How to Get Featured in Forbes

This is the real thing, and it is also the hardest to get. Forbes staff reporters work defined beats, covering startups and small business, technology, markets, leadership and wealth, and a pitch has to clear the same bar it would at any national publication: would a reader who has never heard of you want to know?

In practice that means a priced funding round with a named lead, an acquisition, a legal outcome, a verifiable first, or proprietary data from your own operations. Forbes has a particular appetite for two further things: founder stories with a genuinely unusual turn, and numbers about money that readers can act on. “Unusual” means unusual, not that building a company was difficult.

Find the reporter by searching forbes.com for the two or three companies closest to yours and reading the bylines. That person has demonstrated interest in your category; a generic press address has not.

This is where we would start for any company that has never been written about. Forbes writers, staff and contributors, use journalist request platforms to find named experts on deadline. Registering on Qwoted, Featured and Help a B2B Writer costs nothing, and answering three requests a week is the entire method.

What gets you used: answering within the hour, two or three sentences that address only the question asked, one number from your own operations with the basis stated, your credentials in a single line, and a phone number in the signature. What gets you skipped: a paragraph about your product, a delay of a day, and vagueness.

The first quotes tend to land in smaller publications. Those are what make a larger one plausible, because an editor can see you have been quoted accurately before.

Forbes Councils is an invitation-based, vetted, paid membership programme. Members (typically executives and founders meeting revenue or seniority criteria) can publish articles under their own byline on forbes.com, labelled as council member content. It is advertised openly by Forbes, and it is not a scam.

What it is not is Forbes writing about you. The byline is yours, the label says so, and anyone who looks will see it. Treat the purchase the way you would treat any content platform with an audience: useful for a byline, a link in a bio, and credibility with readers who do not inspect labels; not useful as evidence that a newsroom examined your business.

Before paying, establish four things in writing: the current price for your council and term, what editorial review and publishing cadence you get, whether links in your articles are followed or nofollowed, and what happens to your published articles if you stop paying. The last one has caught people out at more than one publisher.

Note also the history: large publishers have periodically pruned or restructured contributor and member programmes, and content has been removed in the process. Build on a domain you own, and treat anything published elsewhere as borrowed.

Forbes runs a large number of annual lists: 30 Under 30 and its regional editions, sector and country lists, and the methodology-driven rankings under Forbes Advisor. Most take nominations, self-nomination included, through a form with a published deadline and published criteria.

This is the most underused free route on the page. Nomination costs nothing, the criteria are public, and the selection rewards exactly what a good press release needs anyway: verifiable numbers, named investors or customers, and a track record someone can check. Put the deadlines in a calendar once a year and submit with real figures.

Anyone charging a fee to place you on an editorial list is selling something they do not control. The ranking operations that do accept commercial relationships (affiliate and advertising arrangements on consumer-advice surfaces) are a different business, and reputable ones disclose them.

This is the category we sell, and on Forbes specifically it is the weakest of the five routes, so here is the plain version. Press release distribution places labelled release pages across a network of publisher surfaces. Whether any given network reaches a Forbes-branded surface varies, and it is not the Forbes newsroom in any case.

If a vendor promises you Forbes, ask one question: which exact URL pattern will my release appear on, and can you show me a live example from a recent campaign? A vendor that cannot answer that is selling you an impression of Forbes rather than a placement.

Our own packages do not promise Forbes. They cover Yahoo Finance, Business Insider, AP News and a syndication network, with a report listing every live URL: see what each package includes. For Forbes specifically, Routes 2 and 4 above are free and will get you further.

“Guaranteed Forbes feature” is one of the most common offers in the PR market, and it resolves into one of four things. Some sellers are reselling a Councils membership at a markup. Some are arranging a byline through a contributor they have a relationship with, which breaches most publisher policies and can result in removal. Some are selling a labelled press release page and describing it as a feature. And some are selling nothing at all.

Three questions are worth asking before money changes hands. First, ask for live URLs from the last three clients, open them, and look at the byline and the label. Second, ask what happens if the article is removed, because removals do happen and the answer tells you who carries that risk. Third, ask whether the arrangement complies with the publisher's own policy: an article taken down six months from now takes your “as seen in” claim with it.

The underlying trade-off is worth saying out loud: a paid byline buys a logo, and an earned quote buys credibility. The second is harder, is free, and is the one that survives scrutiny.

Keep the whole thing under 150 words. The subject line carries the news or the number and holds no adjectives. The first sentence says what happened and gives the figure that makes it notable. The second explains why it belongs on that reporter's beat, citing something they wrote and when they wrote it. The third offers what you can hand over, whether that is data, an interview or a named customer. Close with your name, title and mobile number, and attach nothing.

The pitch email template has the full version, and the press release distribution covers the document you paste below the signature. If Forbes is the goal, the realistic order is: answer journalist requests weekly, submit to the lists annually, build one piece of proprietary data, and pitch only when you have something that passes the stranger test.