Almost everyone wants media coverage, whether it be for their business, website, new book or for themselves. Little do most people know, every time I launch a new product or even product feature; I seek media coverage.

Unless you’re already in the spotlight, you won’t get much media coverage. No one is really going to write about you, your product, blog or whatever else unless you’re already in the spotlight.

If you’re a nobody, a new startup or maybe launching your own Iphone app or blog; you need to seek media coverage yourself. Every company does it, apart from the few giants like Apple and Facebook that don’t need to.

To a new company or individual trying to market his or her own product; media coverage means everything.

So when can you get media coverage?

• When something bad happens and you/your product has a solution.
• When your product has new data i.e. statistics about how well it works or results users have been getting.
• Whenever you launch a new feature.
• Whenever you launch anything new period.
• When you hit a big milestone.

The key is to get media coverage on a regular basis. If you really want to be recognized, you need to be talked about on a regular basis, you need to be featured. Here’s how…

1. Start A Blog

The first thing you can do to get media coverage is to start a blog. Start a company/product/personal blog depending on what you’re trying to do. Blogs are powerful tools for getting exposure. People like writing about blogs, they like linking to them and sharing their content.

If you want media coverage in the form of links or a quick mention within an article; blog about news. It’s called news jacking. Where you use breaking news to drive ridiculous amounts of traffic to your blog and hopefully gain some media coverage.

By writing about breaking news, other writers who’re writing about the same news may well link to your post. You can also use your blog to announce new products, features, services or almost anything else.

2. It’s About Your Story, Not Your Product

If you want media coverage, you need a good story. Writers don’t like to write about products and boring features or statistics; they like to write about stories. People love reading stories so writers love writing about them.

Your product/s, book/s, blog or whatever else needs a great story. If you’re going to make proposals to writers and bloggers, you need to know that writers and bloggers prefer to cover a story over a product. Always have a story, create one with truth.

3. Connect With Bloggers And Writers

If you want immediate media coverage, you need to contact writers and bloggers. Writers and bloggers in your niche who write about similar stuff to yours. The best way to connect with them is to find them on social media sites i.e. Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

Try and make friendly contact with them and share their new articles when you like them. Befriend all the writers and bloggers in your niche that would be likely to write about your stuff. After you’ve made friends with them, you need to follow a simple strategy to make your proposal.

Really, you should only contact them when you have something new that’s actually newsworthy. The best thing to do is to email them. The trick is to create a really strong pitch in the form of a template you can use for all of your proposals.

You need to put everything on a plate for the writers and bloggers you contact. For example, you could say “Hey Johnny, I really liked the article you wrote on Mashable the other day, really powerful stuff. I just wanted to tell you about this new feature in my product X. It allows people to market on Facebook 10 times faster than anything else… etc etc etc. We just found out it increases traffic by 200% (use real stats only). Do you think this is something your readers would like to hear about?”

Make sure your pitch has one clear question, put everything on a plate for the people you contact to increase the chance of them covering your story. Obviously you’ll want to write a longer, far better email – as that’s just an example.

People use this strategy to get featured on some of the biggest sites in the world. If you build enough rapport with the writers/bloggers you contact – you should be able to get them to cover your story/product on their blogs or sites that they write for.

You’ve Got Media Coverage, Now What?

• Promote any substantial live articles/posts that cover your product/site or even articles that simply mention you via a link. Use social media to share the articles and mention the writer/s in your messages.
• Get ready to reply to any comments made by readers. On pretty much all blogs and sites, you’ll see a lot of comments. So when you get some media coverage, make sure you reply to comments left by curious readers.
• Reply to Tweets and Facebook messages.
• Send a follow up email to the writer/blogger that covered your site/product/etc.

In Prosperity,

David Wood

P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments and questions below. Also opt-in to the email list on the right for more cool media coverage tips, tricks and secrets.