One more thing I will add (journalist here) to these excellent tips is this:
Find your niche reporter. There is some reporter out there at some publication you've never heard of, and they are likely your perfect target for all of your news. You just have to find them and cultivate them. If you are a photo app, get to know an old world photography journalist, someone who writes for camera magazines. If you're a real estate application, find the regional real estate publications. A home shopping app, find local magazines, like (some local Bay Area examples) Oakland Magazine, Alameda Magazine, Diablo, 7X7 (or whatever fashionable SF and decorating focused mag still exists there.)
Stop pitching Tech Crunch, start pitching the Austin American Statesman or the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Your original hometown newspapers are great places to get "local boy makes good" type stories, and the Valley is super duper myopic about offline, regional media.
I'm curious, what value do you gain from something like the Austin American Statesman? I assume the main goal here of the PR is really to get links back to your site, so a higher value site like Tech Crunch would get you a higher value link back. Or, am I wrong, and the real point here is that something just needs to come up when someone Google's your startup.
Indeed, but also, hitting a newspaper read by 1 million people who are semi-technical is far better for a consumer product company than hitting an online audience of 10 million super tech users. The 1 million might just be hearing about you for the first time, while the 10 million online may already know you, seen other articles, moved on to the new hotness.... Those newspaper readers, though, they're wild, fresh and unmolested. Virgin ground for new customers.
Find your niche reporter. There is some reporter out there at some publication you've never heard of, and they are likely your perfect target for all of your news. You just have to find them and cultivate them. If you are a photo app, get to know an old world photography journalist, someone who writes for camera magazines. If you're a real estate application, find the regional real estate publications. A home shopping app, find local magazines, like (some local Bay Area examples) Oakland Magazine, Alameda Magazine, Diablo, 7X7 (or whatever fashionable SF and decorating focused mag still exists there.)
Stop pitching Tech Crunch, start pitching the Austin American Statesman or the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Your original hometown newspapers are great places to get "local boy makes good" type stories, and the Valley is super duper myopic about offline, regional media.