How to Get Bloggers and Journalists to Write About You

Intro

Would you like to get mentioned by other bloggers and journalists (plus generate some powerful backlinks) to come to you?

If so, then you need to become a source in your niche as well as become open to all kinds of different opportunities.

When it comes to getting quoted and featured, there’s no one single recipe. You need to be doing a lot. In that respect I love the “serendipity” approach a lot: You welcome any opportunity to be involved in discussions. You are out there, open to all kinds of opportunities.

The best part is the fact that the leads can be delivered to your inbox as well. Here are a few ways to connect to link and press amplifiers (i.e. journalists and bloggers) for the chance to be featured on top media outlets.

Side note: If you are a journalist or blogger, then you might also want to check out some of those platforms as well to get sources and experts for your content. All of them have a sign up for both sources and journalists, with journalists getting access for free.

Homework: Work on Your About Page

This step is something you need to do prior to any active outreach campaigns because developing a personal brand needs to start from your own site.

Make sure your About page is impressive enough to help you catch every single opportunity that comes your way:

• Describe your personal story and what you do.
• Talk about your experience and expertise.
• List all your social media profiles. Make sure your social media bios provide details about your expertise. This is also a good time to consolidate your branding identity. They say it takes at least 5 impressions for anyone to remember your brand, so use your multiple channels (your site and social media profiles) to keep reminding your contacts of yours.
• Add your testimonials (these don’t have to be clients but niche peers or coworkers praising your skills)
• Add details on how you can be reached (this is very important!). Note that any email may get into your spam folder, so list alternative ways of how people (clients and journalists) can contact you. It is always a good idea to add a phone number. Not only will this make you look more like a professional, it will also make it easier to reach you. There are business phone apps for you to use an affordable business line instead of making your personal number public. Here are also great contact us page templates to give you even more ideas on how to design yours.
• It is also a good idea to provide more engagement opportunities on that page to hear from people who are not ready to contact you. For example, you can embed a video or add a survey. You can embed a survey to guide your visitors toward the right page. Ask about their experience with your site or yourself. Make your survey personal, interactive and add in one or more (variable) visuals. This will enable you to differentiate from the already existing preference filters you probably have on your site.

Once your About page and social media channels look solid, you can start actively pursuing press mentions.

1. Get Interviewed

Interviews are among the most popular content formats these days. They come in various forms, like written Q&A, social media AMAs (“Ask me anything”), Twitter chats, podcasts, live streams and more.

Not all of these interviews will result in links, nor bring hundreds of leads your way. But don’t neglect any opportunity. Getting featured in an engaging podcast could potentially get your brand discovered by other podcasters.

Every opportunity of getting featured, however small, means an opportunity to get noticed by another blogger or journalist.

Start by building connections and reaching out to content creators in your niche (or outside of it) who publish frequent interviews. Search for something like "your area of expertise podcast" or "your hobby interview" and create a list of those content creators.

Try different queries: There will likely be plenty of various opportunities in your niche. Don’t just apply to be featured in any of those interviews or podcasts you have come across.

Spend some time building connections with those bloggers or influencers. This will help you improve your chances of getting a positive answer. This will also help you create a better pitch based on more popular interviews and presenters. Take every opportunity seriously.

Follow those bloggers on social media and interact with them.

Create a separate Twitter list to interact with them on a regular basis. That is easy to do using Tweetdeck on desktop: Simply create a new column for that Twitter list:

Run those blogs through Buzzsumo to identify the most shared content and see if you can come up with a better topic idea based on that research. The tool has a “Content Analyzer” allowing to quickly find the most shared and/or the most linked to content from any blog. Make sure to play with the “Date range” to ensure you find older content that was a success:

This will give you a better idea of each blog’s audience allowing you to better meet their needs when pitching your story for an interview or a podcast.

Twitter chats are cool because they are always looking for more active participants and will likely invite you to host once you show up 2-3 times with some useful input.

Twitter has a lot more opportunities for digital PR, so let’s talk about Twitter a little bit more:

2. Use Twitter

Twitter remains one of the best ways to build connections with bloggers and journalists, as well as to respond to their calls for sources.

Twitter Search is where you could start. You can search for “People” on Twitter, so you can type your keyword in combination with “journalist”, “reporter” or “blogger”:

It is also a good idea to monitor specific hashtags reporters are using to find interesting sources:

• #journorequest
• #PRrequest
• #asktwitter

You can have these set up within a separate column in your Tweetdeck as well to keep an eye and suggest yourself as a source when you have required expertise.

3. Use Free and Paid Platforms

There are quite a few platforms that connect journalists and bloggers with sources that help make their stories more diverse and trustworthy. You don’t need to use all of them but look at several of them before you decide which one to focus on:

HARO

Help a Reporter Out (now a Cision property) is one of the top free services for businesses and experts who want to become sources. Journalists from top media outlets like Fox, ABC, Gannett, AP, and Huffington Post use their service to find sources for their stories.

When you sign up for a free HARO account as a source, you can choose to receive inquiries from journalists on topics related to business and finance, high tech, lifestyle and fitness, and travel. You can also sign up for the Master HARO category that includes everything.

Inquiries are delivered in a digest style email three times per day. The following is a sample of the digest index.

You can click on a story that fits your business to find additional details about what the journalist needs and how to submit your response.

There are quite a few HARO alternatives you can also explore:

Muck Rack

Muck Rack is a premium service that connects PR pros and marketers to journalists and bloggers. It goes beyond just delivering opportunities to your inbox by allowing you to seek out journalists and bloggers by beat, outlet, media type, or custom queries.

You can also create alerts to see when journalists mention your business so you can pitch them at the right time, create media lists for outreach campaigns, measure the results of your campaigns, and get priority support from outreach experts.

You can also subscribe to the Muck Rack Daily, a free digest of top tweets from journalists delivered to your inbox daily. If you’re not ready for a pro plan, this can at least help you start connecting to the right people online.

ProfNet

ProfNet is a premium service that connects experts to journalists and bloggers. They also note that it’s not just journalists and bloggers who are looking for expert sources, but also government officials, academic researchers, publishers, and more. For businesses looking for new ways to build quality links, this means the opportunity to get mentions on .gov and .edu sites along with notable media outlets.

Sources will receive email queries from professionals looking for sources. They will also have the ability to create expert profiles to link to press releases submitted to the top media outlets.

Before subscribing to ProfNet, you will receive a free trial of their service that includes a kickoff demo. After your free trial, you will find out the fee, which is based on the number of users who need access, type of organization, and industries you want to receive leads from.

Source Bottle

SourceBottle is another HARO-like network where you can sign up for free as a source or a journalist. Sources will receive regular emails based on the opportunities available for the topics they choose. There are over 30 topics to choose from in agriculture to travel.

You can also choose to only receive queries from specific countries – Australia, New Zealand, UK, Canada, and the United States. As an added bonus, you can preview the types of queries you would receive by viewing the free publicity opportunities page, organized by industry.

KITI

KITI (previously known as Media Kiti which had been active since 2001) unites over 9,000 journalists to PR professionals, sources, and experts. Sources have to pay a subscription fee of $89.95 yearly. It’s a great platform for businesses in the tourism and lifestyle industries to connect with journalists who will need sources specifically for topics revolving around travel.

Unlike most online services, the platform takes up to seven days to approve your application for membership, as a source or a journalist. Keep this in mind for when you are ready to start connecting with their selection of journalists.

When it comes to getting mentioned or quoted as an expert, it’s all about experimenting with all kinds of opportunities before you find something that works for you. Then you can get more focused. The nice thing about getting featured is that it has a nice snowball effect: Once bloggers and journalists start linking to you, others will notice and reach out as well. Good luck!