5 tips to successfully follow up on your pitch

You sent your press release. Do you wait and hope the journalist takes notice? Or do you follow up and risk getting on his or her nerves? To help you decide, here are five tips:

1. Follow up by phone.

If you’ve never seen a journalist’s inbox, look at your spam box in your email account. If you use an old email provider, you might receive hundreds of spam emails. That’s what a journalist’s regular inbox looks like, except, instead of spam, it’s full of pitches. Your pitch can easily get lost among the others. How can you stand apart? Make a phone call and discuss your pitch with the journalist.

2. Don’t call multiple times.

A lot of journalists can’t stand getting phone calls that check on pitches. Why? More often than not the people entrusted with calling from PR firms are the lowest men on the totem pole—and journalists know it. Journalists work in a high stress environment and always have a pressing deadline. They don’t want a sniveling young intern to bother them every 30 seconds about a press release they can’t remember reading. So call … once.

3 Start with the important facts.