Want to be in the news?
If you want journalists to write about you in the news and their blogs, there are some necessary steps to take before you start pitching.
I’ll outline here the steps to take that include having a media kit, writing a good email, and sending your email that when done correctly can bring you a flood of publicity.
Your Media/Press Kit
The purpose of having a press kit is to make it easy for the media to find out the basic details of your product or business all in one place, which makes it easier for them to write about you. Putting together a press kit can be done in just a couple of hours.
The press kit should include the following:
- Photos of founders or team.
- Company Logos.
- A brief overview of you or your company.
- Any screenshots, photos or videos of your product.
- Any previous mentions in the press, or blogs that have written about you.
It’s not essential that you have each one of the above items, but the more you can provide reporters/bloggers with, the better.
Next Step – Writing The Email
So now that you’ve got a list of potential media contacts to reach out to, and you’ve got your hook and your press kit ready, the next step is actually creating your email to send out to them. This step is extremely important, and I’ll include some sample email text to give you an idea of how your emails should be structured.
Sample Email
Hi [Name],
I’m Joe Smith from Digital Biz. I’m a consultant who helps small businesses get more customers and I have an idea for an article that I think your readers would benefit from. With Christmas coming up, a lot of small local businesses are having to compete with large retailers like Amazon. My article would be about 5 ways small businesses can beat Amazon this Christmas by using Facebook to target shoppers in their local area and get them to come in and buy. I’d love to send you a brief draft of the article for you to take a look at if you’re interested. Let me know.
Regards,
Joe
P.S. I have a press kit available here if you’d like to know more about me: [link to your press kit]
The key to getting bloggers and reporters to respond to your emails is to keep your email very brief. Just a quick intro, a bit about your story hook, and ask them if they’d like you to send more information. You just want to pique their interest enough so they reply: “Sure. Send over what you have.”
How To Send Your Emails
So now you’ve got your list of publications to target, your story hook, your press kit and your email text. The last step is to actually send your emails out to those publications. Fortunately this step is pretty easy to do.
The first step is to get the email addresses of the publications you want to target. You can either do this manually by going to each site and finding the email address, or by using a paid tool that I’ll show you in a moment.
Manually finding emails for each site you want to target is more time consuming, but the benefit is that it’s free. So if you’re on an extra tight budget, that’s the way to go. You can usually find a publication’s email address under their “contact” section. However, some larger news sites will have a “Submit a tip” link where you can email your pitch to. If you go this route, just be sure you’ve addressed your tip to the attention of the reporter who covers the appropriate beat.
If you’re not able to find the reporter’s contact information on a website, you can always reach out to them on Twitter (pretty much any serious journalist or blogger working today will have a Twitter account), let them know you have some cool information about something they mentioned in a previous article, or a tip about the topic they cover, and ask what’s the best email address to send it to.
The two articles below have some more great tips on finding anyone’s email, including reporters and bloggers you want to reach out to:
Find Email Addresses
How to Find Almost Anyone’s Email
If you’d like to save a lot of time, there’s a paid tool called Buzzstream that automates a lot of the process of getting emails and sending them out. At the time of this writing, Buzzstream also has a 14-day free trial.
If you sign up with Buzzstream, simply load up the website url links from the Google spreadsheet you created earlier with the scraper or from Google News. Run Buzzstream and it will generate a list containing the website url, social media accounts and email addresses for each of those sites. You can then paste your story idea pitch into an email, personalize it and send it out to your blogger/reporter list using Buzzstream’s BuzzBar option (Obviously you can still do all this stuff manually if you choose not to use Buzzstream).
Once you start sending out emails, you should start getting responses back anywhere from within a few hours to 23 days, depending on the site. I can’t really give you a template here, because the exact process will differ somewhat depending on the publication and the type of story you’re pitching them. But generally if they’re interested, they’ll request more information about your business, or ask you to send over the tips you wanted to share if you were pitching them on an informational article, etc. You want to just keep the communication open and remember to make their job as easy as possible, which will make them more likely to run the story. Most of all, make sure your website has a landing page where you offer something for free in exchange for people’s email address, so that when people do read news articles about you, and they come visit your website, they’ll have a reason to subscribe and get on your email list.
A great thing about your business or product getting media coverage is that coverage tends to beget coverage, meaning that once blogs or news sites start writing about you, it will make it easier in the future to get coverage from even bigger and more established news sites, local and even national TV news and radio.
In fact, once a smaller blog runs a story about your business or product, the very next thing you should do is send an email including a link to that story to reporters at larger publications who cover that topic and pitch it as the basis for a related story, repeating the process so that you get even more coverage. Social proof goes a long way with the media, and reporters will be much more likely to write about you if they see other people are already talking about you, because it gives you more credibility. This is how you can go from getting blog posts written about you on small, local blogs to getting coverage in larger national media outlets.
So what should you do with the surge of traffic you get from all this media coverage?
The best thing to do is to set up a landing page on your website where you offer a free report, video or newsletter that’s related to the topic of the article. Using the small business marketing consulting example, you could build on an article about how small businesses can use Facebook to get more (fill in the holiday) shoppers into their stores by offering a free Cheat Sheet with even more tips, such as how to create great Facebook ads, how to get customers to spend more money once they’re in the store, or how to turn those shoppers into repeat customers who keep buying for years to come. Whatever you do, you want to be building a list, because that’s where you’ll make your real money.
Conclusion
You now have in your hands information that you can use to generate a flood of traffic any time you want. If you follow the steps in this report, within days, you can contact dozens or hundreds of journalists and popular bloggers who need new content to write about or report on. By making their jobs easier, and providing them with hooks and article ideas that you’ve already practically written for them, the odds of them covering you go up dramatically.
Getting media coverage has a huge advantage over other forms of advertising because in addition to bringing in thousands of new visitors to your website overnight, it also makes people see your business as more credible and can brand you as an expert in your field.
This is potentially life changing information. Use it and let me know how it works for you.
Additional Resources
I’ve included below a list of extra resources that can help you get a better understanding of how to effectively get media coverage. These are strategies that have worked for companies as diverse as tech startups and American Apparel to get tens of thousands of and generate millions of dollars in sales, so they can work for your business too.
This is a great Slideshare presentation by Ryan Holiday, author of Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, who worked as marketing director for American Apparel. His campaigns using the media helped the company generate millions of dollars in sales.
This is another Slideshare by Ryan Holiday, where he shows you how to influence blogs to write about you.
This is the story of how a startup company unexpectedly got 60,000 new users in 60 hours. Read the part on “PR Hacking”.
This is an article by Neil Patel of Quicksprout on how to write great blog posts. Use this as a guide for creating quick drafts of story ideas to send to your media contacts.
Here’s a bunch more tips on writing articles and blog posts by Darren Rowse of Copyblogger. You don’t need to know all this stuff to get started, though. Just follow the steps in this report and get started getting press coverage. You can always go back and work on creating better story ideas for your pitches later…After you’ve already gotten featured in the news.)
This is a HUGELY useful tool for coming up with great story ideas to pitch to the media, because it allows you to search by topic to find news articles and blog posts and see which ones are getting shared a lot on social media, allowing you to find out what topics are already hot within your niche. BuzzSumo offers both free and paid versions.
This is a list of contact information for hundreds of news websites and bloggers, mostly in technology related industries.
Below are three additional resources with tips specifically on how to pitch the media your story ideas:
Secrets to pitching success
17 PR Pros share their best pitching tips
Small business pitch story
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