How do you get PR coverage if you’re not in a ‘sexy’ industry? 

That’s easy, you don’t talk about the boring stuff.

You talk about something else.

I did this for a company offering serviced office space.

If I’d have written about what they did, which is find businesses office space, I would have probably struggled to get any coverage.

Instead, I wrote a totally irreverent job advert, posted it on their site, and then contacted some journalists.

You can do the same.

Have one product on your site that’s completely absurd. Perhaps make it something topical that makes it ‘newsworthy’.

Make the copy funny.

Send it to journalists.

Bing. Bang. Bosh. You got coverage.

You might find other publications start covering it too.

You can go viral in two ways.

You can create something and somehow, someway, it appeals to the zeitgeist and it spreads like wildfire.

However, more often than not, this is not how commercial things go viral.

Instead, you need to get your story published by people who already have a massive audience.

For instance, national or international press.

They cover it.

It gets shared about on social media.

Then even more publications talk about it because it’s gone ‘viral’.

There is one issue with this approach.

Often publications are not keen to include outbound links.

To make it harder for publications to merely give you a mention, you should try to create something that is somewhat interactive. It should have buttons that need to be pushed.

This makes it much harder for publications to get away with not including a link.

We once did this for another serviced office company. We created a ‘tube cost time machine’ where readers could predict the cost of their journey to work in the future.

Alas, the time machine itself doesn’t appear to work. This was a few years ago.

It worked though, getting coverage in Time Out, TNT, London Evening Standard and many other publications.

Why did this work?

It was topical as the topic of commuting prices was in the news.

We then made something containing a tenuous link between this topical story and our client’s offering.

You have to think about this from the perspective of a journalist.

They have KPIs too.

They need page views.

If you can figure out how to help them do that, they will gladly publish a story about you or your client.

If you can create something that requires a little interaction, you’ll force them to link to your site too.

As long as they don’t add a ‘no-follow’ tag to your link, this will help your visibility in Google too.

See, I told you I knew about stuff other than sending amusing cold pitches 

Speak soon.

Cheers,

Jon

 P.S. If you’d like to get better at generating leads, getting PR coverage and generally be able to open all sorts of opportunities for yourself, you should check out Charm Offensive Professional.

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