topics or you can also suggest me any education related topic. No duplication or copying of the article is done. I assure you that the article will be published only on your site.
The best part is I won’t be charging you a penny, but in return all I need is just one link with in the article. I would be really thankful, if you allow me to do relevant informative guests post in your blog.
Looking forward for a positive reply.
Best Regards,
(NAME)”
Aside from the language and grammar issues, the warning bells should go off regarding the outside link, particularly if the author is writing on a topic that has absolutely nothing to do with the link they want to use.
The response more PR Pros use to these kinds of mass email pitches (if they respond at all) is probably something like:
“(NAME),
We won’t published previously mass-published posts, but if you would be interested in writing something specifically for us for our audience of (TARGET DEMOGRAPHIC), we would be happy to consider it for our blog. However, since we are not [related to the link you want to use] focused, we would not be able to link to website. Again, you can see our blog guidelines here: (YOUR WEBSITE).
Thanks!”
To read the rest, you’ll have to go check out PRBreakfastClub, where I wrote this as a guest piece.