When It Comes to PR, Google Is Not Your Friend

Chances are, you use Google for 99% of the things you don’t know about…and usually Google is there to help you. However, in this case, this will be one of the only times I’m going to tell you – Google is not your friend.

Let me give you some context.

I recently went to Tai Lopez’s pool party where the only way to get in was to have 500k followers or more. Obviously, I didn’t have that many followers but I knew someone on the inside which gave me that “free pass”.

So, when I was there I learned something extremely valuable.

I learned that there is an underground in the social media world. There’s literally a handful of people pulling the strings on certain platforms. Whether it’s Instagram, Facebook, Twitter etc.

So, the memes and viral videos you see getting millions of views…those are shared out by people.

Here’s a buddy of mine that does it as a job. You can see some metrics.

It occurred to me that the same concept applies with PR. The same concept applies with many things.

Here’s an example:

The general emails that people are told to send their pitches to like [email protected] or [email protected] are junk folders.

They’re meant to weed people out. Think about it for a second. These publications get millions and millions of pageviews a month. They’re not going to let everyone in through a general submission form.

If you’re asking well how do I even find those emails, here’s how:

If you use Google to look up how to write for Inc, you’ll find this page. The reason you will find this page instead of others is because these publications dominate the search engines. They push out a ton of content every day and have a high domain authority. So, here’s the page I was talking about

On that page, you will see “if you would like to be a regular contributor for inc.com please submit your request to [email protected]"

So, I tested it myself. Multiple times. Here’s the results:

In the picture, it shows that no one was opening my submissions…and I emailed them multiple times. It wasn’t just Inc – it was Forbes, Elite Daily etc.

If I didn’t know any better, this could have been weeks or maybe months of wasted time just thinking they were going to reply.

So, here’s a much better way to go about it and instead of giving you “best practices”. I’m going to show you exactly what I did not too long ago to get a writer from Forbes interested in my pitch.

Before you start head hunting – you need to know what angle you want to lead with.

I talked to my client and he said he wanted to focus on his new incubator that he just opened. Now I need to figure out how to incorporate that angle with what he’s already done.

Knowing his background – I knew he’s built apps for Tony Robbins and Snoop Dogg. That in itself can be used as leverage.

Now I need to create a headline/angle that is appealing to the editor and the audience.

So, we came up with:

“How this LA Development Shop Went from Building Celebrity Apps to Incubating Social Media Influencers”

Now this won’t be the exact headline – but it’s used to give contributors a reference of what we’d like to hit.

In case you missed it, step 1 was to figure out the angle and what publication they want the story on.

Now step 2 is to find a writer who writes about the same or a similar topic.

If I was to send this pitch to the general submission form – it probably would have never have been opened.

Next step is to go the publication of your choice and find someone who writes about your topic.

A simple search with your keyword like this will do.

In my case - I found someone who writes about inspirational stories.

Now that I’ve found the person that will potentially write about my client – I need to find a way to contact them.

Personally, I like to find their email address. So, first things first I try to find their personal website so I can do more research on this person.

I couldn’t find a personal site for Meggen but I did find her business website.

Now that I found her website I used a simple tool called email hunter to check if there’s any emails associated with that site. This is what came up.

I didn’t think any of those were relevant emails so I just went on her profile and emailed her from the Forbes contact page instead.

I tailored my email to why it would benefit her audience to write about my client and got a reply the next day with this.

Now even though she replied – it doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed. There’s still more work to do after she replied.

However, by doing the research, tailoring the email and contacting someone that writes about your topic – you have a much better shot at getting PR than trying to pitch to a general submission form.

Speaking about submission forms - you should signup to my 3 part video series if you want to learn how to get on sites like Forbes, Inc, Entrepreneur & more. Looking forward to providing you more content!​