Hi all! How’s everyone doing?
We’d like to contact technology columnists to write about our startup. We don’t know if they’re assigned tasks but we have a strong feeling they probably don’t care what to write about. Has anyone tried this? How’s it done? What are their rates? More or less standard, that is. Please, share your story.
And if you happen to write about technology, please, contact us through our website. We’ll give you some interesting material too! We promise to reply to everyone.
Reporters/journalists don’t (or at least, shouldn’t) expect or accept payment from the people they write about.
If they accept payment, then it is an advertisement (or possibly an ‘advertorial’).
Of course, but what can you do if you don’t have a huge budget for the full blown advertisement/advertorial? You want to contact reporters directly but why should they write about you? We’d be glad if someone wrote about us for free but it doesn’t work that way.
I’ve had some success without a great deal of effort on https://www.helpareporter.com/
The Process Breakdown Podcast episode with Conrad Egusa has some useful tips.
I was speaking to a very successful friend of mine about this a week or two ago and his experience is that it’s actually not that hard. You just need to find journalists who are already talking about the problem you solve and then pitch them a unique angle on it. He also pointed out, that like cold calling / emailing for sales, it is something of a numbers game.
Sign up as a source on HARO - https://www.helpareporter.com/sources/ - under the topics that are relevant to you/your business.
I tended to find very few things to contact a reporter on in HARO. For a niche, “untrendy” business you might struggle. But maybe I wasn’t being noisy enough.
I’ve been mostly unsuccessful at reaching reporters. We assembled a list of 80+ emails relevant to our app’s productivity theme, some of the authors even wrote about similar apps before.
The pitch is short and explicit, similar to the ones from this guide: http://okdork.com/2014/08/12/how-to-do-pr-for-your-startup-without-spending-any-money/
I can also recommend this guide: http://www.austenallred.com/the-book/press/
But there’re almost no replies for some unclear reason. Maybe it’s the summer, maybe the product is too new (see “The Press Pyramid” in the second guide). I’ll try again soon.
Has anyone used https://justreachout.io by the way?