How To Get Bloggers (And Other Creators) To Actually Promote Your Product

For years, I ran a technology blog. And it literally became a daily occurrence to have companies contacting me asking me to promote or review their product.

These days, I run Blog Marketing Academy… a very different kind of business… and I almost never respond to those requests anymore. Many aren’t even personal. To them, I’m just another email address to spam in the hope something fruitful happens.

But I understand the dilemma. Whether you’re a corporate marketer trying to get creators to cover your product, an indie founder trying to land a podcast guest spot, or a solopreneur chasing partnership opportunities… the question is the same. How do you get a person with an audience to actually pay attention to you?

The world has expanded since I first wrote about this. It’s no longer just bloggers. It’s podcasters, YouTubers, newsletter publishers, Instagram creators, TikTok creators, and the whole loose category of “people with audiences” who can amplify your work. The principles for reaching them effectively are largely the same. So is the noise they’re trying to filter out.

Here’s what actually works.

Let me share what works, from someone who has been on the receiving end of these pitches since 1998.

1. Put Yourself In Their Mindset

Newer creators are usually flattered when a company takes interest. They’ll respond. They’ll often say yes.

Mid-tier creators still respond too. They’re big enough to matter, still small enough to manage their own inbox.

Once you get to A-tier creators, you have to bring real game. It’s not personal. They get a flood of email. And let’s face it… most of it is templated impersonal junk from people pursuing the same playbook.

Step one: actually understand who you’re emailing.

Does their site or feed show that they cover products like yours? Do they promote others, or do they mainly keep things in-house? Do they have a media kit or contact preference?

Have some empathy. Their inbox is noisier than you think.

2. No Template Emails. Ever.

I get pitches every day that look like form emails with my name dropped in. Or pitches that include the full URL of my site in the body — as if the sender forgot to remove their placeholder. Or pitches that wildly misrepresent who I am or what I write about.

Here’s an example I got recently:

That email went into the trash. The sender wasted their time. So did the next ten people who sent me near-identical emails the same week.

The unbreakable rule: actually read what the creator does before you reach out. Reference specific things in your message that prove you read it. If you can’t be bothered to spend 5 minutes on that creator before pitching them, don’t pitch them.

A pro move that almost no one does: build a relationship before you pitch. Send a friendly email with no ask attached. Share something useful. Reply to one of their newsletters with genuine feedback. Comment on their posts. Then, weeks later, when you reach out with an actual pitch, you’re a known quantity instead of a cold sender.

3. Make Them Look Good (To Their Audience)

The creator wants to be the hero to their audience. They want to deliver value. Their reputation with their audience is more valuable to them than your product is.

So work that angle. What can YOU do to make THEM look good?

• Can you offer their audience an exclusive discount only they have? They become the source of a special deal.
• Can you give them free units of your product to give away to their audience? They get to play Santa.
• Can you provide early access to a new feature or product, before the public release? They get the scoop.
• Can you mention them on YOUR channels in a way that drives traffic THEIR way?
• Can you genuinely help them with something that has nothing to do with your ask?

For many creators, that kind of “give to get” approach is more valuable than money. Money is finite. Their audience’s trust is everything.

4. Be Relevant

This should be obvious. It isn’t.

I get pitches all the time for things that have zero connection to anything I write about. Home alarm systems. CBD products. Random fashion brands. I run an online business education site. None of these have any place here.

Irrelevant pitches scream “I’m sending this to 500 sites at once and I didn’t even check what yours is about.” Into the trash they go. Often also flagged as spam.

The fix is simple: read what they cover. Make sure your product genuinely belongs in their world. If it doesn’t, skip them. There are other creators who are a better fit. Send ten well-targeted pitches instead of a hundred random ones.

5. Really Value Their Opinion

If you go in obviously wanting nothing but a backlink and a positive review, the creator can smell it. I know the temptation is to look at bloggers and creators as just another link source for SEO purposes — a dime a dozen, listed in a database, fair game for the rounds of cold outreach.

The creators whose endorsement actually matters can spot that approach instantly. And they don’t like it.

Some things you can do that signal real respect:

• Be open to private feedback. Ask their opinion on your product, separate from any review.
• Be open to criticism. Don’t ask for a glowing review — ask for an honest one.
• Genuinely help them with something unrelated to your product when you can.
• Don’t ask for the review on the first email. Lead with relationship first.

A person doesn’t usually become a creator with an audience unless they have a pretty high opinion of their own opinions. Treat that opinion like the asset it is.

A 2026 Note: AI Is Changing How Outreach Gets Done

This wasn’t a factor a few years ago. It dramatically is now. AI has reshaped outreach in two opposite directions.

The bad direction: Tools like ChatGPT have made it trivial to generate “personalized” outreach at massive scale. Every creator I know now gets a flood of AI-written emails. They’re slightly better than the old template emails — they reference one specific thing about the creator’s work — but they’re still detectable as AI-generated within seconds. The “personalization” feels machine-checked rather than human-cared. Creators are getting better at spotting this and routing it to trash.

The problem is bad enough that I’ve gone past “routing to trash” and now use AI to block this stuff before it reaches me. I run a triage agent on my contact form — if an incoming message looks like one of these AI-generated promotional pitches, it gets auto-discarded and never reaches my inbox.

Realize what this means. Creators have access to the same AI tools you do, and many of us are increasingly using them defensively. Your “personalized” mass outreach isn’t just hitting the trash anymore — it’s being filtered out before any human sees it.

This is your job to think through before you send. The fact that AI lets you generate 10,000 pitches doesn’t mean any of them are going to land. The arms race is on, and the volume side is losing.

The good direction: AI can dramatically speed up the genuinely human parts of outreach if you use it right. Use AI to:

• Research creators efficiently — what they cover, what’s resonating, what they’ve recently said.
• Draft a starting point for personalized emails that YOU then heavily edit with your own voice and specifics.
• Identify the right creators in your space by analyzing their content.
• Suggest the right angle for your pitch based on their recent work.

The pattern: use AI for the research and the rough draft. Then add the human layer — your voice, your specifics, the real personal touch — before you send. That layer is what determines whether the email gets read or trashed.

Final Thoughts: Be A Real Person

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you have a specific end goal in mind. A backlink. A review. A promotion. A podcast guest spot. A newsletter mention.

That sole focus on the end goal can give you tunnel vision. You’ll start sending template emails, optimizing for volume, treating every creator as just another row in a spreadsheet… and end up in everyone’s trash.

Put the numbers aside.

The core mindset shift: optimize for relationship, not for the end goal. Most outreach treats the goal (a backlink, a review, a placement, a guest spot) as the thing to optimize for. That mindset reduces every creator to a means to an end, and they can feel it.

If you optimize for relationship instead — actually getting to know the creator, helping them where you can, being a useful presence in their world — the metric-driven mindset falls away. You stop counting how many “creators I emailed this week.” You start building actual relationships with the few who are genuinely worth knowing. The links and placements come downstream of that, and they come more reliably than chasing the metric directly ever did.

The creators worth pitching are people. They have their own goals. They have their own inboxes. They have their own bullshit detectors. The ones with substantial audiences have very calibrated ones.

Reach out like a real human being. Spend the extra few minutes actually understanding who they are. Offer something genuine. Lead with relationship before ask.

Yes, it takes more work than setting up a mail-merge and pressing send. It’s also the reason it works.