Can we talk for a bit about expert commentary?

Happy Saturday!

Greetings from Brooklyn, where my pups are currently spending the afternoon at the groomer, and are pretty annoyed at me for it. They have no idea how lucky they are to be having a spa day! (And don’t worry, I’ll post photos later!)

But onto the matters at hand…

An issue came up this week in the free version of my newsletter, where I posted about a story I was working on that required expert commentary? It had a reasonable amount of turnaround time, and I instructed those responding to email me for further information and the questions I needed answered, as well as the deadline requirements.

I got a really impressive number of responses, and I gave them all the information they needed and the questions I needed answered, and then the deadline (which was about 72 hours later. Believe it or not in my world, that's a long time.

Those 3 days passed, and about half of the respondents never returned with my answers to the interview questions. I sent a few follow-ups...to crickets.

Ultimately, I sent a new call to action in my newsletter about what had happened and my new quickly passing deadline, and people came through for me in a big way. And now, that story is wrapped up and all is good. THANKFULLY.

But it inspired me to make this weekend's paid newsletter a deep dive in the do's and don'ts of expert commentary. I hope some of this will be helpful to you in your pitching in the future, not to just to me, but to everyone else in our field.