Business owners generally sit on the fence about the press.
The ‘for’ camp will tell you getting press coverage and exposure is great and drives business, while the ‘against’ camp will say spend your efforts on creating lasting interest.
I will let you decide where you sit on that spectrum, but if you do decide to go ahead, here are some tips that may help your article be published on ‘The Inertia’ like mine was recently.
As a bit of context, a couple of Surfpreneurs are The Inertia contributors who have had multiple articles published.
I asked if they would publish a piece if I wrote it, and they suggested I submit it myself 😮
I was skeptical 🤔 , but it was actually much easier than I thought to get access to the more than 1.5million viewers The Inertia receives each month, and give your brand that exposure.
Here is what you do:
Once you have created your content (video, photos, video etc) and have checked it against the Dos & Donts below, you need to create your submission email.
Your submission needs to include at a minimum a bio about you, a photo of you (above shoulders), and your content. As an example, I submitted my content in a link to a google doc, and just had a short 2 sentence teaser to excite them into reading it.
Once you have all of this, email it to ‘contribute@theinertia.com’ with the subject ‘Contributing to Theinertia.com’ - see my email in the image below, as an example:
If successful they will email you confirming it has been published (they told me within a couple of hours) and will provide you with a login for submitting future content.
Voila, you’re a contributor for The Inertia! 🎉
Here is a quick checklist:
✅ Do
Offer value - like any content, it MUST add to someone’s day
Tell a story - humans have told stories for centuries, and that is still true in the digital age, but...
Don’t waffle - get to the point... unfortunately, we have short attention spans
Make it easy for them to just hit ‘Publish’ - do all the work for them (proof-read, formatting, etc)
Check out bios of popular contributors and copy similar structures; generally make it sound like you’re a passionate surfer (which of course you are), an authority figure of some sort (degree, worked in the industry for a long time etc) and also something funny or personable about yourself.
🚫 Don’t
Make it an all out sales pitch - no-one likes feeling like they are being sold to
Leave grammar or spelling mistakes littered throughout it; double check or better yet, get someone else to check your work
Be rude - if you are published or not, always be humble and respect other’s decisions and opinions.
Forget to spread it far and wide on social media, if published
If you have any questions at all, hit me up on james@settsurf.com - good luck, and let us know how you get on!
