I am a featured story in today’s 24 Hours Newspaper. If you live in the Vancouver area, you’ll be able to grab a copy at your local newsstand. If not, you can read the full article online by clicking the above picture. 24 Hours also filmed a video with me on tips to make money with Twitter. I’ve embedded the video at the bottom of this post.
How To Get Featured By Print Media
In the past month, I’ve been featured by the Vancouver Sun, the New York Times and now, 24 Hours. Every time I am featured by “old world media,” I get many emails asking how I did it. Rather than answering every single email, I’ve decided to write a post with my three-step method on getting some old world media love.
1 – Have a Story To Tell
The number one things that magazines and newspaper are looking for are stories. If you have a good story, you have a good chance at getting free press. The best place to tell your story in your about page. If you don’t have one, then you better make one. People visit a blog for the writer as much as the information. I visit Shoemoney not just because he tells me how to make money online but because he’s an interesting guy as well.
I was featured in Entrepreneur magazine a few years back because the editor downloaded and read my free eBook. What caught his eyes wasn’t the moneymaking techniques I wrote about. It was my story at the end of the book. You need a story.
2 – Start At Home
Generally, the bigger the news outlet, the easier it is for them to find content because they’re bombed with story ideas all the time from people or companies wanting to get coverage. Your best bet is to start at home with your local papers and magazines. Once you’ve been featured locally, you can leverage it to get featured nationally and internationally.
Send your local paper an email to the editor and tell them your story. Every editor loves a story about a local boy/girl doing good. I recommend you start with the biggest local newspaper instead of the smallest. It takes the same amount of effort talking to a 1 million circulation Vancouver Sun as it does for 10,000 circulation tab. Aim high locally to get maximum bang for the buck. Another reason for doing this is it makes it a lot easier to get coverage from the smaller papers once you’ve been featured in a big one. If the biggest paper in town says no, then move to the next biggest and so on. Starting from the top down is much better than going from the bottom up.
3 – It’s All About The Brand
In order to get tier 1 media coverage, you have to stand out from the 120+ million other blogs in the blogsphere. You can’t do that if you don’t have a brand. What makes your blog different from all the other? If you can’t answer that question, then you can forget about getting readers much less getting in a national magazine or major newspaper.
When you have a brand, you have an advantage over the blog next door. Even if the two of you write about the same thing, you will be the one who gets the press because you are a brand name while the other guy is a no name. At a minimum, building a brand means you must have your own domain name and custom blog design. Read my post on how to brand your blog for more tips.
You can be the most knowledgeable person in the world on a topic and the media won’t care because you have no brand and no story to tell. These two items are the foundation on which on great media coverage is built on.