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Now the next thing that we're going to dress is what is the right modality for contacting journalists.
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And a lot of journalists have expressed their preferences and basically the summary is that email is
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king.
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Don't pitch a journalist over Twitter.
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You can't do it in 140 characters.
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Don't try and spam journalists to DM them.
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It doesn't really work.
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And don't be creepy and stalk them over Facebook.
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It's just not the right thing to do.
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Instead simply just write an email that the body shouldn't be more than 200 words long and the subject
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line should be you know 40 to 60 characters.
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So basically short, punchy, to the point, don't waste anybody's time.
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And at the same time give them a couple of links or attachments to allow them to find out more if they
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wish to.
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Now this is a template from a friend of mine and it basically encapsulates all of that advice.
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It's short, it's punchy,
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it's the point. It gets across everything that you need to get across
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and at the same time it doesn't waste anybody's time.
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So have a look at it and see if you can adapt it for your own use.
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The next question people tend to have is what is the best time for reaching a journalist.
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And this is surprisingly important because you want to be the guy or girl who gets your email into
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the journalist inbox first thing in their work day because we all know how it feels at 4:00 p.m. on
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a Friday.
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That's the time when most people have given up on life. In order for your email to have the best chance
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of being received, being read and being considered,
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you want to get to them when they're fresh when they're starting a work day.
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And that translates to around 6:30 to 7:30 a.m..
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Now you can do something really creepy which I heard from a press expert and the tip is to look at the
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Twitter feed of the journalists and every single tech journalist worth their salt will have a Twitter
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account. And look at when they first start either replying to tweets or liking tweets or basically any
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sort of activity.
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And that probably is the time when they wake up.
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So this is maximum creepy but probably quite effective and just something to consider when you are going
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down this route.
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Now the next tool is really really useful not just for pitching journalists but for life in general.
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And this is something called BoomerangGmail.com. And it's basically a plug in for Gmail that is
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really powerful.
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It allows you to schedule your emails at any point in the future.
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So this means that if you're pitching a tech journalist who lives in the opposite time zone to you, you
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don't have to be awake at 4:30 am sending that email.
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You can schedule this to be sent later at any time point. You can schedule your email to be sent out at
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any time point in the future.
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And this also happens to be how my mother gets a happy birthday note from me without fail every single
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year on her birthday.
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So use it for life use it for business.
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Either way, it's a really really useful free plugin.
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Check it out.
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Now we're really giving away a lot of secret sauce.
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These tools are some of my favorite in the world.
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This is another one called GetSideKick.com and it's made by HubSpot.
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This is one of the most powerful email tools out there.
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What allows you to do is to track your email.
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So what the service does is that it embeds a invisible pixel into your HTML email
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and once that invisible pixel gets loaded on the recipient's email client you get a notification telling
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you that your email was opened by
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so and so.
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So this is really useful for pitching journalists because sometimes your email will just get lost in
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a sea of emails.
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And if you know that your email hasn't even been opened then it's probably not a bad idea to try and
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resend the email or reword the email a week later and see if you have a better chance.
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Now the next thing to remember is that before you pitch any journalist make sure that you have a press
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kit that's ready.
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So this includes founder headshots,
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this includes your logos,
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this includes your website home page or your app screenshots
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if you're an app company or product photos if you're a hardware company etc.
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Basically these are high quality images or videos in various sizes and 
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resolutions that if a journalist decides to pick up on your story they can simply write you know a paragraph
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and drop these images in without having to contact you ever again.
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And the rule for pitching journalists as well as for life is if you can make somebody else's life easier
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then you'll usually have a better chance of getting what you want.
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So make sure that you include this as a link to an attachment rather than just an attachment itself
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because most spam filters will filter out emails which has a zip file in it.