5 Ways to Get a Discount For Publication In Mass Media

Nowadays mass media are very important for company promotion, especially for startups. In fact, it has always been like that. Regardless of increasing competition in online media market, it is hard to publish your post in some authoritative journal. How to publish data in a famous mass media resource under conditions of limited budget?

1. Act via “Advertise with us” section of the site

Even paper mass media resources have their own websites, at least, most of them do. Many of them have “Advertise with us” section near “Contact us”. Different people are responsible for answering readers’ calls and advertisements, so that is why phone numbers and email addresses are different. So having approached to mass media representatives via contact data in advertisement section…

Advantages. You will be able to save your energy. You will not have to make efforts to assure a journalist (or even sales manager in this case) that your data is really useful and fully corresponds to resource specialization. Your post will be published soon without any difficulties for its preparation.

Disadvantages. You may not even count on a discount. Only if you ask for it very sincerely, but I am afraid, you will have to ask a lot and for a long time.

2. Ask editor for publishing your advertising article for free

This approach is much wiser than previous one, though not so far. It will be a great success if you get a reply. Popular mass media gets hundreds of emails every day or even thousands and many editors prefer even not to reply to unrelevant requests.

Advantages. If you manage to get such post published, than you definitely deserves an award. Few people manage to publish advertising article in mass media absolutely free of charge. But if you need it very much, than you may try.

Disadvantages. Consequences are approximately the same as in the previous variant, but hope dies the last.

3. Suggest editor publishing semi-advertising article and ask for a discount

There are no exact boundaries between semi-advertising article and advertising one. This is obvious, the first type of an article does not include transparent advertisement. Of course, people prefer have a deal with a person who has money. As it is said,”He who pays the fiddler calls the tune». But this is not so easy as it seems. When you ask for a discount some difficulties appear.

Advantages. The key task for mass media, which provides paid advertising services, is sales and you are a potential client, though, you are asking for a discount. If you ask well, you may get a discount 50% or even 70% including an active backlink.

Disadvantages. The bigger discount you are asking for, the more arguments you will have to suggest to justify your need. You better offer anything instead. Just think what you can give and what will be useful for media resource.

4. Suggest editor publishing non-advertising article

This is the most complicated way, which supposes serious preparation, i.e. exploring the resource. You will have to analyze publication style on this resource, post topics, target audience of this media, but the most difficult task is preparation of your own data, which could match all criteria above.

Advantages. If you do a great job, than there will be a the same chance your post will be published.

Disadvantages. You will need much time and efforts for data preparation. There will be poor allusions about your company or a product, and you may not even count on an active backlink.

5. Use online service for gathering data for publications

There are a few services like that. But they still exist (Help A Reporter Out), though how to use them efficiently is literally a science.

Advantages. Journalists request information they really need there, so you will not have to spam anymore. Besides that, your post will be published free of charge.

Disadvantages. Such services have serious competition and your success depends on quality of your data and other secondary factors such as speaker’s reputation and company relevance.

As you see, there is no perfectly working way and in fact, it cannot exist at all. When there is a human factor exists, than everything depends on data quality and communication skills. Though, it is better to use different ways in complex.

How we got a discount 50% for service of paid press-release distribution (case)

In August we (international linguistic freelance platform 2Polyglot) decided to use paid online service of press-release distribution. After publication and distribution of a press-release we prepared a post about this experience and results we got due to this service usage. After publication a representative of other similar service contacted us. A manager offered services and assured we would have much better results.

We decided to cooperate with them, but to suggest other conditions. It has to be mentioned that the announced price was $300 for a package. We offered them we would write an article as we did it last time and we will tell about our experience of cooperation with their service and it will not be advertising article, but reviewing. We also promised we would post this article on our blog and share it in social networks. So total audience will be equal small media’s one. In this way, we offered them PR and prepared a good news hook for ourselves. We asked for 50% discount and they… accepted. In total, we agreed on $150 instead of $300 with mutually beneficial conditions.

So, if you do not want to pay full price or to pay at all, than you should think what you can offer instead and what will be useful for your partners. In this situation always think by win-win category.