Nope. That's the quick answer.

You need some time on your hands, a willingness to invest that time and a good product. That's it.

Nope.

Make no mistake - having some professional relationships with a bunch of journalists you've worked with for years will do you no harm, right?

But I really do not like it  when I hear people imply that the only way you can do any sort of PR or get featured in media in any sort of way is by having some sort of magical black book of contacts.

It simply isn't the case. You can start to land coverage and make journalist acquaintances today without ever having spoken to a journalist in your life before.

Before we even hit publish on this, we'd been asked why we were planning to!

Whenever we speak to a business we can't help (usually because we're not taking clients on, what they need doesn't align with what we do or they're simply not in a position from a budget perspective to really work with an agency yet) we will typically try and offer some DIY tips. This is just a collation of those tips. 

Yep, it took some time to put together. But honestly, the amount of free advice I personally received when I started out in SEO was unreal. Digital marketing is a space that develops and improves when people share.  These are tips we willingly give out to people who get in touch. And now we can just send them here to get them! Winner!

Pretty much, I reckon.

Except rubbish products, that is. Don't pitch poor products.

In fact, don't bother marketing crappy products. Life's too short for that.

But in all seriousness, if you sell something like components for printers or screws, for example, you might have a harder time. That said, there's probably niche mags out there (in small quantity) you'll have a shout with.

Sometimes.

Some journalists are happy to include a product in a round up or a shopping guide on the basis of some information from you, the price, a link to the product and some high quality images.

But understandably, some want to see the product for themselves. After all, it's pretty difficult to recommend a product to someone (and pretty inauthentic too, in my view) without ever having actually tried and tested it yourself.

So I would recommend, if you're about to embark upon activity to get your products featured in press, that you allow for having to supply product samples.

So the one way in which you might be limited here is in the samples area. If you don't hold any product at all, it will mean you can't supply samples and some journalists will require samples.