Here at the BUILD world headquarters we receive an average of 3.5 emails per day from suppliers, manufacturers, vendors, designers, and individuals who all have something in common; they’d all like to have their products mentioned on the BUILDblog. We’re honored that so many groups and individuals think highly enough of the BUILDblog to want to be a part of it -thank you for that. While 3.5 emails a day isn’t an avalanche, it’s enough to notice patterns. Most of our responses to these emails are very similar, so for today’s post we’re laying out some straight-forward guidelines on how to best get your goods introduced on the BUILDblog.

It’s important to point out that the BUILDblog is not a commercial platform.  We’re not paid for what we do in this forum; we don’t receive checks from any outside group for the content we publish. We also don’t have any sort of add-ons that somebody gives us money for; there aren’t any terribly annoying pay-per-click ads; and we hope its obvious, but we’ve never allowed or placed any tacky tacked-on banners or other linked graphics on the BUILDblog.

When we started the BUILDblog nearly 4 years ago, the mission was simple and remains unchanged: remove the veil of secrecy and guardedness from the design world and provide valuable/ entertaining (and hopefully sometimes, humorous) content (and occasionally use potentially made-up words when we’re too lazy to check, such as guardedness). You know our old favorite adage: rising tides raise all boats.

So here they are, our top 5 bullet-points for getting exposure on the BUILDblog:

1.    Be relevant. It’s funny how often we’re approached by products that have absolutely no relevance whatsoever to a blog about cost-effective modern design. It doesn’t matter how masterfully your hand-carved Victorian style bed spindles turned out -it’s not what we do. There’s a ton of blogs out there and you’ve got the wrong one. Submitting a product that is clearly irrelevant shows us that you haven’t even bothered to click around a bit on the BUILDblog. It shows us that you didn’t get it, or worse, didn’t even try.

2.    Take an interest and be involved. If what you’re doing/making/selling/promoting really does relate to modern, cost effective design, then you should enjoy many of our past and recent posts. Read a few, give us some feedback, leave a comment or two, join the RSS feed. Get out of the stands and get on the court.  This is social media, so you know, be social.  Asking us to hawk your product doesn’t count as social until we’ve had social interaction.

3.    Your own website is really important. Presenting yourself well on the web and through social media is a highly valuable commodity; it’s worth the required time, energy and consideration. We point to websites that reinforce what we do and how we do it, we point to websites that we think our readers will enjoy. We don’t point to websites that make us look like hucksters. We’d also rather get a simple email with a link to a beautiful website rather than an 8MB pdf to sort through (or *not* sort through as is typically the case).

4.    Be helpful. Provide information that is of genuine interest to readers –information that people can actually use. Not marketing pitches or press releases –that’s old math and blogs are new math. Promotion is also a two-way street and a good way to get noticed is to promote the places where you want to have a presence.

5.    Follow up. Stay in the game and keep at it. Ask questions in the comments section and check back in for our answers. Use twitter to stay in contact and keep the dialogue going.  To reiterate, be social, not salesy.

While this guide was created in response to the emails we get specifically at the BUILDblog, we’re guessing that these points apply to many design blogs out there. Making a purposeful approach with design blogs will exponentially increase your chances of being recognized for the awesome things that you’re up to.

Thanks from team BUILD