PR Backstage Pass: How to Get Your Business into The Media

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Erika Malone
5 years ago
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2 PR Backstage Pass: How to Get Your Business into The Media Do you want to get in touch with media outlet? Technology and platforms change and adapt, but the principles and advice in this guide are timeless, and will serve you over and over. In this guide, I will show you 3 methods of getting your business into the media: The Traditional Method The traditional way is to acquire a list of media contacts and build up the relationships on your own. This method is comparable to cold calling where you would purchase a media list first. Then you would reach out to the journalists and editors on that media list. If your story is news worthy, and you get through the clutter of hundreds of daily inquiries they receive, then your press release may see the light of day. The drawback to this is that it takes a lot of perseverance and frankly, a lot of time, before you get any results. Ask any business owner who has hired a PR company: How long did it take before your publicist got you on XYZ media outlet? Next proceed with how much that publicist was paid. If you get the average responses of a few business owners, you may be wondering what on earth did their publicists do with that money? The going rate for a decent publicist starts at $5000 a month. If you are looking to purchase a list, we strongly recommend (Disclaimer: This is a 3rd party website and is not part of Press Release Jet). Tip: Individual media contacts are $10 per media outlet but if you purchase a list, you can get hundreds of media contacts for less than $100, which is significantly less in cost than some of the alternative solutions that we have seen available; and our customers have had remarkable things to say about Media Contact List. The Modern Method These days, every press release distribution company on the market uses established media network partnerships through digital news feeds. Typically, the way it is set up, most news networks have a business development/technology partner that handles such partnerships and syndication with PR distribution companies. In turn, the PR distribution company vets the PRs for editorial quality and news worthiness, and if it meets certain quality guidelines, it will get into the syndication of the media outlets within the news network. Even in the era before such web standards were established allowing for digital news feeds

3 (RSS/XML and JSON, depending on the news network), this was a similar arrangement except it was done using analog telegraph services, and then , and since the late 1990s, everything was shifted to XML-based data formats. Press Release Jet is the leader in press release distribution with news network partnerships equivalent of competitors that have been around for 60+ years in this business, including ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, CW and many more. If you are looking to send your press release to promote your business, we can get you onto hundreds of media outlets *guaranteed* along with into the daily feeds of hundreds of thousands of journalists to run with your story starting at $49, although we d highly recommend our mid-tier package which gets you into a LOT more distribution including some of the top ones we ve mentioned earlier (e.g. ABC, CBS, FOX, etc.). To get you started just go here But what if I do not want to write or am too busy to write my press releases? Then you need to continue reading The PR Autopilot Method With the transition from analog telegraph wires to the Internet s digital news feeds, there has been a massive game changer introduced into this process: the search engine. We are talking specifically about Google and Google News. We are amid change as traditional media transitions to online right now. Not only are there more independent news outlets than ever before with the advent of the modern web, monetizing through advertising models, even established traditional media outlets are taking cue. Here is what is happening in the news publishing industry today, from an insider: Traditional media outlets are sourcing to 3rd party columnists through experts within their corresponding industries along with hiring freelance journalists, writers and editors doing armchair journalism (coming up with news stories and research through Google in the comforts of their armchair in contrast to traditional in-the-field journalism). Why? Because the transition to online dismantled their existing methods of advertising that used to pay the bills; and now they are relying on online ads (typically through Google AdSense, or a similar ad network) that pays based on impressions (views) or clicks to ads. This means to stay afloat as a business, their ad revenue needs to pay the bills. Given this business model of serving ads, it means they need to get a lot of views/clicks (meaning reposting a trending news story is more profitable than spending days or weeks on a single, very well-researched news story), and so is hiring a team of armchair journalists that can crank these news stories out like

4 clockwork. I will walk you through the archetypes of these editorial professionals or editors in our modern era: The Social Influencer: This editor gets their topics through social stories so they would use a tool such as BuzzSumo, which will provide top influencers along with top news stories that they would take, curate, and publish on their media outlet. These tools are a standard in any modern news publishing house because having tangible metrics on what kind of stories will get more clicks, means more traffic and more profits on the advertising side (which is what pays their salary as well as pay the bills for their company- the media outlet). BuzzSumo s algorithm on what are trending stories relies upon aggregating data firstly from Google (literally, they analyze millions of news story headlines from Google, and has publicly disclosed this too) and then use that to pull the social signals from Facebook and Twitter. In short, social influencers piggy back off Google. The SEO Marketer: This editor, whom most likely works at a tech-savvy news outlet that takes search engine optimization into consideration, will use similar tools as the social influencer except it is search engine-centric instead of social. Ahrefs and Majestic are a few of the tools that will help identify trending content on the Internet, scanned from Google, and instead of displaying social metrics it is focused around SEO metrics such as Domain Authority, Page Authority, number of backlinks, etc. In short, SEO marketers (and it is in their name too) piggy back off search engines, particularly Google. The Industry Expert: This editor usually writes for industry news sites, financial feed news sites, etc., and typically has specialized expertise within their respected field or industry. This editor typically combines his/her own knowledge and expertise along with news from Google News through Google Alerts, that tells them when news surrounding their industry has arose within Google News. In short, industry expert s piggy back off Google. What is the common theme here? They all use Google, particularly Google News, to find their stories. But if you speak with these editors, aside from the Industry Expert, they will typically namedrop connections they know that they get their news from and even the names of some of the fancy tools they use. They take this stance so what they do for a living does not sound just as simple as going to Google News and rewriting some of the trending stories, which in fact is the reality. I ve sat in the same room as these editors while they ve done their work and I was

5 in the workflow from keyword research to publishing on one of the most popular news sites in the world. Granted, there are a lot of nifty tools such as the ones I ve mentioned to help their workflow along but it really is that simple in concept of how the news publishing industry works. Because of how modern news publishing works, it is important to keep your business in the news along with taking keywords into consideration (because whether they are The Social Influencer, The SEO Marketer or The Industry Expert, they will all be using search keywords to find articles related to what they typically cover subject-wise). However, this can be a full-time job and quite frankly, many business owners are too busy, or it would cost too much to hire a full-time publicist, to write press releases on a regular basis to stay in the news. This is where our PR Copywriter solution comes in where our native English speaking editorial team - with professional journalistic experience - will craft your press release, you approve it and we will distribute it to 100,000+ journalists and guarantee that it will appear on hundreds of media outlets. This is the full service PR Autopilot approach that many of our business owner customers opt to take advantage of because let s face it: today, more than ever before, being in the news is can generate massive sales (e.g. incoming lead generation from PR), marketing (e.g. part of a larger content marketing campaign), reputation management and more. The average decent publicist starts at $5000 per month (they will most likely be using a service such as ours too!), but today you can get started with a full-service writing and distribution package for less than $300 for some of the best work done in the industry. You can get started today with a bundled package at so you can turn your business on PR Autopilot and reap the benefits! That is the power of Press Release Jet. Best of luck to you. I look forward to helping your business grow! Yan S. Huang CEO of Press Release Jet

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