Never Run Out of Brands to Pitch!
If you've felt like you can't find any more brands in your niche to pitch, or you're just not sure how to find them in the first place, then this is the episode for you! Tune in as Bree shares how to find hundreds of brands to pitch and how to find the correct email contact for them!
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE TOPICS DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:
"Like I said at the beginning, content creators work too much for free! You guys bust your booties doing so much amazing work for free, and I want you to get paid! Let's get some money in your bank account!"
Break down your pillars even more!
Yes, we're breaking down our content pillars even more! This is going to help us know what brands to look for! So what does this look like?
Let's say you're a fashion blogger and one pillar you may have is fitness fashion. Under that one pillar, you may post athleisure, your workouts, "fitspo", and things like that. Here are some other things you could look at though! Do you take supplements? Is there a protein that you use? You could even talk about meal prepping! What about workout equipment? You could talk about water bottles, yoga mats, aesthetic weights, and more. What about sustainable fashion brands? Or curvy fashion? Within just the pillar of fitness fashion, you've now just created 3 subcategories of supplements, cute equipment, and sustainable fashion. And with that, you now have three additional areas to look for brands.
Then apply this same method to each of your main content pillars!
Do the Research
Armed with a spreadsheet to keep track of it all, you'll want to head to Google and Pinterest to search for those specific types of brands within each of your niches. This is similar to how we do our keyword and SEO research! Sticking with the fashion blogger example, you'll search "sustainable athletic apparel" and that should give you tons of results. Do this both on Google and on Pinterest!
Once you've come up with a list of brands from those two searches, I want you to head over to Instagram. There you'll type in each brand, individually, and find them on Instagram. Then (and here's my favorite trick) I want you to hit that down arrow right at the top of their profile, that shows you other accounts that are similar! And just like that, you're going to find even more brands. So let's say you were able to come up with 12 niche areas. We just took one niche and were able to come up with at least 20 brands within that category using Google and Pinterest! That's why you'll need a spreadsheet to keep track of all of them.
Keep track of everything!
Really build out your spreadsheet to make sure you're tracking every single thing! You'll want to track brands to pitch, all the emails you're sending, and when you're following up with them.
When you go back and do this research again you'll want your spreadsheet to track everyone you've already pitched! Also, if you pitch a brand in early fall and you didn't hear back from them even after following up several times, put them on another tab to reach out 3 months later. So let's say you're pitching 20 brands in a week, and you don't hear back from 12 of them. After all of the follow-ups that you did, you can just copy those 12, move them over to your three-month tab, and set a date in your planner and your calendar to go back and re-pitch them three months later. And you're just going to repeat this process until your spreadsheet gets too big and you get to make a second spreadsheet!
How to contact these brands
So the next question I often get is "now that we've found all these brands, how do I contact them?" I have a few tips for that! First, look on their Instagram account. Sometimes on their Instagram profile, the social media person or PR/marketing person will put their email address. You can also shoot the brand a DM to ask for the right email! I want to be clear, we will never recommend that you pitch a brand in your DMs, but we can ask them for the right email address!
We can also try finding their Facebook page and ask them for a good email address in messenger. Keep your messages short and sweet, like "I would love to chat with somebody about a collaboration opportunity. Who should I email about this?"
Another tool I've found recently is called Hunter, and it's honestly amazing! Like magic, you can type the company name in the search bar and it will give you email results! You can search for a few emails for free every month, or pay a very affordable rate to have more searches.
Okay, friends! Now it's time to take action! Go sit down at maybe your favorite coffee shop, or your favorite place at your house, light a candle, and start researching. I bet you within two hours you're going to have so many brands to pitch, that you can set yourself up to have such a successful fall and a wildly successful holiday season! I believe in you 100%!!
Resources Mentioned
More about Bree Pair:
Bree Pair is a blogging coach and founder of Thrive - A blogging community built to empower and educate bloggers to make a full-time income by spending time on the right things. Her passion is helping bloggers create a strategy for growth and working with them on every side of their business to give them the confidence they need to be successful. Bree is propelled by the results of seeing bloggers go from overwhelmed to steady and sustained growth and creating the lifestyle they want.
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