How I got my side project mentioned in Forbes

Hey everyone. Here’s a repeatable, step-by-step process I figured out to get media to write about me, resulting in a backlink, traffic, publicity, subscribers, and customers. I used this to get mentioned in MarketingProfs (a major marketing site) and Forbes.

First, you have to consider things from the journalist’s perspective. Why should they write about you? Most journalists have “beats”. That is, topics they cover. You need to have something that they like that they will cover (usually a piece of content). For me, I did original research. An easy way to validate this is to see whether they have written about similar things in the past. Remember, journalists get a lot of pitches. Most of them are not targeted.

A note on research. It’s not nearly as intimidating as it sounds. There’s a lot of public data out there. You can also analyze a small amount of data (like 100 rows of something). You can use free online tools to come up with some graphs. Of course, I know there are a lot of programmers here, so you can just python.

Then, get a list of 50 journalists you think are a good fit.

Then, you want to follow them on Twitter, respond to a few of their tweets. This at least puts you on their map.

If you want them to cover a piece of content, ask them beforehand whether they’d be interested in the piece and some questions they have about the topic. Journalists like to collaborate on research.

Then, create your content with their feedback.

Finally, let them know. If you did it right, you’ll have a few stories written about you.

Be sure to continue to nurture the relationships you’ve built.

Let me know if you have any questions.

2 Likes

Could you share links to some of the articles that have come from this approach?

Sure. I didn’t want to include any links to appear spammy, but I’ll gladly show if you want.

I can’t post links since I’m new so I have to do a tacky workaround:

This is an article I wrote about analyzing 100,000 viral posts: growista DOT com/viral-posts-new-research

This a Forbes article about it: forbes DOT com/sites/cherylsnappconner/2018/02/19/by-the-numbers-how-viral-content-is-evolving-and-what-entrepreneurs-need-to-know/

This is the MarketingProfs article about it: marketingprofs DOT com/charts/2018/33655/what-goes-viral-learnings-from-100000-popular-content-pieces

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Discourse (this forum software) will give you the permissions to put links in soon - in the mean time here they are …

https://growista.com/viral-posts-new-research/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cherylsnappconner/2018/02/19/by-the-numbers-how-viral-content-is-evolving-and-what-entrepreneurs-need-to-know/#371a8cb87b9b