Buzzgain

The top 3 business publications in the US are Business Week, Fortune and Forbes.

A quick comparison of their circulation, unique visitors, online revenue and editorial staff is below. The interesting question raised by 247Wall Street is when do these publication die? Their models seem doomed if you consider cost of printing, editorial payroll costs and the steep decline in advertising.

Leaving aside whether they survive for a minute, lets focus on how you as a business can get a mention or get written up in these publications.

1. Pick the right reporter based on topic of interest: Notice the editorial staff on each of these publications. You can use BuzzGain to get the exact writer / reporter / journalist to cover your story or you can go to their editorial pages and get the entire editorial staff and contact them directly. The important thing is there are over 200 to 400+ reporters on staff. Just because they are a business magazine does not mean everyone cares about startups in the Web 2.0 space.

2. Focus on obtaining an online mention versus a print mention: Clearly the total circulation of these publications is individually about a million and readership about 2-3 million. Compare that to the total number of unique visitors on a monthly basis which is anywhere between 3-5 million. Why is this important? An online mention is more easily actionable – they can search and visit your website. In addition if the article provides a link to your website your chances of Search Engine Optimization improves.

3. Learn more about the reporters past writing style, story angle and suggest follow up pieces to previously written articles. The total number of links to articles written by other writers in this publication compared to the number of outgoing links is very high. This means most business reporters are linking to their own pieces instead of referring to other blogs, web sources. The more you can “link” stories they have previously written about to the story you are trying to pitch them, the better chance you have of getting your story written.

What’s worked for you with business press? Have you got a mention? What tip would you suggest?