How to get featured in a magazine, publication or article.

The five routes at a glance

Route 1: pitch an editor

Editors and journalists are paid to find stories their readers want. They are not paid to promote you. So a pitch works when it hands them a story, and fails when it describes you.

Find the right person

Read the section you want to appear in and find who writes the pieces closest to yours. The right junior writer beats the wrong editor-in-chief.

Bring a story, not a biography

• News: a launch, a raise, a hire, a milestone with a number attached.
• Data: something you know that nobody else has published.
• A trend: your business as evidence of something bigger that is happening.
• A contrarian view: a clear, defensible opinion against the consensus in your field.
• A human story: the hard decision, the near-failure, the unusual route in.

Write it short

Subject line: the story in eight words. First sentence: why it matters to their readers now. Then two or three lines of proof and what you can offer (an interview, data, an exclusive). No attachments. Follow up once, seven to ten days later, and then let it go.

Route 2: an editorial feature

An editorial feature is a piece about you or your business, written from your brief and published on a publication you choose, because you paid for it. It is the only route where you control the timing and approve the words. Its value comes from the quality of the writing and the publication, so judge both before you pay.

How to judge one before you pay:

• Is it a real publication with its own readers, or a site that exists to sell placements?
• Who writes it, and do you approve every word before it runs?
• Is the date it goes live, and what happens if it is missed, in writing?
• Will it be permanently hosted and indexed, and what happens if it comes down?

Our guide to what a paid article costs goes further into pricing and value.

Route 3: answer journalist requests

Platforms such as HARO, Qwoted and Featured send out journalists’ requests for sources. Answer fast, answer exactly what was asked, and give a quotable line in the first two sentences. It works for being quoted as an expert. It rarely produces a feature about you, and you do not see the article before it runs.

Which platforms are still worth joining changed a lot after HARO was shut down and then relaunched. We checked all fourteen: see the free journalist request platforms, checked.

Route 4: press releases

A release sent over a wire service is reproduced on syndication partners’ pages, often within hours. That is useful as an official record of an announcement, and useful as something to link to in a pitch. It is not the same as coverage: syndicated copies are rarely read, often are not indexed, and do not carry the weight of a journalist’s piece. Treat a release as support for route 1, not a substitute for it.

Route 5: contribute an article

Many trade and professional magazines accept contributed articles from practitioners. You write about your field under your own byline and the editor decides whether to run it. Editors want insight their readers can use, so no product promotion. Done consistently, it is one of the best long-term routes to being seen as the person who knows the subject.

How to choose

Prepare these before any route

• A 50-word and a 150-word bio, written in the third person.
• A recent headshot at print resolution, plus a landscape version.
• Your company facts: founding year, what you do in one line, one or two numbers you can stand behind.
• Three story angles you could pitch tomorrow.
• Links to your best existing coverage and profiles.

Mistakes that cost people coverage

• Sending the same pitch to fifty people with “Dear Editor”.
• Attaching a PDF instead of writing two good paragraphs.
• Calling a paid placement “featured in” as if an editor chose you.
• Buying a placement on a lookalike site because the name resembles a famous masthead.
• Chasing a logo instead of the readers you actually want to reach.

Where Blue Leopard fits

We do route 2 properly. Our editorial team writes the feature from a ten-minute brief, you approve every word, and it goes live on the publication that fits your market within 24 hours of approval. It is built to rank on your name, and if it does not go live in the window, you get your money back. A single feature is $249. See how it works for the full process.

To start, send us a short brief and we will recommend a publication and an angle.