Big media is not for web startups
You have an amazing product, one that everyone will love? You don’t need to knock on big media’s door, they will find you. You have a good product, don’t bother the audience will ignore it.
For several years I have seen startups waste time on getting attention from big media (TV, large traffic blogs and news sites) and I have analyzed the traffic stats and conversions after getting featured on each of them. All I can say is that is not worth the hard PR work.
I am not saying that this won’t help build online credibility both for your users and search engines but that is about it.If you are looking to get traffic, venture capital or improving your link portfolio, there are better ways to do it.
A couple of years ago I was working on a project that got several TV appearances, we used to ask them to display our phone number and website. The phone number converted 5 times more than the website. Even the number of visits was pretty insignificant.
I have the stats from being featured on major blogs and news sites and the results are pretty much the same. All you get is an insignificant traffic bump and a few conversions during a couple of days (usually from completely off topic users).
It is great to get high PageRank links to your site but usually big media will only link to your homepage. Homepage links are pretty easy to get and it is not what you should be concerned about (if you can’t rank for your own name, you are doing it wrong).
When you go to an angel investor or a VC they couldn’t care less what kind of media coverage you have (at least for the first round). If they do, they are amateurs. Run away!
You are going to spend days sending out emails, arranging meetings, trying to get a friend of a friend to talk with someone and all that PR hassle, when you should be using that time promoting to the right channels, the ones that convert and bring targeted audience to your site.
The questions you should be answering are: “Where is my target audience?” and “How can I get to them?”. And no, your target audience is not everyone, your product is not amazing (only 0.01% of products are really amazing) and cools kids do not watch TV or read from mainstream media (I know, I am one of them :P).
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