Hey all my name is Ben and I run www.gamedon.co.uk,

I've been trying to get in contact with some companies to see if they would be interested in taking part in some premotional competitions etc on the site but as always there is no reply from there PR contacts (mostly).

Anyone have any tips on the best approach to this would be? 
Also could I get some feedback on the website from you guys? 

Cheers :)

Hey Ben-

The biggest thing is what can you offer them? You really have to plan it out and have a goal for yourself and for the publisher. If you only have a few people who are going to participate, it is not a good deal for them. Honestly the first couple of competitions, I would buy something myself and see how it goes. Make sure it is done in an open area of the site for all to see, that way if it is successful and you have a lot of participants you can then go to the publisher with a link and show them what you have done in the past.

I'm not exactly in the know on this kind of thing, but I would imagine that you need to get a good working relationship with your PR contacts, show that you can benefit them by reporting on their products - Then you can be in a position to get competition prizes. Sometimes you'll even get press releases from PRs that offer copies of games/strategy guides/etc for prize purposes.

As always in this industry, work on getting a good rapport with PR contacts first (Easier said than done), then you can work on everything else.

Thanks for the quick replies! Great input and more research is showing PR contacts are the way to go, I was in two minds about them at first because there a pain to get a reply from haha but trial and error I suppose, thanks again :)

As Lee and I both stated, make sure you have something that will benefit them first... without that you won't get anywhere. Remember they want the maximum return they can get.

It's always good to have good traffic first, giveaways are good and all but if you only have 500 members contacting you then it's a real morale breaker.

As you gain hits companies will treat you better, companies will send you things without asking you etc, then you can call in a promotional giveaway request

I've been a freelancer reviewer for a few years now and I was a bit puzzled about how to get started when it came to contacting PR companies for review samples.

To start with it felt really odd to be emailing these people out of the blue basically asking for free games. I was quite aware that they may see me as a scrounger, but there seemed no other choice.

I must have emailed most of the more relevant PR people I could find and only got a few responses, and just a couple of those were positive. But when they sent me some review samples I did what I promised and reviewed them, they were pleased and things went on from there.

I'm still far from being on the hit list when it comes to PR companies but I have made inroads.

As some of the others have said, come up with a plan highlighting what they will be getting out of the deal. Be honest and don't give up trying.

Thanks to the advice here I have landed my website / business on a few PR lists and a few freebies to preview / review and ever hand out as prizes - Thanks again =D !

Congrats, glad to hear you're getting good results :)