Grabbing The Attention Of The Press

There's a post over on SlyMarketing blog today about the difficulty of getting press attention to your latest and greatest idea - particularly the product or service you might be marketing. The difficulty he identifies is that the local newspaper is focused on something else, namely soccer! what else and the specific local area.

This is an extreme example but encapsulates not so much the difficulty of how to get press attention but rather the opportunity it opens up. This is a traffic generation strategy much loved by Andrew Reynolds, one of the UKs leading direct mail marketers.

His advice is not to write a press release and ship it off to every journal under the sun. Rather to research the publications that are big in your niche, study the style of their articles and then write an article for them. Note I said an article, not a press release.

The editors of most niche publications are desperate for copy. Something, anything to fill those empty spaces that will attract readers because it is the reader numbers that attract the advertisers that pay their salaries.

If you deliver to them an attractive article about the niche in which both their publication and your product belong - and you just happen to major on your product as being newsworthy; and it is written in their house style and is the length they are comfortable with so it fits into their usual page layouts then it is quite possible they will print the article without even editing it.

And what did you put into your article? Why, your website address, the product name, your company name and contact details so that the readers of that publication will have no difficulty at all in finding your website or picking up the phone to order. All in a nice subtle way, but just make sure they are there.

So what's the secret? It's the research and tailoring the article to fit easily and neatly into the editors product. After all, what editor is going to complain if a contributor makes their life so easy?