Guys, it's been a good week. I got featured in Business Insider!

Now, you might be wondering "How the F did Rob manage that? The lucky devil!". Well, it was actually way easier than you think. And, yes my friends, you can copy me.

How I got featured in Business Insider

Right, so the way I got featured was replying to journalists on a platform called HARO (or well, it's now called Connectively). HARO stands for "Help a Reporter Out".

Very simply I logged in, filtered for questions in the business niche and filtered to today's questions. Then I replied to a bunch and did this for maybe a week or two. I just checked, I did 13 replies in total. Clearly I didn't reply to as many as I thought I had...

Anyway, a couple of pitches got accepted, and so I answered their follow on questions. Then....silence.

Nothing happened for literally a month. Then, out of the blue one, of the journalists I had replied to asked a further follow up question. I instantly knew I had a fish on the hook. Muahahaha!

A couple of emails later and he'd asked all the questions he needed. I waited a week and then Googled "Robert Benson-May, Business Insider", and there I was. Damn, I wish I picked a better photo of myself, but hey, maybe I'll look prettier if I wasn't too lazy to take another photo of myself.

What Story Did They Pick Up?

So, it definitely did help that I had a couple of stories in the bank of cool stuff I've done. The story that got picked up was how I got 474,000 views on Reddit.

Funnily enough though, whilst that was the pitch I did, there was no mention of it in the article...they focussed only on how I used AI to help me write stuff (don't worry, this article is written by me, I'm sat here in my pajamas on a Friday night...like the cool dude I am).

Now, I'm pretty sure that it helped that I'd also written an article on it, so there was clear proof and evidence that I'd done the stuff I said I had. 

That is in itself is something I reckon you should do. Write blog articles and all the cool stuff you've done. It makes life way easier, as over time you'll gradually build up small wins which will snowball...or well it has for me.

What If I Didn't Have a Good Story?

Okay, so I reckon you can still use this tactic even without a good story (you have no excuses good sir!).

A lot of the questions aren't asking for really cool stories they're often asking for knowledge in an industry.

For instance, I'm accountant so I was able to reply to questions about accountancy. If you answer enough of these maybe one in 10 or one in 20 might get picked up.

Did I Get a Backlink?

Nope, they didn't link to me...the little rascals. Maybe next time.

Conclusion?

Maybe I got lucky only doing 13 pitches. Maybe 13 pitches is all you need. Or maybe I just loads of stuff like this, and eventally a couple of small gambles worked out. Who knows?