We get pitches and offers to feature entrepreneurs and business owners in our community. Sometimes it's from the business owners or entrepreneurs and other times it's from PR agencies. Many of our interviews will start from roundups that we have featured entrepreneurs, business owners or experts on our one of our sites and we want to dig a little deeper.
Please keep in mind, we get A LOT of e-mails and correspondence. We don't have the opportunity to reply to everyone, but we try.
While it's not a perfect science here's some of the things we take into account:
- We look at the response and the value that it adds. This is the biggest factor. This could be anything from being a response that speaks to our emotions (really good story) or we believe might resonate with our readers–maybe someone started their business for medical reasons or because they couldn’t find their job. These are all the types of responses we look for. It’s possible that someone might provide a really insightful perspective as to the recent Instagram changes or something that again provides value.
- We look for first person accounts. Often, we get PR agencies that respond on behalf of clients. Responses that say “He is a rockstar entrepreneur or He’s the CEO and he said…” are great but we really look to get as much of first hand account of what is being said from the entrepreneur or business owner. It’s more genuine and authentic to us and our audience. It's not required but it always helps.
- Variety. We don’t want one type of business or one type of entrepreneur so you will often see a mix of different entrepreneurs, with different backgrounds and different types of businesses because that’s providing different perspectives. Social media might affect restaurants in a different way than a real estate agent or a construction company. Also, it means that we try to mix different entrepreneurs in our roundups.
- We check out your website. If your website is down or it’s been hacked or just doesn’t look professional, we factor that in. PS–I know someone if you need help with any of that (cc: Blue 16 Media 🙂)
- Timeliness. If there's a certain event that happened OR a specific angle because of the time of year or our theme for the year, we look into that.
- We do look at the social reach. Someone that has engagement across their different platforms are probably more likely to share posts. While that’s not a substitute to a really great and valuable response, it is something we look at and factor in.
Feel free to reach out to us on our contact page if you have what it takes 🙂