How to Get Featured in the Media
There are several ways to get yourself or your business featured
in the media, each requiring different skills, efforts, and/or
costs. If you'd like to experience the benefits of publicity,
here are your ways in.
1) Do Nothing.
That is, do nothing specifically for publicity. If you're
running a professional business that's got some visibility
already, the media may stumble across you while writing a
feature story, and they may want your input for the story.
I actually found my way onto NPR this way once when they were
doing a story on love letters. As a writer for hire, I was
briefly interviewed about being hired to write love letters for
other people and I was quoted within their show.
More recently, a newswire writer quoted me in a story on wedding
speeches since I write these for people
(http://www.speechcrafter.com), and this appeared in a number of
newspapers. And most recently, a writer for a high-traffic blog
was interested to know more about ghostwriting, so I got an
exclusive feature story (in the form of an interview) about my
site, http://www.writerforyou.com.
Relying on the media to find you, though, means missing out on a
lot of potential publicity. What follows are more active
approaches.
2) Become an Expert Source.
As you can see in #1 above, media look for experts to feature in
their stories. Get yourself into an expert source database and
the media can more easily find you. Databases include:
http://www.profnet.com
http://www.prleads.com
http://www.prvade.com
The first two offer more traffic and cost more. The latter costs
less and has less traffic, but also offers other benefits.
3) Send Out Press Releases.
If you can write a solid press release, you have some solid news
or a great story angle, and you send the release out through the
right channels at the right time, you can indeed get publicity
with this approach.
Of course there's plenty to learn about each of those elements,
and a lot of so-called experts make some grave errors about
their approaches to writing and distribution. If you're doing
this yourself, take the time to read through several sources to
get a balanced viewpoint in how to do this.
If you're hiring someone, make sure to ask some questions. Ask
for definitions of hard news, soft news, and feature stories.
Ask their opinions about what can be sent out as a press
release. Ask if they can explain the difference between
traditional newswires and modern "Direct PR" newswires (such as
PR Web). Can they compare results between the two?
You may not know the answers to these questions ahead of time,
but if you're asking a few professionals, you could get a good
education and find out who seems the best bet for helping you.
4) Query the Media Directly.
If you have specific media you want to get into, there's no
point in sending out general press releases. After all, a
general release is up against a LOT of competition and costs
hard cash.
Figure out who your target audience reads, watches, or listens
to, then approach those media. Pitch an article in which you can
educate the audience and get a byline (much like with this
article), or ask if you can send in a press release (and how
they'd like to receive it).
Getting in touch with editors directly gives you better odds for
success and, since you don't face the cost of press release
distribution in this case, you can save a lot of money and
potentially get more exposure.
Hopefully this is a good introduction to your paths to
publicity. You can learn more about various forms of publicity
and how to use them through a free e-mail course at
http://www.prvade.com/ecourse.html.