How to Effectively Pitch Your Content to Editors

Chances are, you know how important it is to get your company featured in niche industry publications. After all, high-quality guest posting in major industry blogs can do a lot to grow your company — build awareness, showcase expertise, and bring in targeted traffic.

Who doesn’t want that?

However, if you ever tried to reach out to editors, you probably know how hard it is to get your pitch noticed since you’re competing with hundreds or even thousands of pitches.

When sending your pitch, you are probably thinking: “What if they reject my content?”

Truth be told, you will get rejected. Not even once. Some editors will delete your email or just ignore it. This is the hard-to-swallow truth about pitching your content you need to accept.

So, what can you do to increase the odds of getting your content published?

Let’s get into it.

How to find journalists to pitch

Basically, there are three approaches to finding journalists.

Approach #1: Manually make a list of journalists

This is the old-school way to find bloggers and journalists you want to reach out to. What you need to do is to search for relevant blogs in your industry, then find authors who cover your beat. To search for publications in your beat, use queries like ‘[niche] blog’, ‘[niche] news’, ‘[niche] website’, ‘[niche] trends’. 

Approach #2: Using a PR outreach tool

Although approach #1 is quite popular, it is time-consuming. There are a lot of PR tools that help you find bloggers, authors, journalists from whatever industry you need. Here’s the list of my favorite outreach tools:

• NinjaOutreach helps you find influencers, leads, and bloggers and automate your PR outreach strategy. All you need to do is type your keywords to access millions of profiles and their email addresses. 
• HARO allows you to receive regular source requests from journalists via email. You can pitch to journalists with the answer, and if they are interested, they’ll reach out!
• Mention helps to monitor your brand, PR campaign, target keywords, etc. on the web and social media.

Approach #3: Borrow ideas from your competitors

To find journalists and bloggers who have linked to your competitors and approach them with your pitch, you’ll need a backlink research tool such as Ahrefs. Simply plug your competitor’s URL into Ahrefs and click on ‘backlinks’ to see all the blogs linking to your competitor. 

How to craft an effective pitch email

Before getting into the details of creating an effective cold pitch, I want you to make sure you have a compelling reason to reach out to editors, bloggers, or influencers. If you’re not sure you provide real value to them, then don’t. A lot of people do not follow this advice and complain about how hard getting an article published on a major blog is. That’s why I advise you to formulate a clear reason why you reach out to a person and what value you’re going to bring.

Let’s look at the tips that will help you create an effective pitch email

• Know who you’re pitching to. Learning as much as possible about the person you want to reach out to will help you find the unique approach to pitch your content. So make sure you know the topics those people cover usually and read their recent works.

• Tell the editor why your pitch is perfect for their blog. Your goal is to explain clearly how your content will fill a hole in their coverage, provide value to readers, and engage the audience. Never blast the same pitch to dozens of editors without changing a word.

• Pitch a story, not a topic. A pitch having a narrative backbone is a good one. Your email should convey the story you want to write and have a reason why your story matters. Telling a short story rather than writing just a topic will allow you to showcase the deep knowledge of the topic and the insight you plan to pursue. Keep in mind that pitches should be written in the same style you expect to write the story. Make sure a pitch story is not more than 200-300 words.

• Be original. I guess there’s nothing new for you at this point. To make your pitch stand out, explain to editors why your angle is fresh and what makes your content unique.

• Write a relevant and compelling subject line. Do not be misleading when creating a subject line. Do not write something irrelevant to just grab the editor’s attention. Focus on writing a subject line that will convey the reason for outreach. I like these ones:

content ideas for a [Company’s] guest post

writing a guest post for [Company]

exclusive content for [Company]

• Don’t attach a piece of content to your email (yes, even if you already have one written). The editor should green-light the pitch first, then you can go back to your draft and reframe it according to your editorial guidelines.

If your content idea is turned down, don’t take it personally. It was the idea that was rejected, not you. Frequently, your pitch is good but ‘not quite right at this time’. What I would recommend is not to get offended and stay in touch.

More stellar pitches to you!