Initial Contact with Potential Advertisers

I’m a bit busy with a whole bunch of annoying things in the offline world so I haven’t had a chance to compile my super duper huge list of potential advertisers. In the meantime, I thought I’d address a comment made on my last post about making that first contact with possible advertisers.

Lea pointed out that sending off bulk emails to addresses I find in magazines might not be the best approach as they’re meant to be for customers, not for random incoming sales pitches. I totally agree with this but the problem I have is that I’m both lazy and completely crap at sales. Because of this, phoning is out of the question. I love the anonymity and simplicity of just shooting off a bunch of emails and hoping for the best but I acknowledge that it’s probably not going to have the results that a phonecall might have. I’ve had luck finding advertisers in the past but I put that down to being able to speak directly to the marketing person. This has either been because they’ve contacted me previously about something else or just because the company is a small one and the people who work there have to be a Jack of all trades.

So I have a semi evil plan and have decided to comprimise a bit. I’m going to stick to emailing, but instead of being totally lazy and jumping straight into my pitch,  I’m going to send out pre-ad pitch emails to try to find out who holds the marketing purse strings. Sort of a little reconnosance mission where I get to be all sneaky and stuff. I’m not sure yet what I’ll write but I’ll draft something up (I’ll let you know what I come up with) and then send it from one of my many email addresses. I’m going to avoid using my main email address so that I can still attempt to get in touch with anyone who ignores me without coming across as too stalkerish.

This whole thing is an experiment and I’m not really expecting much, to be honest. If it works that’s great, if not then I’ll know not to waste my time approaching people out of the blue in the future. Just another step in what has become a massive trial and error process for me!

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