collaborative post
When you’ve been running a blog for a while, one thing you’ll notice is that you begin to receive PR enquiries. In a nutshell, these are messages from people that want to collaborate with you on something mutually beneficial. For example, if you run a fashion blog, you may get PR enquiries from clothing brands that wish to advertise on your blog. Or, they may want you to review their latest line of clothing and link to their website.
PR enquiries come in all different forms. But, one thing’s for sure: they are messages that you should not ignore, especially as some of those enquiries will offer the opportunity for your blog to get promoted elsewhere on the Internet. To that end, how should you deal with PR enquiries?
Respond to all enquiries
When you get emails from individuals and brand representatives, the least you can do is take the time to reply to their messages. Even if you’re going to respond with a simple message telling them you aren’t interested, it’s still courteous to reply to people.
The only exception to that rule is ignoring spammy emails. As with any emails you receive, you should check the legitimacy of your inbound blog email messages. After all, the last thing you want to do is respond to a message from some poor soul’s hijacked email account!
Email automation is your friend
You know you’re running a blog people are really into when you get dozens of PR enquiries a week, or even per day! As you can appreciate, responding to high volumes of emails can be rather time-consuming, especially if your blog is only a sideline.
Short of paying someone to read and respond to your emails, what else can you do to deal with high volumes of emails? Well, the good news is that you can use email automation tools. For instance, you can use your email software to insert canned responses that save you having to type out the same replies every day.
And when you do respond, you could consider using email signature software to update your signatures dynamically. You may wish to put links to your latest blog posts, for example, or add seasonal greetings to recipients.
Have a media kit ready to send out
One of the questions people will likely ask of you is how much traffic goes to your blog. Marketers and brand representatives will wish to see details on things like numbers of unique visitors, traffic sources, and so on.
With all that in mind, it’s worth having a media kit that you can easily send out to interested parties. You should also keep your media kit updated with the latest blog statistics so that those people can check out the latest data from your blog.
Be flexible with your pricing
Lastly, it pays to be flexible with the kinds of prices you want to quote to marketers and brands. Sometimes you may even wish to do a free collaboration; it all depends on who is contacting you and what’s on offer.
