Learning Marketing in the Trenches

[Testament]

(TLDR Readers - I just got what is essentially an internship for a start up, by offering my work for free at no risk to them. I've learned more in the past week than I have in the last 8 months of reading. This is my progress thread to outline what I'm learning each day about how businesses work.)

For months now I've wanted to put up a progress thread...but I had sadly, no real progress to mention. I'd gone about 10 grand in debt over my last entrepreneurial venture, and since then I've really been trying to pick up the pieces and rise from the proverbial ashes. A few months back in the US, and I was able to get a demeaning job as a barista at a cafe...then around April, I got a new job doing manual labor in a warehouse 12-14 hours a day, occasionally six days a week. And to make matters even more pressing, the company that I was working for had many, MANY, very shady business practices. Luckily for me, I was fired at the beginning of July. It was probably about the best time to be fired, and I managed to make enough money to pay back 75% of my debts, which feels like a huge win for me.

Anyway, when I was living in England for my last venture, I learned how to survive on practically nothing money-wise. I've been using that skill to really make the bit of savings I have left over stretch. Luckily for me, I'm fortunate enough to be able to stay rent free with my mother for the moment, so with the free time I've recently come into, I've been able to open myself up to new possibilities to get to my eventual fastlane business.

A question has wracked my brain non-stop for the last...well, since I read The Millionaire Fastlane . How can I get around the people who will be able to pull me up to the next level? Because I'd already pinpointed the most valuable skills I could set myself to learning with my 16 hours each day - sales and marketing. And there's really no other way to learn than by actually selling (or marketing) to people. The real problem was that I had no experience in sales or marketing. No proven track record, and no college degree to sell potential mentors on. So for a long time, I was at a total loss as to how to learn these skills.

It finally occurred to me that if I wanted to get around the people that could actually take me to the next level, I had to offer them a zero risk, 100% potential reward offer. And just recently, a friend mentioned to me that his brother who was a marketing consultant for start ups, might need some help with his more mundane tasks so that he could focus on the bigger things with a new start up that was currently in its kickstarter funding phase. So, I got in touch and offered my pitch: I'll do whatever you need done for your start up for free.

He started off by having me collect emails for him, and was very excited to see that I set about collecting them at a quick pace. My philosophy so far has been, treat doing work for him like he's paying me 80 grand a year. Whatever value he was expecting, give him 200% more than that. As soon as he realized that would be how I would be operating, he proceeded to add me to his start up's group skype, and I've been able to get a bird's eye view into the inner workings of an actual fastlane business! Its been amazing so far, and each day I've been getting introduced to new aspects of marketing for a start-up.

Anyway, I'm excited to go forward and learn this most interesting and important of business skills. I'll be updating from time to time with what I'm learning and the progress I'm making toward being a marketing superstar.

 

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[sle3pyguii]

Congrats on the gig. No better place to learn marketing for an entrepreneur than a startup.

Launch day or the day your first shipments go out is the scariest/best day.

 

[Testament]

So I ran into my second major hiccup yesterday, which was running out of major blogs to send emails to after my initial email blast. It was getting more and more difficult to find the emails of popular bloggers, so I spoke to a few people and came up with some cool ideas. I did a lot of google searching on various topics: how to run a successful kickstarter campaign, how to write a press pitch email, etc.

• CSalvato recommended that I start seeking out b-list blogs to send out PR emails to, and also to hire someone from odesk to do it for me. I've started to gather up emails from them for my second big email blast, and am up to about 20 now
• Thought about contacting youtube reviewers to see if they'd be interested in writing a piece about our upcoming product
• Another good idea that came up was just typing the phrases I've been putting into buzzsumo into twitter, and contacting people there to see if they'd tweet about our upcoming product

Besides hunting down relevant blogs and then the emails of their writers, I spent a great deal of time reworking my pitch email that I'd been sending.

My last one only snagged two replies out of about 30 emails sent. I didn't get email status tracking software until later, a google chrome extension called Streak is what I finally settled on. I also got Boomerang to set up emails to be sent at a specific time, and the Alexa page rank viewer extension, so I can get an estimate of how much traffic certain blogs are seeing.

The new one will hopefully get at least a few more responses. I followed a template I found online that looks like this:

"Hey (reviewer first name),

Thought your recent article on "The Best Beanbag Chairs of 2014 That Will Rock Your Bottom" had some pretty interesting views and I enjoyed the read. Anyway, I thought your (blog name) readers might enjoy reading about our new product - SmartChair. It's a chair that controls your every comfort need through a complex system of massage units controlled through your smartphone device. A few key features:

• More massage units per square inch than any other chair on the market
• Fully controllable and customizeable comfort experience from your smartphone
• Made of high quality chair materials

You can find more information located on our kickstarter(link). Please let me know if interested, and I can send you some more information. Thanks!

Testament
Tes@smartchair.com "

Here's the article I got the template from.

I'm planning on starting my next email send off tomorrow during the morning. I'm going to discuss my pitch with everyone else and then see if it's a go for them. I'm not sure of the exact quality level of my pitch, but I feel proud that I was able to come up with my own first custom pitch! Even though it was based on a template...heh.

I'll try to update tomorrow after a sufficient amount of time.

All in all, I'm having an absolute BLAST so far learning about marketing first-hand. It's probably the funnest thing I've done all year, honestly. I'm able to hit problems and then have to think my way out of them to find a solution. And after 8 months of working dead end, brainless jobs, it's a very refreshing feeling.

 

[Joe Cassandra]

So I ran into my second major hiccup yesterday, which was running out of major blogs to send emails to after my initial email blast. It was getting more and more difficult to find the emails of popular bloggers, so I spoke to a few people and came up with some cool ideas. I did a lot of google searching on various topics: how to run a successful kickstarter campaign, how to write a press pitch email, etc.

• CSalvato recommended that I start seeking out b-list blogs to send out PR emails to, and also to hire someone from odesk to do it for me. I've started to gather up emails from them for my second big email blast, and am up to about 20 now
• Thought about contacting youtube reviewers to see if they'd be interested in writing a piece about our upcoming product
• Another good idea that came up was just typing the phrases I've been putting into buzzsumo into twitter, and contacting people there to see if they'd tweet about our upcoming product

Besides hunting down relevant blogs and then the emails of their writers, I spent a great deal of time reworking my pitch email that I'd been sending.

My last one only snagged two replies out of about 30 emails sent. I didn't get email status tracking software until later, a google chrome extension called Streak is what I finally settled on. I also got Boomerang to set up emails to be sent at a specific time, and the Alexa page rank viewer extension, so I can get an estimate of how much traffic certain blogs are seeing.

The new one will hopefully get at least a few more responses. I followed a template I found online that looks like this:

"Hey (reviewer first name),

Thought your recent article on "The Best Beanbag Chairs of 2014 That Will Rock Your Bottom" had some pretty interesting views and I enjoyed the read. Anyway, I thought your (blog name) readers might enjoy reading about our new product - SmartChair. It's a chair that controls your every comfort need through a complex system of massage units controlled through your smartphone device. A few key features:

• More massage units per square inch than any other chair on the market
• Fully controllable and customizeable comfort experience from your smartphone
• Made of high quality chair materials

You can find more information located on our kickstarter(link). Please let me know if interested, and I can send you some more information. Thanks!

Testament
Tes@smartchair.com "

Here's the article I got the template from.

I'm planning on starting my next email send off tomorrow during the morning. I'm going to discuss my pitch with everyone else and then see if it's a go for them. I'm not sure of the exact quality level of my pitch, but I feel proud that I was able to come up with my own first custom pitch! Even though it was based on a template...heh.

I'll try to update tomorrow after a sufficient amount of time.

All in all, I'm having an absolute BLAST so far learning about marketing first-hand. It's probably the funnest thing I've done all year, honestly. I'm able to hit problems and then have to think my way out of them to find a solution. And after 8 months of working dead end, brainless jobs, it's a very refreshing feeling.

Good job snagging the marketing work, always great to get the experience.

On a more constructive note, the pitch is not good. Why? It sounds like every pitch every blog/site gets everyday.
Hey , your readers will really love me, can you pitch my product to them.

That's essentially what you're saying, notice the me and my in there coupled with a "Hey do me a favor, do more work and write about me."

Perhaps a better approach:

Hey (reviewer):

I read your post "2014 bean bag chairs.." , I did some research and one that I talked to says Bean Bag chairs give you spinal damage and STDs. I'd be happy to send over the research.

My company, Comfy chair, wrote a piece on the subject as we developed a much better alternative to bean bag chairs that you control with your smartphone.

Let me know and I'll shoot you over the research, I was surprised to when I read it.

Cheers,
Joe
PS: I'll follow up in 2 weeks if I don't hear from you, I'm sure you're busy.

Let's break it down:

A problem you have in your pitch?....You GIVE AWAY ALL YOUR AMMO. You tell them everything about the product, you give them a link to your site and everything. Don't give away the cow on the first go!

I structure it right away, as you did, mentioning a recent post. This is good, as it shows you actually looked at their site and didn't just blast out a pitch to 1MM sites. What did I do differently? I added to the conversation!

They wrote about how bean bags are great, and I have research to say otherwise. But notice i don't tell them the information. First part, I create a discussion, second I open up what is called an information gap. It's a gap where you make the person "HAVE TO KNOW THE ANSWER."

For example, look at Huffington Post, they have amazing, information gap headlines. "You won't believe what Orlando Bloom said to Justin Bieber that started a all-out brawl." Who give a shit about bieber or bloom, but you HAVE TO KNOW WHAT HE SAID.

You're doing the same thing here.

Next, mention the product (don't name it so they can't google it).

At the end I say "I'll follow up..." this tells them. Hey, if I don't answer, this bastard won't leave me alone. And if you put this, YOU HAVE TO FOLLOW UP IN 2 WEEKS. Don't make empty "threats." If you say you'll follow up, do it! SOme won't respond just to see if you're serious about following up.

What's the point of this?

Get them to respond....that's all you want in this first email. If your goal is to get them to write an article about you after 1 email, you're in for a world of hurt. Doesn't happen especially with how much email these guys get.

On a side note, I would start wtih smaller blogs as well, gain momentum there to use as social proof for big sites. Big sites get pitched 5,000,000,00,00000 times a day, you're just another annoying gnat.

GOAL: GET THEM TO RESPOND.

 

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[Testament]

Good job snagging the marketing work, always great to get the experience.

On a more constructive note, the pitch is not good. Why? It sounds like every pitch every blog/site gets everyday.
Hey , your readers will really love me, can you pitch my product to them.

That's essentially what you're saying, notice the me and my in there coupled with a "Hey do me a favor, do more work and write about me."

Perhaps a better approach:

Hey (reviewer):

I read your post "2014 bean bag chairs.." , I did some research and one that I talked to says Bean Bag chairs give you spinal damage and STDs. I'd be happy to send over the research.

My company, Comfy chair, wrote a piece on the subject as we developed a much better alternative to bean bag chairs that you control with your smartphone.

Let me know and I'll shoot you over the research, I was surprised to when I read it.

Cheers,
Joe
PS: I'll follow up in 2 weeks if I don't hear from you, I'm sure you're busy.

Let's break it down:

A problem you have in your pitch?....You GIVE AWAY ALL YOUR AMMO. You tell them everything about the product, you give them a link to your site and everything. Don't give away the cow on the first go!

I structure it right away, as you did, mentioning a recent post. This is good, as it shows you actually looked at their site and didn't just blast out a pitch to 1MM sites. What did I do differently? I added to the conversation!

They wrote about how bean bags are great, and I have research to say otherwise. But notice i don't tell them the information. First part, I create a discussion, second I open up what is called an information gap. It's a gap where you make the person "HAVE TO KNOW THE ANSWER."

For example, look at Huffington Post, they have amazing, information gap headlines. "You won't believe what Orlando Bloom said to Justin Bieber that started a all-out brawl." Who give a shit about bieber or bloom, but you HAVE TO KNOW WHAT HE SAID.

You're doing the same thing here.

Next, mention the product (don't name it so they can't google it).

At the end I say "I'll follow up..." this tells them. Hey, if I don't answer, this bastard won't leave me alone. And if you put this, YOU HAVE TO FOLLOW UP IN 2 WEEKS. Don't make empty "threats." If you say you'll follow up, do it! SOme won't respond just to see if you're serious about following up.

What's the point of this?

Get them to respond....that's all you want in this first email. If your goal is to get them to write an article about you after 1 email, you're in for a world of hurt. Doesn't happen especially with how much email these guys get.

On a side note, I would start wtih smaller blogs as well, gain momentum there to use as social proof for big sites. Big sites get pitched 5,000,000,00,00000 times a day, you're just another annoying gnat.

GOAL: GET THEM TO RESPOND.

Wow! Thanks for the super detailed reply, Joe!!

I must've googled "How to Write a Good Pitch Email" at least 10 times, but nothing I found was even close to what you just offered. That's going to help me more than you'd believe.

So, from what I gathered, really the only goal of your first email is to get them to respond? And if I'm correct, this is just to get them to build investment in your potential story? You don't blow your proverbial load off the bat, because it leaves no curiosity in them, and they get a million different products a day that are similar to yours (interest-wise), and this way you get a leg up on the competition? So you wait until you they respond and then give them all the information about your company in the second email? Or did you have a different strategy for the second one?

The information gap - I've never heard of the concept before, but that sounds very very interesting. For the information gap, do you always try to bait them with some piece of information that runs counter to whatever they said in their article that you're referencing? Like, if I were promoting a new product that puts miniature disco lights in your aquarium, and they ran an article about the newest developments in LED lighting for fish, would I be correcting in sending something like,

Hey (reviewer):

I read your post "Newest Developments in Fish LEDS..." , I did some research and someone that I talked to says fish LEDs cause fish-bindness and increase fish ecstasy abuse by a whopping 900%. I'd be happy to send over the research.

My company, Disco Fish Inc., wrote a piece on the subject as we developed a much better alternative to fish LEDs...that you control with your smartphone.

Let me know and I'll shoot you over the research, I was surprised too when I read it.

Cheers,
Tes
PS: I'll follow up in 2 weeks if I don't hear from you, I'm sure you're busy.

-------

Do you usually reference having research for the opposite point of their article? Or do you usually have another way to start the information gap if you don't have it?

Thanks again for the assistance, Joe! This is going to take me a looong way toward my mastery of marketing.

 

[Choate]

I agree with Joe. The pitch you devised was shit. You have to build some rapport with these people and have a working relationship before getting anything on their blog. I also like how he mentioned to maintain some kind of mystery about your product.

My own opinion is that you should drop the pitch all together and revert back to what you did during your original post. Initially, you jumped head first into a startup offering your help for free, and I thought great! Adding value and not asking for anything in return, yet gaining valuable experience. And then you went against exactly what you did and started trying to suck value out of these established blogs. You have to keep doing what you did. How can you offer them value without taking away anything in return? What can you do for them to get what you want? Write an article? Feature them? etc

 

[Testament]

Hmmm, interesting Choate. I didn't think of it like that, but what you said makes a lot of sense. Value for value...what could I offer of value to a blog that I want to write for me...? Hm... I'm not sure what it is a blog would want, other than pitches for interesting content on their blogs that will bring them visitors. As a future, long-term PR goal, I've started writing articles that I'm going to submit to infobarrel - use that as a launching ground to write for other blogs. But short term, I'm not sure what I could offer a blog as a 100% value, 0% risk proposition. I suppose I'll have to ponder this one a bit...

----

But as for my update, today has been quite good so far! My supervisor-ish friend wanted me to send off emails asap today, as I spent all of yesterday just collecting more emails and studying everything I could about how to write an effective pitch. Probably tomorrow I'll send my slightly modified take on Joe's email. Later tonight after I've finished the days round of emails, I'm going to seriously read up on creating information gaps. Since I'm not sure what to say instead of offering to send research on the downsides of smartchair's competitors, I'll need to think that through a bit tonight as well.

Anyway, I fired off about 10 emails, using a modified version of what Joe suggested. I also went a bit more indepth in reading the author's other articles. 9 out of 10 emails were opened today, with only 3 getting several views instead of just one. I received two responses from decent Alexa ranked sites (both of them around 180k).One of the editors said that my product looked interesting, but he would have to take a look at it tomorrow. And the second actually complimented my pitch!! He offered to write about our product's kickstarter asap, and wanted me to keep him in mind when the review copies came out. I sent him over some images, and he proceeded to have a conversation with me afterward via email! He's a huge fan of Street Fighter 4, and that's what I commented on when I sent him the pitch. I said something along the lines of...

"I've been reading your articles recently, specifically your one on Street Fighter IV (it took a huge toll on my high school dating life), and also this other one you wrote about digital chairs. Anyway, I thought your (blog name) readers might be interested in my new product - smartchair, a chair that you can control with just the power of your mind (and smartphone), not unlike a Jedi. "

Anyway, the rest of it was pretty similar to what I had before, but I added Joe's "PS: I'll hit you back up in a week" to the very bottom of it.

Like I said, he commented on how he liked my pitch a lot...and that made me feel special.

I mentioned the part about high school because he talked about how he played Street Fighter 3 religiously in high school. I thought that it would be something extra relatable, and show my vulnerable human side. I was (and still am) a huge nerd consequently, didn't have many dates in high school. His articles were mostly about nerdy stuff and new tech gadgets, so I thought it would help cut through another potential lair of resistance. That was my strategy behind mentioning that particular piece of information.

Hmmm...you know, I just thought of something as I was writing this very moment: What if the value that I offer the writer, comes in the form of giving them someone to dialogue with about something that they are irrationally passionate about? The value of a connection in the form of someone who seems to understand them? Hmmmm!! I think I might be onto something...

It's pretty easy to get a feel for what the writer is like personality-wise from scanning a few of their articles. I'll have to experiment with this a bit!

Well, I'm off to continue emailing my list. I'll likely have an update for tomorrow.

 

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[Joe Cassandra]

So, from what I gathered, really the only goal of your first email is to get them to respond? And if I'm correct, this is just to get them to build investment in your potential story? You don't blow your proverbial load off the bat, because it leaves no curiosity in them, and they get a million different products a day that are similar to yours (interest-wise), and this way you get a leg up on the competition? So you wait until you they respond and then give them all the information about your company in the second email? Or did you have a different strategy for the second one?
The information gap - I've never heard of the concept before, but that sounds very very interesting. For the information gap, do you always try to bait them with some piece of information that runs counter to whatever they said in their article that you're referencing? Like, if I were promoting a new product that puts miniature disco lights in your aquarium, and they ran an article about the newest developments in LED lighting for fish, would I be correcting in sending something like,

Right, first goal GET THEM TO RESPOND. People are more likely to respond to your second, third etc. email than the first. In the second email you're just building rapport, send over the research or whatever, maybe provide another link to another relevant article. You're providing value, no pitch. If they respond to the 3rd than you can present your product, ask for their thoughts.

The information gap is a simple psychology trick that begs them to WANT MORE. Perhaps you approach a blogger who just wrote about the best chairs of the year and you say, "Those chairs are cool but what if there was a way to connect your chair to your smartphone..." and leave it at that.

Hey (reviewer):
I read your post "Newest Developments in Fish LEDS..." , I did some research and someone that I talked to says fish LEDs cause fish-bindness and increase fish ecstasy abuse by a whopping 900%. I'd be happy to send over the research.
My company, Disco Fish Inc., wrote a piece on the subject as we developed a much better alternative to fish LEDs...that you control with your smartphone.
Let me know and I'll shoot you over the research, I was surprised too when I read it.
Cheers,
Tes
PS: I'll follow up in 2 weeks if I don't hear from you, I'm sure you're busy

This is good, no it doesn't need to always be an opposing view, sometimes you could approach people who are Pro-fish and say, "Hey, can you believe what this Fish LED product does to fish," get them to ask "What" . Get them worked up about it than present your fish LED solution.

For your chair, get just 1 professional opinion to say" It decreases stress" anything, and that's the research you can use if you're looking for that. It's a lot of testing and research.

Find different articles you can put a spin on to approach and open up an information gap. Don't just look for articles about chairs. Look for bloggers about back pain, chiropractors, office environment etc.

Keep it up, let me know how it goes!

 

[Testament]

Thanks again for taking the time to give me such awesome advice, Joe! I wrote up a pitch testing out an information gap and I'm going to try experimenting with it on the smaller blogs as I come across them.

So, great news today! Had 2 articles written, and developed a friendly relationship with an editor of an Alexa rank 180k site! Also, Stuff magazine (the U.K.'s version of Maxim) liked the pitch and the product, and smartchair is going to be in the physical October issue of Stuff!! Yippeeee!!!

Everything's coming together very fast, I almost can't keep up with the rate at which I'm learning! I'm trying to stick to a very solid ultradian rhtyhm schedule (from The Power of Full Engagement)- 2 hours of work/study/important stuff, 30 minutes of break doing something that completely mentally changes the channel so I can renew as best as I can. Last night, I soaked up so much information about how to write good pitches that it started to feel like my head was throbbing. I kept trying to push it and learn more, but I was totally mentally exhausted and I couldn't focus or retain info on what I was reading, so I decided to call it a night and veg out a bit watching The Simpsons.

It's funny, I almost forgot what it felt like to mentally grow that much in one day!

Today, I spent the whole day writing up some new pitch emails to try and expand to other parts of the world - specifically India. The CEO wanted me to go with the angle of one of the founders' parents being from India, so I wrote up a pitch based on that. Unfortunately, I got no responses for it, and upon reviewing how the actual pitch looked, it was pretty bad. My attempt to offer value by offering heartfelt commentary on their articles and trying to connect was nearly impossible for me to do, as all the blogs I messaged were almost exclusively just posting looks at the newest tech developments. So, I think I've gotta spend a decent amount of time tomorrow working on this angle.

Also started reading a book that was suggested to me by AndrewNC in another thread I made, "Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator" by Ryan Holiday. So far it's pretty interesting, and from the (admittedly limited) amount I've read so far, I think I'll be able to glean a lot of valuable lessons from it. Thanks again, Andrew!

Well I think that about covers it for today. So far so good!

 

[Testament]

Just a quick update - I got a legitimate job offer to market another start up, from the same guy who got me the internship. Now I'm going to actually *have* to pull results...which is more than a little frightening for me. And oh yeah, this start up is also about 10x more successful than the one I'm currently interning for. But ultimately, I'm pretty excited about it! I'll be pulling double duty marketing, learning twice as fast and burning out quick if I'm not able to consistently land PR hits for my start ups.

Unfortunately, things have actually kind of dried up for me recently. I'm thinking it's because I don't have a good angle for my pitches. Or, usually any kind of angle. I've poured over my old pitches and gotten some incredible feedback from my fellow fastlaners (including SYK through PMs, which has been just amazing), so I'm going to be trying to figure this out hardcore over this weekend...how can I make interesting angles for my product?

What is of value to bloggers that I'll be pitching? How can I frame my pitches so that they find them interesting enough to cover them?

 

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[Testament]

Been a while since I've updated -

Looks like the offer of a paid job doing marketing fell through, so I'm just doing the internship for now. The project's Kickstarter is almost over, and I've been getting a lot of feedback from blogs that they aren't interested in writing a story about a Kickstarter that's almost done. So now I've got to think of some other way to get the project the attention it needs.

 

[SYK]

Totally missed this thread. Thanks for the shout out man! Keep pushing that PR. 15 hits is great start.

What would you say are the biggest things you've learnt from your early strides in the PR world?

 

[Testament]

That's a really great question Syk. You know, it's hard to pinpoint everything that I've learned. Or atually, it's really difficult to condense everything I've learned so far into just one single list of lessons, though I've certainly been trying. At this point I feel I've started to procrastinate with writing out a list, so I'll put down some of the ideas I've been sitting on and add to it a bit once I think of more.

Make your pitch unique
There's a saying I've heard about being the exception to the rule if you want to be successful. Well, I'm taking it and retrofitting it for PR – The successful PR person has to be the exception to the rule. If everyone else is slamming out mass generic email templates, you need to be the one sending out personalized emails that let the blogger in question know that you've at least taken the time to read a little bit of their content.

By "make your pitch unique," I don't mean to not work off a template. But you have to make it look like it was actually written by a real person if you want someone to click through to your links. This starts with the email subject line, but after they open your email, you should at a minimum use their first name somewhere in it and mention an article they've written so they know you're not just spraying and praying.

Make your headlines look as casual as possible.
Ask yourself, when was the last time you opened a very obviously copy-written subject email? If you're anything like me (and apparently after talking to them, a lot of people are), you actively avoid opening stuff that looks like it's been heavily copy-written. For me personally, it sort of feels like I'm being manipulated into doing something. So I'll usually instantly delete an email that has a headline that looks like that.

I've been using a technique that I've taken from other forms of sales and applied it to emailing bloggers – get to know what someone is like as a person. What are they most proud of in their lives? What do they feel very strongly about? With Twitter, this is pretty easy to get at. With most of the bloggers that I'm reaching out to, I try to at least scan their twitter feed to see what it is they comment on that they feel strongly about. Just below I've posted two examples of what I'm talking about. The second one listed actually got me two seperate responses from two different bloggers on the same site (alexa rank <10k) that were both interested in my project. In both of the templates I've provided, the writers I emailed actually complimented my pitching ability funnily enough:

[Note: All of my editing comments that are NOT a part of the original email will be with square brackets and italics!]


Hey [editor first name],

I'm a pretty recent follower of your articles, specifically your look at Halo 5 (Combat Evolved took a huge toll on my high school love life) and I agree that the "guardians" thing is a bit odd [this was a reference to a comment he made in the article that he seemed to feel strongly about]. Also noticed your article on the Cozy Chair WifiMax5 [relevant article he wrote on a similar product to mine]. Anyway, I thought your [blog name] readers might like my new product, SmartChair [bit.ly link to product landing page] – a smart chair that can sense your presence...not unlike Darth Vader. [editor was a gamer, so I assumed he'd be a open to some Star Wars comparisons ]

And it works with a smartphone,automatically turning on/off and adjusting to your custom comfort levels. I'll just give you a quick bullet list:

• It works through your smartphone to activate your massage chair
• It can sense how close you are to it so your chair can turn on and off automatically...(like a Jedi)
• It's also usable with any chair (also like a Jedi)

We also have a fancy Kickstarter page [bit.ly link to the Kickstarter] Would love to discuss more with you!

Cheers,
Testament

PS: I'll follow up in a week if I don't hear from you, I'm sure you're busy.


---------------------------------------------------
[I'll write most of my comments at the end of this one, as the detailed ones seemed to kind of mess up the flow of it as I was writing them in]

Hey Jenna,

I'm a pretty recent follower of your articles, specifically your look at the 5 robot vacuum cleaners...although you don't seem like someone who would have one. [cold/warm read] Also noticed you're a fan of "House of Cards". I've only gotten through season two so far, but the whole thing with Rachel and Doug...Wow! Who knew she had it in her? Anyway, I thought your Pocket-lint fans might like my new product, SmartChair [Link] – a smart chair that can sense your presence and works with a smartphone. Our Kickstarter [Link] campaign just broke 100,000 dollars, with almost a full month still left.

I'll just give you a quick bullet list:

• It works through your smartphone to activate your massage chair
• It can sense how close you are to it so your lights can turn on and off automatically
• It's also usable with any chair

Would love to discuss more with you!

Cheers,
Testament

PS: I'll follow up in a week if I don't hear from you, I'm sure you're busy.

------

In the very beginning of this email, I was experimenting with something I thought might work interestingly - making a cold/warm read on a writer. In person, it builds up a lot of interest whether you're right or not. People are always interested in themselves first and foremost, and guessing something about them is a way to get on the topic of them. I wanted to see if this would translate to the world of emailing bloggers, which so far it seems to have...I've gotten several replies from writers just to tell me whether or not I was right on whatever assumption I made about them.

But in both of these emails, I found something that I had noticed they commented strongly about. One of them was in a twitter, the other was in one of the blogger's other articles.

To reiterate my point a bit, my technique was to show interest and a perspective of some kind on what they commented strongly on, and to line myself up as someone who “gets it,” whatever “it” is to them. For the first email, getting it was admitting that Halo was one of my favorite game franchises of all time and that it wrecked my dating life in high school (he had echoed similar things about himself in his blog post). For the second email, I noticed in the blogger's twitter that she was currently watching House of Cards, and commented on it many times about how great it was and how much she loved it. Bingo! I read up on House of Cards until I found a decently shocking plot twist (the kind that people love to talk about in serial shows like that), and made a comment about it. I was vague enough in the wording to where if she hadn't seen that particular twist yet, it wouldn't have spoiled it for her (as I can only imagine how thrilled she'd be with the guy who spoiled a major plot point in her favorite show and was also asking for free press coverage... )

This has taken a bit longer than just firing off a regular template would, but I've found that, when employed correctly, it has so far brought pretty awesome results.

I should mention now that the product I'm getting PR for is pretty well designed and unique enough, with a fantastic video on the KS landing page and astonishingly well-written copy. So basically my overall goal is just to get them to click-through to the sales page. Another good benefit about doing it this way is that, so far even if the writer isn't interested in writing about the product, a lot of the time they'll email me back to let me know the reason why they aren't interested in doing it which is super helpful. I'm thinking it will be useful in building long-term relationships with the bloggers too, but I'm not too familiar with keeping those kinds of relationships up yet...although I did have an 8 message email chain going back and forth with the guy I sent the first email to, which was very cool.


Outsource your email collection
I think this will be my last point for the moment, but if there's been one thing that's taken an inordinate deal of time from me doing more important things, it's definitely been collecting blogger emails. When I was first learning to do it, it felt like I was getting a useful skill that'd really come in handy at some point. Now I feel like it just takes a tremendous amount of time away from me focusing on the stuff that's actually going to get them to open and click through on my email. While I've yet to actually try outsourcing it to somewhere like odesk, it's already been suggested to me by a number of different people, and all of my future campaigns are going to involve my outsourcing of this step.


But yeah, I'll add more to this as I think of stuff! Kickstarter is officially over now, and we made more than 6 times the initial goal! w00t! I'm thinking of doing a write up of what I've learned so far, but the prospect of huge article tasks is sending my procrastination-matrix into overdrive. So I guess we'll see what happens.

 

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[Testament]

So the Kickstarter turned out to be a huge success! And I performed so well on the initial PR blog pitching campaign (thanks nearly 100% go to everyone who helped me, with an extra large amount of that % going to the amazingly generous PR Master Syk. ) that the guy who took me on into the internship wanted to start actually paying me on an hourly wage. So, awesome! I'm also starting off on a new company that he's consulting. It's a much much more successful start-up, and I'm going to be handling more of the banner-ad side of things, though he also has me interviewing people and giving him my opinion on whether or not they'll be a good fit for the position. I believe he's going to give a second interview to them before he hires them, but he trusts my judgement enough at this point to be able to spot whether they're BSing or not...a trust I'm hoping is justified.

So, stay tuned for some updates on that side of things starting probably this Monday!

I've also started assisting a personal friend of mine in marketing a new album that he's releasing, so I should have a lot of fun updates with that as well.

I know this post wasn't heavy on actionable advice, but one thing I will add in here that has helped me TREMENDOUSLY in finding potential blogs to pitch, is searching for similar products to yours and using google's reverse image search on them to find blogs that have covered that similar product. Then, pitch your idea to them (using a warm personable email) and make sure that you add in how your product is different from the similar one they've covered...and of course, add in an attractive angle that makes them want to write the story!

 

[SYK]

That's awesome man! So pleased my advice helped you along. You were almost there but just needed a little redirecting so hold onto some of that credit for yourself!

You'll get sharper and sharper at pitching and identifying opportunities as you do it more often, plus have previous outlets to call back to for future campaigns.

Make sure you keep me posted with your progress and feel free to consult me anytime!

 

[Testament]

Hey everyone, sorry for the slow updates. Everything with the internship (job now) has been going great. The guy who hired me on wants to make me his personal protege at marketing and wealth creation. With that in mind, he's been having me do a lot of various things and developed a growth plan for me. I'm now:

-Learning about real estate investing
-Learning how to run a successful crowdfunding campaign
-Learning how social media advertising works
-Learning to hire and manage contractors
-Learning about investing

So, yeah...a huge amount of work on my plate now. But it's been really fun so far, and I think I'm learning a lot of really valuable things that I can eventually take into a fastlane business of my own. Now I'm helping him with his marketing and PR strategies with 3 different start ups! :O

With that in mind, I wanted to offer a link to an article post that's been extremely useful to me over my short stint in PR so far:

http://fourhourworkweek.com/2012/12...ys-includes-successful-templates-e-mails-etc/

It's absolutely chock FULL of useful information about running a Kickstarter. One of the most important bits in it for me was to hit up the press about 10 days BEFORE your Kickstarter actually goes live. That was probably one of the biggest hurdles for me in my last PR campaign for SmartChair - it was already about halfway over when I came in to start pitching blogs. So, very quickly I started receiving email responses about blogs not wanting to cover a Kickstarter that was about to end.

I'll give an update soon with more details about what I learn and how I'm refining my PR campaign.

Stay tuned!

 

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[Testament]

Oh man, tough week so far.

So my new mentor has been throwing non-stop learning and experience opportunities at me and it's been very challenging and rewarding so far. I have to give thanks to my circumstances and this wonderful forum for helping me to grow my "burning desire" to succeed in business...I don't think I'd be game to be working pretty much 24/7 if it wasn't for reading members posts here about everything I'm doing and stoking my curiosity. Because I've spent so much time over the last year reading about all of these interesting topics, it's amazing to actually be learning first-hand all of these awesome fastlane skills. Even though, like I said, I'm working just about 24/7 atm, it really doesn't feel like work at all. I'm getting to understand what makes people buy, how social media works, why crowd-funding campaigns are amazing successes or pitiful failures, and a smorgasbord of other valuable abilities.

I've been working on building up a strong pre-launch PR campaign, focusing on 10 different sorts of niches this time, as opposed to SmartChair's 2 niches on my last campaign. But on top of that, I'm helming the rewards/referrals program for the campaign, as my mentor wants to teach me how to think critically. He told me that's why he gets paid so much, and he wants to impart that skill onto me. Every day I stay up late and go to bed exausted, but utterly fulfilled. I would never have considered trying to take on these skills if I hadn't read IceCreamKid's thread in particular, where he mentioned how important marketing was (and also mentioned that it was originally zen******* that imparted that wisdom onto him). So I must send out an extra ooey, gooey, heartfelt thanks to the both of them for helping to point my interests in this direction. Thanks guys!

Anyway, one of the main things I've been taking care of this week has been hiring on people for the project. Now, I had thought that I would only be hiring them on and then taking care of my own PR and crowd-fund studies. But just a few minutes ago, my mentor added me to a skype conversation with the new hires, and told us that I would be managing them in this campaign. So...I guess I'm a supervisor of a major campaign now. I'm both utterly flattered beyond words, and simultaneously terrified beyond all reason.

It's actually strange...in the back of my mind, I'm a bit worried about this as it's so new and unknown to me, but I feel strangely at ease with everything. I really feel like, if I fail at this, it won't really matter. I'll be able to learn from my mistakes. I'll be able to come back and post my experience and my lessons and have the altruistic fastlane masters school me in where I went wrong. So even though I just wrote I was terrified, I'm actually feeling like I'm not, just as I'm writing this now and realizing that.

My mentor took the ad design off of my plate but didn't say anything about it. I'm thinking he probably realized I already had a lot of very new and involved skills to learn and that was just one too many. But, a one of my best friends is also launching an album at the moment that I'm going to be helping him market, and one of the things he wants to focus on is facebook banner ads. So I guess I'll still get my chance to learn about them.

As far as my future fastlane business goes...I'm keeping my mind open to ideas that may come my way. I think it'll pay to start building my credit back up at this point, as it's still in the low 500's from my disastrous business venture across the Atlantic. In the meantime, I'm getting a lot of good ideas and thoughts about pain points for people as I talk to more of them while I'm out doing various things for the companies.

Which reminds me, on Wednesday I was involved in overseeing the filming of our product video!!

It...was...GREAT!

We were working with a legitimate director who's involved with the campaign, and filmed several different scenarios. It was a really amazing experience overall. I was standing in for my mentor who had to attend another business meeting and couldn't make it to the the shooting, so he wanted me to get some practice being his stand-in. Everyone who showed up turned out to be really cool, and I managed to make a lot of new contacts that I'm sure will come in handy in the future.

---------------

Overall, I'm pretty damn happy with how my life is going right now. Last week was the anniversary of my best friend and business partner's death, when our business venture finally and unequivocally came crashing down like the Hindenburg x10. It was a sad day for me, but also one of a lot of deep reflection. Coming back 10 grand in debt, my girlfriend leaving me, almost having to stay in a homeless shelter when my "friends" wouldn't take me in, and having to face the prospect of working at utterly demeaning and soul-crushing mcjobs...that was my life a year ago. It almost seems like it was all some dark, twisted nightmare that I've just begun to wake from.

In the back of my mind, my worst fear is that all coming to pass again. I don't know what I would do if I had to go back to working a 9-5 minimum wage service industry job again. Maybe that's why I'm working so hard now...I don't think I'd make it if I had to go back to that again. I feel like my life literally depends on me getting this right now. And I'm not about to let this opportunity slip through my fingers.

Apologies if this post was light on the actionable advice. I'll work something really mind-blowing into my next post...I promise.

 

[Testament]

Oh man, it's already been more than two weeks since my last update! Time really has a way of getting away from me. D'oh!

Well let's see...I wanted to make a longer post about everything I've been up to and some actionable advice that someone can take away from reading this, but I think a short up date will have to suffice just so I have something to throw out. So the things I've been up to in the last two weeks...

• Went to a college campus to do in-person testing, which was great and also very nerve-wracking. I almost thought I wouldn't be able to do it, but @Grimaldo very generously offered some very keen help and advice and I was just barely able to force myself to approach the demographic. All in all it went horribly toward the beginning, but actually went quite well toward the end. I was surprised and delighted.

• Began learning the very beginning steps of website design so that I could help my mentor out with creating some of the finer points of our new crowd-funding campaign.

• Started reading a ton of copywriting books so that I can write the copy for some of the campaign. It's great - I'm starting to be able to see copy everywhere I read!

• One of the programmers who is working under me that I found on Odesk turned out to be kind of a douchebag. He knows his craft very well, but he's quite arrogant and also is starting drama with the other programmer on the team. He sent me an email today complaining non-stop about the other programmer and made a vague threat about quitting if I didn't give him more detailed info on our project. Brought it up with my mentor and he said that he'd take care of it and not to worry, but I'd like to know how to deal with this for the future so I'll be questioning him on how he's handling the situation.

• I've been studying competing Kickstarters/Indiegogos absolutely RELIGIOUSLY to understand what makes them successful or not. I think it's actually a lot of stuff behind the scenes that determines the overall success of the campaign. As I've seen from being around all of his clients, a lot of the entrepreneurs and their teams who go into crowd-funding are their own worst enemies.

Anything else?

Nothing that comes to mind immediately I suppose. Updates coming sooner than last time!

 

[Testament]

Hey all, thought I'd give a quick update and some resources.

I'm having a lot of trouble recently with procrastination. I have so much on my plate that when I think about everything I have to do during the day, it makes me feel very lethargic. Honestly, at the end of the days recently, even if I get most of what I need to done, I still feel like I should've done more. At the moment, I'm juggling....

• Learning about real estate investing
• Learning basic coding
• Learning copywriting
• Handling pre PR campaign for a crowd-fund
• Learning about tax information to help out my mentor
• Studying what makes a successful crowd-funding campaign
• Copywriting the entire referral program + doing the website mockup for it
• Learning to do FBA stuff

So, yeah...any one of those things can (and usually will) take longer than an hour. So I think I've hit the point in things to do where you start to lose motivation because it doesn't seem like there's any way to finish your given amount of tasks during the day.

Anyway...one of the things Iv'e had a lot of time with over the past few months has been learning how to do email related stuff. I had a list of a few articles sent to me by a friend a few days ago and I thought any intrepid list builder would be able to get a lot of mileage out of them. So take a look if you're inclined:

http://www.copyblogger.com/30-day-email-list/

http://www.imforza.com/blog/building-an-email-list-from-scratch/

They're both concerned with taking you through building an email list from scratch and quite cleverly written. Anyone reading feel free to comment and let me know if you found them useful.

 

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[Midas Touch]

Update?

 

[Testament]

Update?

I was thinking about writing as much of an update as I could, but reading the last post I made in here again makes me realize that I'm kind of in the same position.

One of our clients insisted that we push his campaign through even though there were critical errors that had yet to be addressed on their end. Now the project isn't doing so hot. One thing I've learned from working with a lot of startups is that they really, REALLY, want to do things their way. I continue to be amazed with most new clients, as they're paying good money to hire a product manager/campaign consultant but choosing not to heed his advice half the time.

I was making an analogy the other day, it's like someone's hiring a very successful personal trainer/nutritionist with a proven track record for a lot of money, and when the trainer creates the workout routine and diet for them, they're just like "Yeah, you know that doesn't really sound like what I want to do. So, even though I have no real experience in this area, I think I'm going to go with the exercises and diet that I think would work best." Just replace exercise and diet with marketing, lol. It's pretty frustrating, but other than that things are moving along at a slower pace at the moment.

One of the tasks I'm focusing on a lot currently is building a wireframe lander for my mentor and writing the copy for it. It's honestly been pretty difficult so far. I've been reading Copy Hackers as an alternative to the GH challenge and so far it's a great book series - saves a lot of time in that it just came out a few years ago, so you don't really have to translate over the principles from the GH challenge book series into how they'd work for modern times.

I'm supposed to be taking on the role of product manager on one of the new campaigns that we're about to run, which will be exciting if it happens.

And my mentor said that once I get pretty fluent in the skills of real estate, finance, and landing page creation, he'll bump me up to an actual salary, which would be great. Currently making about 600 bucks a month, but learning absolutely tons and making some great connections in Silicon Valley. Once I get bumped up to a few grand a month, I'll be in heaven.