Now the next thing that we're going to dress is what is the right modality for contacting journalists. 1
And a lot of journalists have expressed their preferences and basically the summary is that email is 2
king. 3
Don't pitch a journalist over Twitter. 4
You can't do it in 140 characters. 5
Don't try and spam journalists to DM them. 6
It doesn't really work. 7
And don't be creepy and stalk them over Facebook. 8
It's just not the right thing to do. 9
Instead simply just write an email that the body shouldn't be more than 200 words long and the subject 10
line should be you know 40 to 60 characters. 11
So basically short, punchy, to the point, don't waste anybody's time. 12
And at the same time give them a couple of links or attachments to allow them to find out more if they 13
wish to. 14
Now this is a template from a friend of mine and it basically encapsulates all of that advice. 15
It's short, it's punchy, 16
it's the point. It gets across everything that you need to get across 17
and at the same time it doesn't waste anybody's time. 18
So have a look at it and see if you can adapt it for your own use. 19
The next question people tend to have is what is the best time for reaching a journalist. 20
And this is surprisingly important because you want to be the guy or girl who gets your email into 21
the journalist inbox first thing in their work day because we all know how it feels at 4:00 p.m. on 22
a Friday. 23
That's the time when most people have given up on life. In order for your email to have the best chance 24
of being received, being read and being considered, 25
you want to get to them when they're fresh when they're starting a work day. 26
And that translates to around 6:30 to 7:30 a.m.. 27
Now you can do something really creepy which I heard from a press expert and the tip is to look at the 28
Twitter feed of the journalists and every single tech journalist worth their salt will have a Twitter 29
account. And look at when they first start either replying to tweets or liking tweets or basically any 30
sort of activity. 31
And that probably is the time when they wake up. 32
So this is maximum creepy but probably quite effective and just something to consider when you are going 33
down this route. 34
Now the next tool is really really useful not just for pitching journalists but for life in general. 35
And this is something called BoomerangGmail.com. And it's basically a plug in for Gmail that is 36
really powerful. 37
It allows you to schedule your emails at any point in the future. 38
So this means that if you're pitching a tech journalist who lives in the opposite time zone to you, you 39
don't have to be awake at 4:30 am sending that email. 40
You can schedule this to be sent later at any time point. You can schedule your email to be sent out at 41
any time point in the future. 42
And this also happens to be how my mother gets a happy birthday note from me without fail every single 43
year on her birthday. 44
So use it for life use it for business. 45
Either way, it's a really really useful free plugin. 46
Check it out. 47
Now we're really giving away a lot of secret sauce. 48
These tools are some of my favorite in the world. 49
This is another one called GetSideKick.com and it's made by HubSpot. 50
This is one of the most powerful email tools out there. 51
What allows you to do is to track your email. 52
So what the service does is that it embeds a invisible pixel into your HTML email 53
and once that invisible pixel gets loaded on the recipient's email client you get a notification telling 54
you that your email was opened by 55
so and so. 56
So this is really useful for pitching journalists because sometimes your email will just get lost in 57
a sea of emails. 58
And if you know that your email hasn't even been opened then it's probably not a bad idea to try and 59
resend the email or reword the email a week later and see if you have a better chance. 60
Now the next thing to remember is that before you pitch any journalist make sure that you have a press 61
kit that's ready. 62
So this includes founder headshots, 63
this includes your logos, 64
this includes your website home page or your app screenshots 65
if you're an app company or product photos if you're a hardware company etc. 66
Basically these are high quality images or videos in various sizes and 67
resolutions that if a journalist decides to pick up on your story they can simply write you know a paragraph 68
and drop these images in without having to contact you ever again. 69
And the rule for pitching journalists as well as for life is if you can make somebody else's life easier 70
then you'll usually have a better chance of getting what you want. 71
So make sure that you include this as a link to an attachment rather than just an attachment itself 72
because most spam filters will filter out emails which has a zip file in it.