As an early-stage startup, building brand awareness is one of the most important parts of your business. To succeed you must get the word out about your brand, cultivate an audience and expand the reach of your company. Generating online traction is a top of priority, second only to getting funded.

However, getting large volumes of website traffic and piquing the interests of PR professionals and journalists is incredibly difficult for an inexperienced entrepreneur. That’s why we’ve compiled this list of tips.

Related: How to Build Credibility as a Young Entrepreneur

The following are tips from 14 leading PR professionals, journalists and entrepreneurs that will help you capture the attention of your target audience, get media coverage and grow your business.

1. Stay trending. “What is your industry doing that could be considered a trend? Figure it out, and pitch a reporter that trend, with your company leading the story. Reporters prefer trends over one-offs.” Peter Shankman, www.Shankman.com.

2. Build something innovative. “Build something your customers want to be passionate about but don’t know it yet. Passionate customer are by far the best sales people in the World.” John Rampton, www.adogy.com.

3. Branding is everything. “Focus on branding above all. Strong brands naturally attract attention, links and buzz, which are all elements that play into search engine rankings. As such, building a strong brand actually helps improve SEO, helping you get more traction, more quickly.” Jayson DeMers, www.audiencebloom.com.

4. Be a thought leader. “Gambling on traditional PR does not guarantee success. To bloggers and journalists, your standalone product or service is not very newsworthy. Instead, offer your domain expertise. Provide quotes for stories writers are working on to demonstrate your knowledge and critical understanding of the space(s) you operate in. Services such as Help a Reporter Out, Source Sleuth and ProfNet simplify this process, making it easy for you to connect with journalists researching information for upcoming posts. Alternatively, you can follow the reporters that cover your industry and volunteer yourself whenever they send out a call for sources.” Firas Kittaneh, Amerisleep

5. Know who your customers are. “One of the keys to growing your startup is really understanding your customer. Where are they? What are their pains? How does your solution solve their problem? What sites do they frequent online? How often will they need to use your product? Does it pass the ‘Toothbrush Test?’

You'll want to create an affinity grid of their interests, so that you can find more them. You can use Facebook graph search to really understand your ideal customers interests.

Next, I'd suggest trying to build in growth into your product. If you can get your customers to help you get new customers, then that's a huge win. Incentivize your customers to help you get new customers. If you figure that out, you're in for a ride.” Travis Wright traviswright.com

Related: Getting Your Business Press

6. Know when to move on. “Too many entrepreneurs don’t know when to cut bait and go on to the next lead. It is easy to say, ‘I have had eight great meetings with this $15B a year company’ and not realize that you have spent $2,000 getting two people to those meetings each time, and that means you have spent $16,000 for a sale that will only make you $10,000, but it is also realizing when you are being pumped for information so that the company can build rather than buy.” Sarah Austin, pop17.com

7. Invest in video. "If there's one thing every startup should invest in, it should be a short, aesthetically pleasing video that explains exactly how its product works. As a journalist covering startups, I guarantee no amount of selling a concept over the phone is as effective as a well-produced video that clearly communicates the benefit of the app or software. If there's a good video, I almost always embed it in my article. Bonus points if it's funny." Omar Akhtar, senior editor, www.thehubcomms.com

8. Strive to be the best. “Be the smartest person in the room, or at least your space. If you aren’t, change space or get smarter.

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