How Bloggers Screw Up their Chance to Be Contacted

Blogger outreach is not an easy task. Influencers/bloggers are becoming the preferred channels through which brands talk to their potential customers. And each blogger/influencer has a website filled with traps that a marketer has to avert to get a message through. Sometimes, it's easy - there is an email address, a contact form or some kind of social media account published on the website or blog. But there are times when it seems that the bloggers (influencer wannabes) are hiding from any attempt to be reached out to on purpose. Here are a few ways bloggers tend to screw up their chance to be contacted by marketers (based on experience).

Unlisted

You are a publisher. You rely on advertising revenue. Advertising revenue can come from a series of sources - advertising networks like Google's AdSense, content recommendation engines like Taboola, banner ads, and so on. But let's say a brand loves your writing, is pleased with your metrics, and chooses your website from a million (or so) similar ones to run an advertising campaign. And when it comes to reaching out to you... bump! You have no means of contact listed in your online publication.

While this seems unlikely (or just plain stupid), it happens more often than you think.

Not working

You are a publisher. You rely on advertising revenue. Let's say a brand chooses your website from a million (or so) to run an advertising campaign. A marketer visits your website and finds your contact form. And then... bump! The contact form is not working - you do have a shortcode embedded in your "Contact" page but, for some reason, the form itself is not rendered or it is rendered but it responds with an error message telling the marketer to contact the administrator by another method.

No longer available

You are a publisher. You rely on advertising revenue. Let's say a brand chooses your website from a million (or so) to run an advertising campaign. A marketer visits your website and finds your email address. And then... bump! The email sent is returned with a "Mail delivery failure" error message, with your mail server telling the marketer that there's nobody here with such an account.

No social presence

While this seems illogical - every blog out there needs to be on at least some social media outlets today - it does happen, and more often than you think. The website - usually after a redesign by a lazy, careless or amateur designer - does have links to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest... but the links point to the services' homepage rather than your account. Add this to all of the above - and your blog becomes absolutely unreachable. And even the desperate attempts to dig out an email address from the domain's WHOIS data will often fail.

So, if you are a publisher relying on advertising revenue to make a living, please make sure to check - and double-check - the contact information on your website. If you want to make money, that is.

(My two cents)

 

Some good points.
Its a balance - I run a few blogs and get loads of unwanted comments each day so my instinct is to turn off ways for 3rd parties to contact me, but in so doing I / we all loose out on the real outreaches of people interested in sharing content in a positive helpful way.

 

You are right, there is too much garbage filling our mailboxes and blog comments already. But the solution is not cutting off all ways to communicate with the "outside world", especially in an age when you can't rely on banner ads alone to generate revenue for your blogs.
Yet the worst thing is certainly when there are listed means of getting in touch but they don't work - webmasters like this give people the impression they are either lazy or not interested.