How to talk about your startup in foreign media with a millionth audience for free: difficulties and ways to get around them

Millions of entrepreneurs all over the world dream of leading English language publications writing about their project. Today I will talk about the difficulties that may arise in trying to realize this desire, and how to get around them.

"Need to get into TechCrunch": the difficulties of working with top-end media

So, you have a business that you want to talk about on the pages of foreign online media. And not anyhow any, but large and world-famous - from Mashable to VentureBeat, while the project is not yet so cool to foreign media. Let's talk about how you can generally get to their pages.

The first option is to offer them some interesting news feed related to the project. This path is well described in the already classic article VC.ru- the iblazr startup team (flash for smartphones) was able to get into the top media, like TechCrunch - the project’s launch on KickStarter became the information line. At the same time, it’s important to understand that the editors didn’t take and became interested - it took a lot of time and effort to attract attention: the project team analyzed the interests of the authors of popular media and blogs, offering their press release to those whom he might be interested in, a few hundred were sent letters.

In the case of iblazr, this worked, but it is obvious that not every startup can boast of any news that goes beyond the scope of its usual activities - which means that even a thousand letters sent will not help to attract media attention. In this case, it remains to share your expert knowledge in the format of columns - this is a very popular genre not only in Russian but also in foreign media. But this does not mean at all that publishing your column will be easy.

It is important to understand that the editors of any more or less well-known media are simply attacked by startupers and PR managers from around the world. The volume of incoming calls from them just rolls over, so often they simply do not respond to letters. When contacting general editorial addresses like info@site.comoreditorial@site.comIt’s almost impossible to wait for an answer, which means you need to somehow find the editor’s direct contact - there are even special services ( one , two ) that help solve this problem for money.

At the same time, if you were answered nevertheless, then with a high degree of probability it will only be a notification of receipt of the material. For example, this summer, I wrote material about how artificial intelligence could improve email in its current form, and offered the text to one of the leading online media on the topic of The Next Web technologies. The answer that they received my text and will give an answer later came on August 21:



After some time, the editor wrote to me that for a number of reasons the material is not suitable. And all would be fine, but his answer came already on October 4, that is, almost a month and a half after sending the material:



A month and a half to wait for the reaction to find out that they will not take your material! It is important to say that in fact, this is still a very good option, since in this case the editor at least indicated the reasons for the refusal. Such a detailed review is very rare, usually representatives of the media either do not answer at all, or get off with standard phrases that they can not give detailed feedback due to the large number of incoming texts.

Another important point - even if you manage to place one article in the top media, this will not facilitate the process of subsequent publications. For example, I managedto publish his research on The Next Web , but several subsequent, and it seemed to me, even more interesting materials, the editors "wrapped up."

Due to the fact that the editors of well-known media have to work in a frantic pace, responding to dozens of letters a day, there may be overlays in communications. For example, once I offered my material about one of my projects (chatbot for marketers) to the VentureBeat publication, and the journalist liked it. He asked me to send a photo for the avatar through the Gravatar system, I was not registered there, and while I was sorting it out, it turned out that the article had already been published. And my profile was without an avatar, and the editor already had no time to answer my subsequent letters with a request to install it. Nothing terrible happened, but the moment is indicative - if suddenly some kind of mistake creeps into the material, and it will need to be corrected after publication, it can be difficult.

At the same time, getting around all the difficulties described at the expense of money is also not so simple - native advertising in top online media is very expensive. The publication’s price lists are usually not published, but using intermediary sites to automate the procurement of “native”, you can find, for example, that the cost of a post on The Next Web will be more than 780 thousand rubles:

If there is no budget and time: we work with Medium

Most startups do not have budgets that would allow them to be regularly published in top-end media on a paid basis. In addition, often native advertising with the appropriate mark simply does not fit into the marketing strategy - it may be important for companies to show what they write about it and not only for money. At the same time, a rare startup can afford and wait one and a half to two months for a response to a letter with only one article. If the publication is planned in support of a specific event (yes, the same ICO!), Then after such a long time it may no longer be needed.

At first glance, the situation looks rather sad - it is not clear how to promote a project abroad in such harsh conditions. But not everything is so bad, and there are acceptable alternatives to trying to get into TechCrunch. The most important of them is the Medium blogging platform.

In RuNet, this service is not very popular, but in the English-speaking world it is one of the main media platforms. It allows not only to maintain personal blogs, but also to launch their own media. There are a lot of such publications - on Medium they are called "publications" - among them there are very popular ones with millions of readers and hundreds of thousands of subscribers in various social networks. A list of the most popular publications, divided into categories, can be found on the Toppub website , this is how the top 5 media based on Medium now look like:



Publications on Medium may belong to some company, but may develop according to the model of the media - and in such cases their editors can offer their materials as guest posts. It is quite simple to do this: usually publications that accept columns of external authors highlight a button directly in the menu for receiving instructions on sending materials. It looks something like this (Submit button):



Information on what publications are looking for external authors is also available on the Smedian project website :



To send an application to join the publication as a blog, you need to log in to your Medium profile and click the Contribute button - media editors will study the publications in the profile and add you as the author. After that, you can send your columns directly through Medium - after typesetting the text, you can add it to a specific publication, the administrators of which will then publish it:



It looks like a menu with adding a post to a specific publication

This is all very simple, while media editions on the Medium platform are much quicker and more loyal than their colleagues from the traditional business media familiar to everyone. In my case, the material that was never published on The Next Web, and the answer by which I waited a month and a half, was published per day in the Hackernoon tech blog.

You might think that everything is so simple because no one reads such media and blogs, but this is not so. For example, the aforementioned Hackernoon outruns such a famous publication as VentureBeat by the number of readers, and this blog only balances on the border of the top 10 publications in Medium - there are also much more popular publications there:



Recently I sent a material with a story about his entrepreneurial experience in VentureBeat - they didn’t take him there, but in the same Hackernoon he went out in a day, and I did not lose anything in readability.

Summary

The online media industry is constantly evolving, and this gives startup founders new opportunities to advance in new markets. Previously, in order to reach an English-speaking audience, a new project had to go to TechCrunch pages and spend a lot of time, effort or money on it. Today, new platforms, such as Medium, contribute to the emergence of popular online media in a new format, whose editors are much more loyal to external authors.

I felt this progress in my company - if earlier we had to wait for a response to articles sent to the editorial office for a month and a half, then now at the same time we manage to post 5-6 materials in media with millions of coverage. It suits us perfectly.