Excerpt from the Ebook “Common Sense Inventing”
All to often I get contacted by Inventors that are paying a Public Relations firm, Media Specialist or some other company to try and generate buzz about their product to get it noticed. The problem is a number of these companies use the same outlets no matter what your product is. If you have a fishing product you don’t need to pay them to send out your flyer to a baby magazine.
One method these companies do is the shotgun approach where you throw everything you have in all directions and hope something sticks. They send out flyers to companies that are not addressed to a specific person in the company, just to the company’s general mail. Your chances of it getting to the right person are rare. Most just end up in the trash. But, the company you hired can say they sent it to company X and they are not lying. They just didn’t do the next step of getting you a contact within that company. They tell you it will be presented at this years trade show, which it is. They put your pamphlet at their booth so anyone walking by can see it. They don’t normally walk up to every potential company’s booth and hand them your pamphlet. But, they can honestly say you were represented at the Trade show. Hey, what do you expect for your money?
Now, lets look at what you can do for FREE and get results. You can get good free press by contacting your local newspaper, State paper, T.V. News station, and online blogs. They are all looking for stories to fill space. National Public Radio is a great place for interviews and they rerun them often to fill empty slots. I did a spot interview on NPR and they ran it for 7 months at different times of the day and week. If possible when doing interviews don’t mention specific dates unless you really have to. When you have no dates mentioned it is easier for them to rerun the spot because no one knows you did it months earlier.
I did an interview with http://ideasuploaded.com/2011/02/04/podcast-interview-with-inventor-roger-brown-who-gets-his-ideas-licensed-by-spending-less-than-100/ seven years ago and am still getting emails from people who just saw it. Send samples of your product to various online Try It Before You Buy It type of venues. I sent my Pizza Scissors to an online kitchen product tester and got a great testimonial out of it for free
Contact your local cable network and find out if you have any local shows you can be on as a guest. Local shows are always looking for guests. Contact your Public Radio Station near you. They want on-air guests. The great thing with them is they rerun interviews a lot to fill air time. I did an interview with NPR that they ran every week for 5 months at various times of the day.
Contact your state paper for an interview in the Features section. Try submitting a Press Release to magazines that fit your target market. Let’s not forget all of the social media outlets like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, specific blogs that fit your product and a host of others that are all free venues to get your product exposure.
Your local T.V. station can be a great asset. Talk with them about using you as a local expert they can contact for a quote when they run stories on inventions or the topic of your product. If you have local small press newspapers that are free giveaways to the public see if they want an interview. Contact your small business group in your area for other exposure opportunities. Send products to national news shows that do spots like “Try it before you buy it” They are always needing material to fill the 24 hour coverage air time especially on slow news days.
Get t-shirts with your website and product on them. Send some to the national radio shows. John Boy and Billy is a nationally syndicated radio show that is popular in my area. I sent them two t-shirts. They talked about my website for 3 minutes on air. They have over 10 million listeners. I got 67,000 hits within 5 minutes of them mentioning me on the air. It cost me two t-shirts. Well worth the investment.
There are numerous ways to get exposure for free. You just have to be creative in your thinking. Use the same energy that helped you create your invention to get it noticed.
All the things I mentioned above are free. Most PR firms I have talked to start at about $2,000 and go up from there. Try the free things first. Who knows you may have a knack for PR and can do it yourself and save a lot of money.