I hope by now you are excited about the prospect of organizing your very first virtual tour. Trust me when I say that the benefits will last a lifetime.

You have done your research and now you are ready to contact your potential hosts. This means it is time for you to draft a general letter to send out to each potential host; and if you already have people who have agreed to host your tour, then you need to have a letter for them as well.

In your letter to potential host you want to include:

• Your name, business, and link
• Why you are a contacting them
• What’s in it for them
• The theme of the tour
• The dates of the tour
• How many days you would like to post on their blog or what date you want to appear on their podcast
• Why you think their blog or podcast would be a perfect fit for the tour
• Any giveaways you are planning for the tour

That does not mean that your letter needs to be a long one. Most of what needs to go in letter can be drafted with 400 to 500 words.

For those who have already agreed to host your virtual tour, the letter should include:

• Dates of the tour
• Dates you want to visit their blog or be a guest on their podcast
• How you would like to have content uploaded. You can request to be added as a contributor with writing options only so that you can go in and upload the content yourself. However, keep in mind that some may require that you just forward the content to them and they will upload it. Either way is fine.
• Remind them that this is like a cross promotion partnership and that you will be promoting them to your list as well as on the social media platforms you belong to and you ask that same of them.

Nicole Dean provides a great letter sample in Blog World Tour Guide. I actually borrowed it (she said that you could) and I tweaked it to fit my style of writing.

**I have to put a pen and say that as much as I knew about virtual tours, reading Nicole’s guide helped me to ramp it up a bit.

Ok and now back to your regularly scheduled program.

Your contact should be brief yet have all the pertinent information needed. If you follow the guideline suggested you will craft a great contact letter!

Tomorrow Day 5 will be all about gathering content.

Have you missed any of the tips provided in this series? Not to worry, you can just read them here.