You have a brilliant idea for a blog post.

You know how to pitch.

You’ve read the blog’s masthead, contact page, and About page.

You’ve worked out which editor to pitch to. Your fingers are twitching to type out your pitch and send it right away.

But you don’t see their email address listed on the site, and you have no clue how the fudge you’re supposed to find it out.

Sound familiar? 

Don’t fret, and don’t give up hope of getting your pitch into your dream editor’s hands.

I’ve been through this challenge myself, and I found some simple online tools that helped me get the email addresses I wanted.

Here’s a quick walk through the 6 tools I find the most helpful, and how I use them.

[Read more…]

The theme for this Pitchfest is: Audience. More on that — and the chance to earn $150 — to come, but first, here’s a quick tip to help you get to know a site’s audience quickly and how it’ll improve your pitches.

Every editor offering pitching advice will tell you, “Let me know you understand my audience and why your pitch is a good fit for them.”

The best way to gain that understanding is to become part of the audience. Read the blog, and engage with other readers. You’ll become familiar with the topics and voice of the site, and understand what readers look for in content.

But…

That takes time. And, frankly, if you write on the subject, you’re probably already reading 800 other blogs about it. Do you really want to add another to your reading list?

Most pitchers approach this conundrum wrong. They want to pitch a lot of blogs, so they Google their topic and send a generic pitch every site on the first page of results — whether it’s relevant or not. When I ran a blog called DIY Writing, you wouldn’t believe how many pitches I got that started with something like, “Since you write about DIY and crafting…” Nope. No, I do not.

You can do better than that… without committing to reading a novel’s worth of blog posts every day before you pitch.

[Read more…]