How to get organic PR for your startup?
It doesn't matter if you are a startup or a big enterprise. You have to market your product/ service to bring more customers to your shop. It sometimes feels nonsensical when we see the amount of money spent on some of the marketing campaigns. Being a startup, forget the fancy marketing campaign, it is very hard to even spend on something very essential like the salary for your employees. But these things should not stop you from thinking about ways on how to market your product/service as its the only way through which you will be able to skyrocket your revenue.
There are lot of easy ways to do it when you have your jackets filled with dollars. For others it might not be as easy, but it is absolutely possible if you do few things right. There is nothing like a free article about your startup or your service or about you in a popular blog or a news magazine. It can give a hell lot of visibility when you get many of eyeballs reading your story. So to get that, there are few thing to which you need to pay a lot of attention.
Story:
One needs to understand that the blogs and news magazines are popular for a reason. They simply don’t want to waste their readers time by posting random things and boring stories. So before you start contacting the editors, make sure that you have something interesting and useful to share with them. We are in an era, where if you fail to package and present your story interestingly, you are dead and buried under the pacific ocean where even the micro organisms are not going to notice you. So invest quality time in preparing a proper pitch. Send it to your mentors and well-wishers before you send it to any editors. Get their feedback and tweak it until you are confident that you have a strong story to tell.
Connections:
The next thing you should do is to target the blogs which are more related to your segment. For example if you are a tech startup try to target tech blogs. Prepare a list of blogs and their editors. Most of the editors have their linkedin or facebook or twitter handle in their author bio of their blogs. Connect through their social media handles and try to get into a conversation. Send your story to their personal email. Now don't become a desperate boyfriend who is expecting a reply from his dream girl for his proposal. Keep calm and wait till they reply. If they don't reply, try to follow up once and if they still don't reply, leave it. Don’t risk spamming their mail and getting neglected completely.
You can find the list of international tech blogs and popular news blogs list in this links
Relationships:
Your probability to getting noticed increases when the editors know you personally. Most of these tech blogs conduct meetups and annual tech conferences. Try to attend them and get introduced to them personally. Talk to them about their work and try to get some info about what they might be working on in near future. It might be something related to your story. Grab the opportunity and make a pitch. Remember its not only you that is getting benefited, its win win for both of you. They get content and you get coverage. You can also try getting introduced to them through referrals, which are much more effective.
Leverage:
Now that you have good network of contacts try to leverage them in a useful way. You can propose for a guest blog and get featured as an author in their website or magazine. Try to give relevant,new and useful informations that will help their readers. You can also ask them to write an article in your blog. Help them find new stories by referring some of your friends who have an interesting story to tell. By this way you will have a very healthy network. And finally you can also ask reference to any of their editor friends from different blogs and build your network.
Okay now that have enough customers pouring in and have more than sufficient cash flow, start thinking about the fancy marketing campaigns and skyrocket your sales ;-)
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)
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