Check this out: http://www.printgreener.com/news.html
WSJ, CNBC, Entreprenuer, ComputerWorld, CNN, Inc, ... How could they get so many coverages?<p>I've written a similar algorithm and sold it to a few companies, which you could find at http://purifyr.com/. I've also emailed all relevant bloggers for review. But I just couldn't imagine getting so many positive coverages.<p>How did they make it?<p>Ideas?
There are a few things:<p>- You have to tell the press a story, and it has to be interesting. The best stories are about people, the worst about technologies. For startups the story of how you have struggled through countless insourmountable obstacles and are now making big money is perfect. It is personal, it fits the cliche, and it gives readers something to look up to. Don't focus on your technology (unless you are trying to get an article in a trademag or something similar) normal people just don't care. If you need to talk about technology try to find a story where people are using your product to gain some advantage. Involve emotions if possible, it makes the story better. How Tim re-found his long-lost kindergarten girlfriend in old age and the two of them now happily living together because of Google is a much better story than how good Google's serach algorithm is.<p>- Personal connetctions and relationships. This is what PR people do. Journalists are different, have different taste, and find different things interesting. A story that may seem uninteresting to one might be picked up by another. If you don't know anyone try to read through the newssources where you'd like to be covered and see which journalist writes about stuff that is close to what you do. Then contact him. By phone. Talk to him and ask him what he thinks and whether he would like to do an interview with you. Journalists are nice people, and they make their living talking to people, so don't be afraid of it.<p>- Give them an easy story. Combining one and two above to make an easy story that can more or less be copy-pasted to give a full article. Journalists are lazy. Don't forget to include photos. (Again, it's people that are interesting. If you include product shoots make sure there are some with a proud owner showing off the product)<p>- Don't ever lie. Journalists have an excelent nose for liars, and when (not if) they catch you they'll never talk to you again.
I'm not a expert, but, I'll would suggest a few things:<p>printgreener.com has a lot of information describing what they do and why. They play on green card a lot which is bound to generate interest from mainstream media where as you hardly tell the user why they would want to do this.<p>Also a free account allows you to view one page/30 seconds and the only version that fixes this costs $299/month where as printgreener.com costs $29 which is a one off - I don't understand the massive difference in price. Who is the target market that would actually pay $299/month for this. You need to explain this better or drop the price. To me this is the type of thing that could tend towards $0 with open source and/or a firefox plugin.<p>Some of their coverage goes back to 2006, so they have a first mover advantage over you.
Your approach, Purifyr, seems as though it should be a more consumer friendly alternative to printgreener. From a story perspective though it's not being presented as a consumer-oriented product which limits the market a prospective reporter/blogger sees when they think of writing a story. i suggest you start with this:
"Free account could submit requests no shorter than 30 seconds. If you'd like to send requests more frequently, please check out our commercial offering."<p>if you're intent on not using a passive payment model (advertising) to subsidize consumer traffic, this page is destined to be your main conversion choke point. this page needs to sell your product. there should be a big, friendly button that lets the consumer (not developer) immediately make that purchase. alternately, show an interstitial ad and count down the 30sec before letting them see the content.<p>more fundamentally, you need to decide who your market is and optimize for them. are you really set on targeting webmasters and if so, how many content producers out there can afford 300/month while accepting a maximum of 10k views/day. seems like your major competition there is any freelancer who can hack out a "print view" wordpress template or even a simple print-view css file for less money. seems like a consumer model might make more sense, but then i would think about this almost more like an rss reader - if you're targeting consumers, you should consider ways to make it as easy as possible for people to maximize the content they see through your lens. the bookmarklet is a step in the right direction but isn't something most web users are used to.<p>once you have your market more clearly defined, alert the media that's producing content to entertain said market. they always need a story but they have discriminating tastes.
Human Interest. Look at what you put out from the perspective: Would this be part of the human interest category in a newspaper? If not, then you're unlikely to get covered unless you know someone.<p>Furthermore, who are you? You have to be someone newspaperable, for example:<p>"The guy who made a robot that sang songs"<p>"A 16 year old boy"<p>"A guy who traded a paperclip up"<p>There are so many standard developers, you need to make a press friendly definition of yourself. Then email interns who are always looking for a story. Locate them on linkedin.
Timing is another thing. When we tried to get press for a site targeted at moms, we had a lot of luck approaching news papers, tv shows and blogs around, surprise!, women's day and mother's day.
In my personal experience, if you want press to write about you/your startup, you'll have to give them interesting stories that their readers like to read.<p>They don't have too much attention span. They don't care about how hard/easy it is do, or even if it is true or not. They just care about interesting stories...<p>For one of my stories I told them that we did some survey and just made up the findings. They loved it and published it next day without looking at my data or even asking me methodology of survey/research