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Thanks for reading The Next Web, now it’s time to get to know you.

We get a lot of pitches from companies and PR companies, some good, some extremely bad. You’ll understand we can’t cover everything so we select the stories, services and products we love and think fit our audience best. Here are ten tips to increase your chances of getting covered by one of our awesome editors.

Note: If you would like to advertise or sponsor content on our site, please visit our advertising page, check out the opportunities at our events, or contact the right person using the form down below.

10 tips on how to pitch this blog

Do your homework

Try to understand who reads us and what we write about, where would your message fit in? Check out the different channels and target your pitch to one of these channels.

Find an angle

If we wrote about a company, say Airbnb, and you have a local version of Airbnb in Africa (which is cool) its wise to try a different angle. When you reach out to us saying ‘you wrote about this competitor, we do the same, can you cover us’ chances are minimal we would do so. Try to find something interesting, a different angle to your story.

We like news before it is news

You have a big announcement coming up… share it with us before you announce it. This gives us time to prepare our story and to schedule the publish date in congruence with your announcement date. You could use the ‘embargo’ feature of PressDoc to send us all info (including pictures and videos) beforehand under embargo (yes, we respect embargoes).

Keep it short

The fewer words you need to explain what’s going on and why its cool for TNW, the better. Ideally one or two paragraphs max. Of course include a link to the service or product you’re pitching and it helps as well to include a (private) link to your embargoed press release where we can read the whole story and can get pictures and videos.

Make it personal

Why do you want TNW to cover you? Ok, thats pretty obvious, now think about why do our readers want to hear about your story? Hard, but not impossible

Engage

Do you follow us on Twitter, like us on FB, leave comments on articles you’re interested in, ever been to one of our events? If you engage with us and our audience you’ll understand what we like, what we write about and its way more easy to pitch us the right story.

Pitch the right stories (aim at 51% -or higher- coverage rate)

Just uploaded a new version of your iPhone app to the app store that fixes some bugs and contains minor improvements? Please, don’t waste your time to reach out to us. Only if you feel the news is interesting enough for our readers, spend time to reach out to us and do it in a short and simple way (see above). You should aim at a 51% (or higher) coverage rate. Out of each two (embargoed) press releases you send us, you should get at least one story covered. If your coverage rate is lower, you’re sending too much insignificant news for our audience (that doesn’t mean its not interesting, its just not interesting enough for our audience).

Tip other stories

Think of us as well in times its not about your product or services. So when you have a hot tip, ping us (if you want to do it anonymous do it here. We give hat tips and you’ll build a relationship with our editorial team.

Make it easy

Make sure you’ve organized your PR so its easy to see what’s going on at your company, if you’ve been covered by other outlets, what other news came out previously, who to contact etc. Probably the worst thing you can do is to send an email with attachments. Keep the email brief and to the point and point us to a url where we can find all info needed to write a post; text, images, video, audio all in one place. There are multiple social media press release products out there. We use and can recommend to take a look at PressDoc (promocode ‘TNW’ will get you 25% discount)

Keep us in the loop

If you don’t have any specific news you can still keep your contact(s) in the editorial team in the loop on the smaller things you have been working on and the interesting things you’re planning on launching next month.

Although we can’t promise to cover your story, if you follow the these tips we can ensure you that your message will be read by the editorial team.

While these tips are specifically written for TNW, you can use the basics for any blog out there.

Now you’ve read all this… contact us!

Email your news, press releases, tips and stories to us via mia [at] thenextweb.com
For other enquiries please use the form below. We’re looking forward to be hearing from you.