5 Ways to Get a Journalist to Respond to Your Pitch

You’ve spent an entire year planning your business launch — from forming an LLC to designing a website to hiring the right employees. You’ve also spent a year thoughtfully planning out your media relations campaign including which outlets you want to get into to reach your target audiences.

You begin drafting pitch letters and emailing the top 20 or 30 media outlets that you thought would pick up your story in a second — only to find out that no journalist replies back to your emails. So what can you do? What steps can you take to increase your chances of getting a reply? Here are five simple tips you can follow.

1. Follow up one to two times after you send your initial pitch.

Media professionals receive upwards of 500 email pitches per day and yours might get lost in the shuffle, so you might not hear back after your first email. If this happens, then it’s okay to send a follow-up email a few days later (I recommend three or four days after your initial pitch).

Related: Pitching Your Business to a Journalist? Here’s What Not to Do

If you still didn’t get a response from the journalist after your second…