Five steps. About 30 minutes. One spreadsheet that fills itself.
Earned media used to mean hiring a publicist or burning your evenings Googling reporters. Now an AI assistant handles the grunt work, and you show up to drafts instead of homework.
Here's the loop you'll run every week.
Check replies and sent mail first
Who answered, and what did you send by hand? One reply beats ten new pitches.
Follow up three times, max
Only if your message was the last one. A two-sentence nudge with one new reason to care. Then stop.
Find a handful of new people
Skip any show that's gone quiet for four months. Five honest names beat fifteen padded ones.
Draft one pitch per person
About their story, written the way you talk.
You read, edit, and send
The AI never hits send. You do.
Also inside
- The pitch formula
- Four jobs every pitch has to do in four to seven sentences.
- The six-point test
- Score it like a newsroom before it leaves your outbox.
- Four guardrails
- The mistakes I made with AI, plus the corrections sheet that keeps them from happening twice.
- The starter prompt
- Copy, paste, and schedule it. Your drafts and your tracker are waiting every Monday morning.
How do you write a pitch somebody actually answers?
Four to seven short sentences, and it has four jobs to do. Miss one and it reads like every other email in that inbox.
Their story
Name the specific piece they just published. That is your proof you actually read it.
The gap
What their story was missing. Usually it is the practitioner who lives this every day. That is you.
Who you are, for this angle
Two or three credentials that fit this person. Not your whole bio.
One real question
"Can I walk you through it?" beats "let me know if you're interested" every time.
Then attach proof that matches the person. Two links, not ten. Writers want published articles, because they want to know you file clean copy. Podcast hosts and producers want video, because they want to know you are good on camera.
Specific beats clever
I sent a cold pitch to a podcast on a Friday morning, tied to an episode they had just aired. The host said yes 51 minutes later. There was no gimmick in it. I just proved I had listened.
Score it before you send it
Six questions a newsroom is quietly asking about every pitch it opens. Give yourself 1 to 5 on each one, honestly, before the thing leaves your outbox.
| The test | What they are really asking |
|---|---|
| The face | Can this person explain it clearly, on the record or on camera? |
| The fresh angle | Is this something we have not already run? |
| The timing | Why now? |
| The local impact | Does it matter to our audience, here? |
| The audience payoff | Will people learn something they can use? |
| The ease of coverage | How much work is this for me? |
The last check is not on the table. Would you say this out loud to a client? If it sounds like a robot wrote it, it does not go.
Four guardrails I learned the hard way
The tech was never the hard part. Trust was. Every one of these exists because something went sideways first.
My AI once took a talk of mine called Digital Avatars and decided I owned an avatar company. Two pitches went out saying so. Now a one-page fact sheet gets read first, every time. If a claim is not on that page, it does not go in a pitch.
Only use addresses it actually saw published on a real page. One wrong name in a greeting and you are done with that newsroom.
Mine once told me a TV reporter had gone silent. She had answered nine minutes after my nudge. It read the preview, not the thread. Trust, but verify.
At one point I had 53 unsent drafts. Stack a second follow-up on an unsent first one and you look like a spam bot. The bottleneck is almost never finding names. It is you hitting send.
The fix for all four is a corrections sheet. Every time the AI gets something wrong, write the fix down as a rule, and make it read that sheet before every run. Mistakes happen once, not every week.
The one thing not on this page
Everything above is the method, and it works whether you use AI or not. What the playbook adds is the prompt: the copy-and-paste block you drop into ChatGPT or Claude, fill in three brackets, and schedule once a week. Plus the ten-column tracker, so next week it already knows who you talked to.
Get the playbookAI finds the door. You still have to knock.
Proof that compounds
Every yes becomes the credential for the next ask. Podcasts, TV segments, bylines, all in one place, and the list grows every time someone says yes.
See every appearanceUpdated every time I land one.
Hi, I'm JMan.
I'm the AI Edutainer for Real Estate, an AI strategist and national speaker who has trained more than 50,000 real estate professionals. I host the AI Agent Advantage podcast and I'm a licensed Associate Broker with REMAX Realty Group in Rochester, NY.
AI is the topic. People are the mission.
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