Last week I sent over 100 emails about ghosts.
To journalists. In every state. About Bigfoot, UFOs, closed asylums and how many cemeteries Tennessee has (12,856, more than Texas and California combined).
Replies? A handful. Two of them told me off.
And yet Answer Socrates landed on 46 sites.
Here’s how.
I built the data myself
A study of America’s most haunted states.
Nine public records (ghost sightings, UFO reports, Bigfoot reports, cemeteries, ghost towns, closed asylums and a few more) plus our own autocomplete and trends data.
Yes, Answer Socrates data got Answer Socrates into the news.
Then I ranked all 50 states two ways: by raw totals and per person.
Two rankings means every state wins something. Or loses something. That matters more than you’d think.
Here’s the study: America’s most haunted states.
I didn’t pitch one story. I pitched 50.
Every state got its own pitch:
- Maine had the most ghost sightings per person.
- Ohio had 2,054 ghost towns.
- Washington was the Bigfoot and UFO capital.
Let the data write the headline.
The loser won
New Jersey came dead last. America’s least haunted state.
I nearly buried it. Instead I made it the headline.
New Jersey alone gave me 22 of the 46 links.
Nobody wants to read that their state came 31st.
Everybody wants to know why they came last.
The outreach
Over 100 emails between 22 and 29 October. One per journalist. No follow-ups. Every subject line ended with “(study)”.
I stopped on the 29th, because a Halloween story after Halloween is a dead story.
If you’re sending in volume:
- Warm the inbox up first.
- One email account per 25 emails a day.
- One email a minute, never a blast.
To find the journalists I used JournoFinder. It starts at $189 a month. Muck Rack, the tool most PR agencies use, won’t even show you a price, and most estimates put one seat at around $5,000 a year, annual contracts only.
When building a media list, I had two rules:
- One contact per outlet.
- Only people who already cover Halloween, or stories like it.
Monitoring
A timely story gets covered fast, so you have to catch it fast.
Search Google for your brand in quotes plus your main keyword, set to the last 24 hours or the last week:
Check the News tab too, and set up a Google Alert.
Then do the same on Bing. Yes, Bing. It turned up sites Google didn’t.
Then confirm every link in Ahrefs.
Chase the missing links. Fast.
Six sites mentioned us without a link. I asked straight away.
Why the rush?
A journalist is far more likely to add a link right after publishing than a month later.
And once they add it, every site syndicating that article picks the link up too.
One quick, polite email can turn into ten links.
The honest part
Replies were few. And it took real time:
So that’s the whole process. Steal it.
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