Freelance Work: Pitch those Press Releases!

I'm finding my niche in freelance work, even though I only have two clients so far. It's really fortunate that I have businesses who are willing to take a chance on me handling their publicity as well as professors who are willing to help me excel even as a student. I've found there are three important things to remember when doing freelance media pitching, especially if you're not familiar with the newspapers yourself:

1. Customize your media pitches by platform and audience. I recently sent out a press release to multiple sources with the hope that they'll contact my client for an interview. While there was only so much that could be said each time and not many ways to say it, I made sure to differentiate between small newspapers, big newspapers, magazines and blogs because I wanted to make the content relevant to the person I was contacting.

2. Don't let an online submission form scare you. There were a few newspapers that had no contact information for business editors or staff writers, and only the blank submission box to work with. When I did some research in the business section, I found several press releases ran as-is. I'm sure this is the process these businesses followed, and so I followed it as well. When in doubt, try and find an actual person who can at least forward the release on to someone who would handle it - but if you have to submit it online, just make sure you check all the right boxes.

3. Familiarize yourself to know how to speak to these editors. I've never read the newspapers I was pitching to, so I made sure to take a few minutes on each paper to familiarize myself to see who would best benefit from my release. If it's business expansion, this paper put it in Business while that paper would put it in the Local section. You don't have to go through all of their archives, but if you at can at least look at what is on their website and respect their structure, they'll be much more willing to work with you.

In other news, I'm excited to hear that AP Style has finally changed Web site to website. I've already corrected my press releases to read website.