The Arcane Art Of Cold Emailing Bloggers

Startup Moon:

The big day has arrived. Your product is ready to launch, you know exactly which bloggers you need to target, and all you have to do now is well, convince them to write about your product with only a few lines of email. Very few.

In both of my companies I managed the marketing of products which were anything but “sexy” – not usual blogger material and still – we received coverage. I also guest posted for TechCrunch, LifeHacker, The Next Web and others without much (or any) writing references. Here are the emails which led me there and what stands behind them.

The biggest leap I made to get more press coverage was by changing the main question I asked myself when writing the email. At first, like most people, I simply tried to explain why our product benefits users. Having lots of engaged users is obviously my goal but bloggers have a different one. They’re not interested in your users but rather in their own users = readers. Bloggers want to get as many people to read their posts, and if you can help them meet that goal – you’re in. So I started asking myself “How will writing about my product drive more traffic to blog X?”. That changed everything. Emails were suddenly getting answered and my product started appearing in blogs. When focusing on the bloggers’ goals you might not get to list all your features or discuss the innovative technology in detail, but – you’ll get in.