How Not To Pitch Your Infographic

I love good infographics. And as the person who considers which third-party infographics we run, I appreciate a good pitch, one that demonstrates that someone is aware of what our site is about, what’s appropriate for us and doesn’t take a cookie cutter approach.

That’s a good pitch. Here’s a bad one that I received yesterday through the Marketing Land contact form:

I came across your blog and I have been following for a little bit now. I have enjoyed your articles and think they are very informative. I would like to pass along an infographic describing the growth of social media marketing and how careers within the field are growing.

I know how you get several infographic submissions a week and they amount to a sales pitches, however, this is just not one of those. I think you will be able to use this on your website and have great feedback from your readers.

I encourage you to at least check it out and, if you like it, use it. Please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.

Ah, they’ve come across our blog! They’ve been following it! They enjoy our articles! And they’ve got a pitch for an infographic that most definitely not a sales pitch!

The only problem with believing any of this is that I also received the identical pitch yesterday for a completely different site, for my personal blog.

It’s bad enough to get an email that’s obviously just using a template. It’s worse when that happens twice for different sites. It’s like insulting you, then spitting in your face. It’s obvious that:

1. They’ve not been following either site
2. They’re lying about enjoying any of the articles, because they’ve almost certainly not read any of them
3. They’re delivering the sales pitch they swore they weren’t doing

Well, at least the pitch didn’t try to dictate the exact anchor text I was supposed to use in my link to the infographic.

Maybe the fire-and-forget template approach is great for some, in that for the 99 misses, you get one hit, with little time invested on any one site. But personally, I’d rather see more time go into pitching the right places where getting the link will really pay off in direct traffic and perhaps with some authority passed to help with search rankings.

To win there, templates like that don’t cut it. Actually knowing the site and taking a more personalized approach does.