After a great panel discussion yesterday for the Wikreate Expansion with digital strategist Susan Barnes and Btrax CEO Brandon Hill, I realized that foreign startups really aren’t that different from American startups. Everyone wants to get on TechCrunch or a similar premium publication’s radar. At NetShelter we’ve got more than 200 tech blogs with more than 136 million uniques per month so I understand why startups would want to pitch our editors. The question is: Have you got what it takes?

IS TECHCRUNCH REALLY THAT MAGICAL?
Before trying any of the following tips, keep in mind that PR and social media should increase exposure with the intent of conversion. Whether this is converting eyeballs to memberships, subscriptions, sales, affiliate dollars, ad dollars, consulting fees, business partnerships or VC prospects - you need to get some benefit from the effort. Eyeballs aren’t money and eyeballs alone don’t put food on the table. I once had an enterprise CEO ask me to get him on Oprah. First off, I’m not Gayle King (Oprah’s BFF) and secondly, I don’t see the point in putting a B2B CEO in front of a mid-adoption consumer audience. I guarantee neither does Oprah. That being said, if you still think TechCrunch, VentureBeat or ReadWriteWeb’s business tech audience can create conversions for you, and your product is ACTUALLY awesome, then here are some tactics that can help you get noticed

GET ON THE RADAR
Tech journalists have a plethora of go-to feeds and sources when there’s no breaking news on the web. Get in them. Some ways you can do this include:

• Submitting yourself to Digg, Reddit and HackerNews and clamoring for the popular tech front page;
• Winning awards, accolades and speaking gigs at major tech events with journalists in attendance. (You can find event listings on the O’Reilly Conference Page, Gary’s Guide and WebWallflower);
• Getting mentioned by a top tech influencer on their blog, Twitter or Facebook profiles;
• Recruiting an advocate who already knows all the journalists you want to cover you;
• Answering the question of a top tech journalist via Twitter or their blog in such away that you are too intelligent to ignore.

BE NEWSWORTHY WHEN IT’S TIME
As I’ve said before in my Blogging 101 talk newsworthiness is essentially determined by relationship to a celebrity or known entity, timeliness, the number of people affected by your service, conflict and uniqueness. If your pitch has one or more of these newsworthy angles then you’re more likely to get covered. If you can offer exclusives and promo codes to a blogger, those don’t hurt either.

HUSTLE AFTER THE FIRST BITE
If you get one good story under your belt your job isn’t done. As soon as a good story is written you should:
• Ping Techmeme via the @techmeme Twitter account and submit it as a tip;
• If relevant, submit it to Hackernews, StumbleUpon and Delicious and get your most popular Digg and Reddit friends to submit it under their popular handles;
• Share the link via your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles and groups and ask for others to share it as well;
• Thank the writer who covered you publicly through your profiles;
• And finally, if it’s all about TechCrunch, update your company profile and add your news story to the Crunchbase.
Clearly there are other ways to go about this and I’m all ears if you’d like to share your tactics in the comments below.