Follow Up and Bylines | Dylan Tweney

Okay, follow-up. You want to reach out 1 to 2 weeks in advance of your launch. You want to follow up after a few days and again the day before your news date. So in total, you're probably emailing each individual maybe 3 times, maybe 4 times. My preference is to do it in the same thread. In Gmail, you can just reply to the email that you sent. Which will not create an additional line in their subject, or an additional subject line in their inbox. What it'll do is just bring that same thread back to the top of their inbox. Some reporters will get touchy about being emailed multiple times. You just kinda have to take it in stride, make a note in your little spreadsheet where you're keeping track of them. Don't hassle them too much. But just understand, like I think most reporters will understand that, you know, they're not reading everything. If you have actually done your homework and you're actually emailing something that you legitimately think is relevant to them, emailing them multiple times is a way to get through the noise. Just don't do it like every day for a week. Okay, be flexible. I said email them at first a couple weeks in advance, but be flexible about your launch date. TechCrunch says they want to write your story, but maybe they can't do it by Thursday, which is when you're launching. Be like, okay, let's work on this. It's okay to let— if you get live interest, especially at your stage, if you get interest from a live reporter, go with it and let them set the schedule within reason if they're willing to. Okay, and if you don't get interest, blog it or share it, put it up on your Medium account. And then blast it out to your own network, and then repeat the process next month. So the idea here being, you're gonna build a relationship with specific reporters. Now, it's not, it may be a very one-sided relationship at first, but you're gonna keep pinging them. You're gonna have something to say every month or 2, and you're gonna, if they don't cover you at first, maybe they'll cover you the second month, or the third month, or the sixth month. Just be patient, keep giving them something interesting every month or 2, and just keep following up. And eventually, hopefully, they will start to recognize you and have enough background that they'll find you interesting enough to cover. Okay, what about content? All right, so just don't call it content. I have a real problem with the word content because to me it feels like content is something that fills something else, right? So it's like we've got a jar. and it needs some content to go in it. We've got a hole on our website and we need to fill it with some content. And back to my original point, your goal is to make contact with human beings. Your goal is to communicate, right? So one way to do that is by writing things that they would be interested in reading. Similar— I have similar conflicted feelings about thought leadership. It's a big part of my business, I guess, helping people become thought leaders, but I really don't like the term a whole lot. I think What you're really trying to do is just demonstrate that you're a leader in your field by presenting well-crafted, intelligent, articulate ideas. Okay, so the key is you have to have something to say. You're not just gonna like fill a blog with like bullshit SEO stuff. You have to have something actual to say that people are gonna be interested in, and I think you need to do it in your own voice. A thing that I find very frequently with startups and entrepreneurs, and frankly, lots of people who are new to writing or not professional writers, is when you sit down to write a post or you start to write something for your website, suddenly you get really formal. It's like really stiff writing. There's a lot of passive voice, like, the market will have recognized. It's like, the opportunity is substantial for— Whatever, just like buzzwords and passive voice, just don't do that. Like, you need to find your own voice, which is usually a much more direct, much simpler sentences, much more human sounding voice. Okay. Here are a couple of ways to get content out into the world. One is bylines, which are posts that you write and then get published by a publication in its guest post or its op-ed area. The key to making these work, these are some of the specs. You need to offer some, the reason publications publish these is because it offers them a chance to provide their readers with perspective that they can't, their reporters can't do on their own. So that means maybe you have a point of view that's unusual and provocative, maybe you have some practical advice that other people could benefit from or some specific knowledge or a really interesting anecdote that would be beneficial. That's what they're looking for. The problem with most byline submissions that editors at publications get is that they're way too self-promotional. They tout the company's own product, or they talk about a big industry problem, and it's really obvious that the solution is the company's product. It's just way too transparently promotional, and editors hate that. They won't publish it if it's too promotional. So this is a good opportunity if you have something to say and you just want to increase your visibility as an expert, as a standout person who has some smarts, somebody who's worth paying attention to. And the benefits will be indirect. The benefits are very real, but the benefits to your startup will be indirect because it's not going to be a direct promotion of your product, your market, your funding, what have you. Okay, website and blog copy. When you're publishing on a platform that you control, you can say whatever you want, obviously. But in addition to thinking about how to speak like an ordinary human and not like some business bot, you, you need to also think about what readers are going to actually be concerned about and what they're going to think about. And the point that I'm trying to get at with this slide, and it says at the end, you need an editor. And that doesn't necessarily have to be somebody expensive like me. It can be your co-founder, it can be your best friend, or your boyfriend, or what have you. The point is you need somebody who's a little bit outside— probably your co-founder is maybe not the best choice to be an editor, because you need somebody who's a little bit outside your market Who doesn't spend all day thinking about the things that you think about, who can look at what you're writing and say, help you understand, not just like, is this spelled right? Is this grammatically correct? Should I put a paragraph, start a new paragraph here or not? You want somebody who can say, this is interesting to me, or this would be interesting to somebody who is not thinking about it 24/7. You need to, if you, It's very hard to get into that space yourself. You need somebody who has some distance to say, okay, talking about the problem that your product solves in these terms is not interesting to me because I don't have that problem. You need somebody who can act as a sounding board to help you zero in on or triangulate on The stuff that people are actually gonna wanna read. Because with blog posts for sure, more than even news stories, people are not gonna read it unless there's something in it for them. Okay, and then finally, don't forget the distribution part, which is you've published your thing on Medium, you've put up your video on YouTube or whatever your channel is. You want to then use your social media strategy, even if it's a seat-of-the-pants strategy, to get the word out. You want to tweet it from your personal account. You want to encourage all your friends to retweet it. You want to tell all your employees to share it from their personal accounts. But you also need to be present and engage with your company's account in whatever these networks are. You don't want to just be like— the corporate robot that's sitting there broadcasting the corporate message, right? You want to be engaging with people. You want to be following other people. You want to identify who the influencers are and follow them and retweet them and reply to them occasionally so that you start to build relationships with these people on the social media that matter to your market. That way, when you have relationships in social media— Twitter would be the one for me that I'm primarily active in. But once you have relationships, people are far more likely to engage with your content when you share it there. Oh, and when you succeed in getting coverage from a publication, tech or mainstream media or what have you, you want to do the same thing. You wanna share that coverage as much as possible. You wanna amplify it so that it drives readers to the story. That will help validate the reporter's and the editor's choice of covering that story. And also, just because you wanna amplify that coverage for your own sake too. Okay.