Get Your First Round of Press Coverage
The second row on a high converting website is called The Trust Bar. After the top row which tells website visitors what your company does, we list either:
- The company’s 5 star customer rating,
- Or all of the places the company has been published.
This quickly indicates to website visitors that your company is trustworthy & has domain authority.
While you do want amazing names for your Trust Bar, you also need to avoid top tier publications until your website is able to scale to accommodate 100,000 website visitors in a few hour window.
This is how I accidentally killed a startup with Top-tier PR, early on in my career:
Me: “How fast can we grow?”
CEO: “As fast as you want.”
Me: “We don’t have any scalability issues to worry about?”
CEO: “None. We are ready for the flood.”
FAMOUS.
LAST.
WORDS.
I reached out to a contact from the PR industry for a bit of coverage. She came through with some top tier coverage that sent more than 140,000 people to the company’s website. The website was not ready to handle that type of traffic so the servers hosting the website crashed. Repeatedly.
The people who could not get onto the site, tried to contact the company via social media. When they did not get a fast response from the tiny customer support team, they grew into an angry mob that took to ranting across multiple social media platforms.
As any smart competitor would do, the startup’s competitors took this anger and made sure it also got press coverage (#facepalm).
What was supposed to be a PR win turned into a tragic apocalypse.
This is why, your dream of landing on the cover of Forbes should wait until your customer support team & servers are ready for that type of flood.
So…how do you get enough press coverage to create an effective Trust Bar without accidentally killing your company?
The startup pitch list:
- Got a tip or have a guest column to submit?
- web submissions@HBR.org
- opinion@nytimes.com
- pitches@inc.com
- contributors@inc.com
- contributors@businessinsider.com
- kdavis@fastcompany.com
- ideas@forbes.com
- https://www.huffpost.com/static/how-to-pitch-huffpost
Want to dive deeper into this topic? Check these out:
- Free PR: How to Get Chased By The Press Without Hiring a PR Firm
- Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator
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