How to find freelancers and start forming relationships

When it comes to forming valuable relationships with media people who can help you, treat freelance writers with the same respect you would staff writers. Here’s why they can be so valuable to your publicity campaign:

—If you pitch a freelancer, it’s their job to tweak the pitch, flesh out the story, and sell the story to the editor. All you have to do is interest them in your idea, then give them access to the sources they need to interview.

—Freelancers often work for a variety of publications. So if they write about you for one magazine, there’s a good chance they’ll return to you again in several months and use you for a similar story they’re writing for another publication.

—They’re often working on several stories at a time. So if you pitch an idea and it isn’t a good fit for one story, it might be a pefect fit for another. Learn more about what freelancers want in this article at the Publicity Club of Chicago website at

—Freelancers are fairly easy to spot. They usually receive a byline just like staff writers do. But at the end of the article, there’s often a paragraph that identifies them as a freelancer and sometimes offers their email address.

Cozying up to freelancers is one of 19 “rules of the road” suggested by a panel of journalists who met in New York in October. The complete article is in the January/Februrary issue of The Publicity Hound subscription newsletter.