Forget about the Wall Street Journal

Forget about Time, Forbes, Newsweek, Business Week, the New York Times, and

the Wall Street Journal. Pitching a reporter at one of these places is practically

impossible. Good luck even getting ahold of that guy. And even if you do, he

probably won't care anyway. You're not big enough to matter.

You're better off focusing on getting your story into a trade publication or

picked up by a niche blogger. With these outlets, the barrier is much lower. You

can send an e-mail and get a response (and maybe even a post) the same day.

There's no editorial board or PR person involved. There's no pipeline your

message has to go through.

These guys are actually hungry for fresh meat. They thrive on being

tastemakers, finding the new thing, and getting the ball rolling. That's why many

big-time reporters now use these smaller sites to find new stories. Stories that

start on the fringe can go mainstream quickly.

We've been written up in big mainstream publications like Wired and Time,

but we've found that we actually get more hits when we're profiled on sites like

Daring Fireball, a site for Mac nerds, or Lifehacker, a productivity site. Links

from these places result in notable spikes in our traffic and sales. Articles in bigtime publications are nice, but they don't result in the same level of direct, instant

activity.