Pitching a major blog is essentially going through the same gate/different keepers as doing PR for the New York Times or whomever. There's a million people who want to go through, and -- dirty little secret -- the ability to reject you is key to the gatekeepers' power and status.
If you're going to send out pitch emails, I'm going to plug Peldi's technique for getting blog coverage yet again: find the wee little blogs in your community who will absolutely melt to learn that anybody reads them. Send them personalized emails. Bootstrap your way up the chain.
In particular, if you've been in a community for a while, you should have a sense for who the really influential people read. Watch which way the stories tend to spread, in particular the outlets a step or two before the story hits the large sites. Pitch that guy. Or, recursively, the guy one step before him. And every time you pitch someone, for goodness' sake, mention as social proof the people on his social graph who already like you. The Internet is Chicago politics with less Daley: "don't be nobody who was sent by nobody".
I got almost a realtime education in this watching my blog bounce around the mainstream media's sites this week. I'm fairly confident somebody at the New York Times reads Marginal Revolution, who reads Slashdot, who reads Reddit. And, of course, everyone in the mainstream media reads the NYT and most of them take direction from it.
The trickle-up approach definitely works. Look at The Next Web and Inside Facebook... they break so many cool apps that then get picked up by RWW, TechCrunch, or Mashable.
Also, if you catch a night or weekend writer/editor, you could be in luck. There have been so many times -- especially at RWW -- when I was absolutely starved for something to write about on a Sunday night. I would have killed/maimed to get a pitch email then, but everyone was waiting until Monday morning to flood my inbox.
> I would have killed/maimed to get a pitch email then, but everyone was waiting until Monday morning to flood my inbox.
Why not just dig through the pile of things that didn't end up getting published on Monday (or, to be more systematic, why not have a "slow news day" queue that less-interesting stories could be shunted into after a first pass)?
I have learned that when a woman says "All the good men are taken", she is really making a comment about herself. The relevance of this as it regards journalists with a full inbox and dearth of story ideas is left as an exercise for the reader.
I'll give you my inbox for a day, and we'll see what you can make of it. =)
Snark aside, it's really different on this side of the divide. Finding a relevant angle or some aspect of a startup that your average Internet user can relate to is extremely difficult, and writers and editors have to be very picky sometimes.
Well, my experience of pitching to major bloggers has been frustrating. For example, I've mailed Mashable thrice and filled the Startup Series application but I never heard back from you. I can read from your post that you get a deluge of emails and it is totally understandable from your perspective. But from the startup perspective, it is frustrating not to hear back. After a few emails, you start wondering if anyone is even reading your email or even opening it. Being a major blog, of course, you cannot write about every startup that emails you but even a small (non-automated) reply saying that a particular startup might not be a good fit goes a long way. In fact, I started wondering if my mail was going to spam box or if something was wrong with my email program. Do you think replying to every mail is impossible? Of course, you don't have to do it personally.
One exception is RWW who replied saying they usually don't cover startups of my type. I liked the fact that they cared enough to atleast reply.
So, I can see why Mash didn't get back to you and why RWW didn't write about your company.
It's really hard to get regular people who don't own websites interested in stuff like security, optimization, downtime monitoring... anything to do with the backend of the Internet, anything that shows the "man behind the curtain."
And in your case, I'd say you don't even really need coverage on a major blog. The majority of readers of a major blog aren't going to be paying customers.
I'd honestly advise you to go after a niche publication. Sure, it's not as splashy, but I guarantee it'll get the job done a lot better and convert a higher percentage of post-readers.
Thanks for your reply. Yep, I totally understand (in hindsight) that my service may not be the best fit for your audience. All I was complaining about was a lack of response :)
Actually, I had pitched Mashable only after doing a fair amount of research which concluded that you do write about web analytics, optimization and marketing sort of stuff. Here a few recent stories which nicely fit your description of "man behind the curtain"
Of course, now I am going ahead with niche blogs in web analytics and online marketing domain (and finding success too) but when I was preparing to pitch you (and other major bloggers) I had made sure that they covered similar stories in the past (except that I am bootstrapped and they got funding!)
So you're looking for services geared towards people who don't own websites? A couple of friends and I are bootstrapping a social desktop service called Favetop.com, which may be attractive to many of your readers looking for an easier internet experience. I emailed Mashable earlier and submitted our service for the Spark of Genius feature but haven't received any responses. I'm going to follow your recommendation and fill out the Pitch Your Startup form next. Thanks for the suggestion.
I'm not quite sure I still understand what the best way to "pitch" a blog for coverage is.
Are you saying startups should stop pitching you, and pitch the smaller publications instead? and if a story is hot, you'll automatically pick it up? or, should they fill in the form, and email news@mashable, but not email you, personally?
This press thing is new to most hackers, and because it's new, it looks fairly hard from the outside, so we fall back to the one thing we do know: persistence. Pitch everyone, all the time. Is there a better way of getting covered by the big technology blogs out there?
Many of those writers actually read hacker news and I've seen them break stories that were on hacker news the previous day (e.g. note Jolie replying in one of the threads on this page).
It might be better to still pitch big blogs even if they ignore it.
If you get some press from smaller blogs and the big guys read them, it may recall them that you tried to contact them and have them have a second look at it ?
If you're going to send out pitch emails, I'm going to plug Peldi's technique for getting blog coverage yet again: find the wee little blogs in your community who will absolutely melt to learn that anybody reads them. Send them personalized emails. Bootstrap your way up the chain.
In particular, if you've been in a community for a while, you should have a sense for who the really influential people read. Watch which way the stories tend to spread, in particular the outlets a step or two before the story hits the large sites. Pitch that guy. Or, recursively, the guy one step before him. And every time you pitch someone, for goodness' sake, mention as social proof the people on his social graph who already like you. The Internet is Chicago politics with less Daley: "don't be nobody who was sent by nobody".
I got almost a realtime education in this watching my blog bounce around the mainstream media's sites this week. I'm fairly confident somebody at the New York Times reads Marginal Revolution, who reads Slashdot, who reads Reddit. And, of course, everyone in the mainstream media reads the NYT and most of them take direction from it.