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Make the Most of Your Release: Make a List

If you’ve read any of my articles, you know that I’m fond of lists. On the heels of my last article about how to follow up on your release (See “Trevor’s 7 Rules of PR Pitching”), here’s the second of 6 tips to help you get the most out of your follow-up (read the first here).

Make a List: of the people who write about your industry or business.

Image Credit: To Do List by °Florian. Licensed through Creative Commons 2.0

Who talks about your industry? Your company? Keep track of blogs, journalists and commenters who seem especially influential or knowledgeable. They’ll come in handy later. Don’t get creepy about it, but take notice of what they’re talking about.

Unless you work in an incredibly niche market, you should be able to find at least a half a dozen good writers who cover your industry or something that is close enough to it that they might be interested in what it is you do. (If there *aren’t* a half-dozen people who write about your industry, then you definitely should take advantage of tip 7 on my list of making the most of your release, which will admittedly not appear for a few days.).

If your writer is a blogger, then subscribe to his or her blog. If your writer is solely a traditional journalist, buy his or her magazine or newspaper (or read it in your local library if your budget is too shoestring to afford a magazine subscription) and take notes.

The complication for many people is not going to be finding writers who cover their industry, but rather  how to determine which of the dozens of writers they find is “influential.” A blogger’s influence is relatively easy to discover through a combination of Technorati and Yahoo.  Look the blogger up on Technorati and see how the site ranks your blogger’s “authority.”  The helpful people at Technorati have devoted a lot of time and effort to making algorithms that search out inboud links, trackbacks, and other arcane signals that a blogger is an “authority” who influences the market. The closer the number is to 1, the more “authority” that blog has, so you’ll want to keep tabs on people with lower numbers.

If your resource isn’t a blogger, or if your target niche is small enough that Technoarti isn’t doing a good job accurately judging the authority of a writer, Yahoo! can provide you with a quick and dirty look at how well regarded someone is on the Internet, using that most precious resource: the inbound link. Type in a search on Yahoo! for the website that you want to evaluate with the following language:

linkdomain:yourdomain.com – site:yourdomain.com

By way of example, this would be the search for http://overnightpr.com:

linkdomain:overnightpr.com – site:overnightpr.com

When I wrote this article, Yahoo gives me credit for 11 links that point back to my main address of overnightpr.com–all of them from other pages on my site. Since I’ve just started this site, that makes sense, but there will soon be more. In this sace, the higher the number, the more authority the writer has.

With a combination of these two tools, you should be able to get a relatively objective measure of how well your writer is regarded by the marketplace in general.So once you’ve found your influential writer or reporter, read what he or she has to say, and then make a point of posting thoughtful commentary on his or her blog, if there is one  Post comments about the article on some other industry blog if you absolutely have to. If you regularly post good comments and provoke discussion, you’ll get noticed by the article’s author. As someone who wrote and maintained a corporate blog for over a year, take my word for it: I knew my 10 best commenters pretty well.

If you find any stories that you think may be interesting to the influential writers in your industry, pass them. Don’t spam them with things that you’ve found, of course, or you’ll irritate them more than you’ll advance your cause.

Keep tabs on what these influential writers routinely cover and what they usually don’t. This will be handy for you when you get ready to pitch your story to them. I use a spreadsheet when I’m reading up on people in an industry for a client, because it’s easier for me to keep track of details that way.

Once you’ve got that list and you know who you want to write about, you’re ready for the next item on Trevor’s 7 Tips for Making the Most of Your Release. But that post waits until Monday to get put up–sorry–so you’ll have to wait until then.