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If you’re not familiar with blogger outreach, it can be a tricky tactic to master. Get it wrong and you will be splashed over the front cover of PR Week and dragged over the Twitter hot coals – at least for one day anyway.

For some helpful tips on the subject please read this post by Ogilvy PR, entitled Creating a Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics, or this post from PR Week: Social media: Know your Bloggers.

And now for a simple idea!

Wouldn’t it be a lot easier  if blogs had some sort of visual cue in their side bar, that indicated whether they welcome pitches or not. A very tiny minority of bloggers do have text to this effect hidden within their site, usually in the About page.

Maybe something like the obvious image below could be added to your homepage sidebar, if you would like to be proactively pitched to?

And if you don’t want to be pitched to, of course you give it the (red card) thumbs down.

You could take this a step further by including text within the image to indicate the sectors that you would like to receive pitches for. The images could also come in a variety of sizes, allowing you to add them to different prominent places within your blog.

Something like this would be a visual cue for PR agencies not to approach a particular blogger as part of their blogger outreach campaign, thus saving the agency time and effort researching the blog further. It would also allow the blog owner to stop moaning about the number of boring and unrelated pitches they receive. It’s a win win!

Do you like this idea?  Do you think it should be taken further? Please leave your comment below or email me at andymerch@googlemail.com. I look forward to your thoughts.

Guest blog post by Andy Merchant

Andy is head of social media at Populate Digital and the driving force/director behind Pressitt SMNR platform. Follow him @andymerch

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