How I Earn Press Coverage By Answering Journalist Queries
Written by Lilach Bullock
Most of what I submit to journalist call-outs never gets used, and the answers that do land the pickup are the ones with a number attached that could only have come from my own desk that week.
Why most expert answers to journalist queries go nowhere
The answers I regret sending are the ones I wrote in a hurry, a general claim about a trend with nothing pinned to a real week or a real page. I can spot my own bad habit now, the sentence that reads fine until I ask whether anyone else answering that same query could have written the identical line. If the answer is yes, it isn’t ready to send.
The test I run before I hit submit
Before I send anything now I check whether the first sentence carries a number or a named result, because a query answer that opens with an opinion and saves the proof for later usually gets cut at the opinion. If I can’t point to a real page, a real week, or a real figure from my own work, I don’t send the answer at all, I go find one first.
Where the specific detail comes from
When a query is about technical SEO recovery I don’t say internal linking helps, I say I triaged 1,219 orphaned pages on my own site, picked eight to ten of the strongest hub pages, and added three to five internal links per post with descriptive anchor text. That afternoon of work did more for the recovery than anything else I tried, and it cost nothing but the time.
When a query is about content decay I pull the audit I run every 18 months, checking every post that once sat in the top five for current ranking and referring domains lost. The last one, in January, found 14 posts that had dropped from page one to page three or lower, each having lost between 20 and 40 percent of its referring domains over three years with nothing updated since publication.
When a query is about product reviews the specific detail comes from using the thing myself rather than reading the spec sheet, whether that means running a kettle daily for a fortnight, wearing walking boots on three different terrains, or putting a piece of software through a real client project instead of a demo account. The fault, if there is one, usually shows up somewhere in that stretch rather than at unboxing.
A short checklist before you hit submit on a query
I read my own answer back and cut anything that sounds like a category rather than an event, marketing helps businesses grow is a category, 1,219 pages triaged in an afternoon is an event. I check that the number in the first sentence is one I could defend if someone rang me and asked where it came from. Then I cut the answer down again, because most editors are scanning through dozens of these between other jobs and the version that survives is usually the shorter one.
I still send answers that go nowhere most weeks, and I’ve stopped minding that part of it.
By Lilach Bullock, AI implementation consultant and fractional CMO. Written for Connectively.