Now what's the next step after you've figured out your story or your angle, 1
you figured out how to succinctly pitch your app or your company. 2
Well the next step is figuring out who to pitch to. 3
And this is a workflow that helps you to do that. Different journalists have different areas of interest, 4
they have various things that they like to cover. And in order to find out what that beat is you have 5
to look at what they've written in the past. 6
So say if you're creating a coffee app, 7
the best bet to get press is by finding out which journalists have covered this topic in the past. Because 8
if they've written about coffee apps in the past you're far more likely to get their attention than 9
if you pitch somebody that covered financial tech or fin 10
tech for example. One of the ways of doing this is by going to Google and hitting the News tab 11
searching for either your competitors name or your niche. And then you can start making a list of who 12
those journalists are. 13
Now a slightly more sophisticated way of going about this is using a service like Buzz sumo. 14
And this allows you to see not only who the journalists are but how much interest they got from their 15
stories as well as a whole load of really useful details as well as a whole load of really useful details. 16
But the main point is not about getting some fancy service. 17
It's about figuring out who has written about your niche or about your competitors and then getting a name 18
of the journalist making a spreadsheet of who the journalist was, 19
what is the URL of the story that is in the same niche as yours. And then read up and do a little bit 20
of background research on the journalists. Figure out what do they tend to write about, 21
what do they care about, 22
what are they interested in. 23
So that will come from their previous posts, their Twitter feed or their Facebook feed and start getting 24
a sense of what each journalist is about because everybody's different and you have way better of a 25
chance targeting a journalist that actually cares about the topic that you're involved in rather than 26
just rather than just blasting every single journalist. Because at the end of the day when you are pitching 27
journalists you want to make it personalized. 28
You want to be able to show that a) you're not wasting their time because you know what they write about. 29
You know what their opinion or their stance on certain things are. 30
And either "Here is a novel idea" or "Hey here's a heads up on what's happening in that area" or in that niche 31
or something that basically is worth writing about because these journalists get pitched every single 32
day from morning to evening. 33
And you have to somehow stand out from the giant crowd of self-obsessed founders who all believe that 34
they are a special snowflake and that everything they do is worth an hour of somebodies life to write 35
about it. 36
So really do your homework and you'll have a much higher chance of success.