The Forbes question is one of the most common things founders ask PR people about. Can you get me into Forbes? How long does it take? How much does it cost? The honest answers usually disappoint them.
Yes, you can. Weeks to months. And the real coverage doesn’t cost anything except time and effort. This post is the full playbook.
Start with what Forbes actually publishes
Before pitching anything, understand what you’re pitching into. Forbes publishes three kinds of articles, and they’re not equivalent.
Staff-written features. Written by Forbes employees — senior editors, beat reporters, and staff writers. These are the articles that carry real editorial weight. A founder profile written by a Forbes staff writer is a credentialing event for the business. It gets read. It gets cited. Search engines and language models both trust it.
Senior contributor articles. Forbes has a senior contributor program with vetted outside writers who cover specific beats. These articles are lower on the trust ladder than staff features but higher than open contributor content. Some senior contributors have real editorial judgment and their articles are treated like staff work. Some don’t.
Contributor articles. Outside writers who pitched and were approved to contribute. These vary wildly in quality. Some are serious journalists. Some are PR people in disguise. Some are founders who bought their way in through a gray-market service. The trust level of these articles is significantly lower than staff content, and savvy readers have learned to distinguish the two.
The Forbes you want to be in is the staff-written Forbes. The contributor path exists but it’s not what founders think it is, and chasing it is usually a waste of money.
The difference between the two paths
Staff features come from pitching an angle to a specific staff writer whose beat matches your story. The writer decides whether the story is worth writing, researches it, talks to you, writes it, and publishes it. You don’t control the angle or the framing. You don’t see the article before it publishes. What you get is an article written by an editorial professional making an independent editorial judgment about your business.
Contributor placements come from either being a contributor yourself or paying someone who is one to write about you. The writer controls less and the pitch is lower-stakes. You usually get to see the article, sometimes you get to influence the framing, and the final product looks like a PR placement because that’s what it is.
The search and AEO value of the two is not even close. A staff feature is cited by language models as authoritative. A contributor article is often filtered out or discounted. The links from staff articles feed Google’s knowledge graph in a way contributor links don’t.
Plan your pitch for the staff path. The contributor path is a consolation prize at best, and usually not worth the consolation.
Find the right writer
The staff writer matters more than the publication. Forbes has dozens of staff writers, each with a specific beat — small business, venture capital, personal finance, sustainability, crypto, tech, entrepreneurship, retail, and more. Pitching “Forbes” is pitching nobody. Pitching a specific writer whose recent work shows they cover your exact category is pitching somebody who might actually say yes.
Spend an hour on forbes.com before writing any pitch. Read recent articles. Note the writers. Note the angles they tend to cover. Build a shortlist of three to five writers whose beats overlap with your story.
For each writer, read their last ten articles. Notice the angles they picked, the sources they quoted, the data they cited, and the story types they favor. This research is the thing that separates a good pitch from a generic one. You’re not trying to get into Forbes — you’re trying to give a specific writer a story they’d write anyway if they had the right source.
The pitch itself
A Forbes pitch is short. Six sentences, max. The structure that works:
Sentence one: reference something specific the writer has published recently that ties into your story. “Your piece last month on X was the best treatment I’ve seen of that topic.”
Sentence two: introduce the angle you’re offering, tied to something new in your world. “I’m reaching out because we just hit a milestone that directly connects to that piece — we crossed $X in revenue with only three employees, which illustrates the productivity trend you wrote about.”
Sentence three: one credential that makes you a credible source. “I’ve run [company] since 2022 and we’ve grown entirely through organic channels.”
Sentence four: the specific, usable thing you can offer. “I can share the P&L numbers, the hiring data, and put you in touch with two of our customers if that helps the angle.”
Sentence five: a low-stakes close. “Happy to send more detail if this is a fit for anything you’re working on.”
Sentence six: the sign-off with your contact.
That’s it. No attachments. No press release. No company boilerplate. A Forbes staff writer gets hundreds of pitches a week and the ones that get replies are the ones that demonstrate the writer doesn’t have to do any setup work to evaluate whether the story is worth pursuing.
What makes a pitch work
Three things.
Specificity. Generic pitches get deleted. Pitches tied to a specific recent article, a specific data point, or a specific reportable event get replies. The specificity signals that the sender has done work and is not blasting the pitch to twenty other writers at the same time.
Timeliness. A pitch that connects to something in the news cycle — a new regulation, a trending topic, a study that just dropped — gets disproportionate attention. Writers are always looking for the second-day angle on yesterday’s story. If you can be the source for that angle, you’re valuable.
Credible data. Writers love numbers. A pitch that includes a specific revenue figure, a customer count, a growth rate, or any hard number beats a pitch that’s all adjectives. The number doesn’t have to be impressive — it has to be specific and verifiable.
Following up
Send the pitch. Wait five to seven business days. If no reply, send one follow-up with a single sentence — “wanted to bump this in case it got buried, happy to share more detail if useful.” If no reply to the follow-up, move on to the next writer.
Do not send three follow-ups. Do not send a pitch to a writer you pitched last month unless you have a genuinely new angle. Writers have long memories and small networks. Pestering gets you on lists that get shared.
The 90-day path
Weeks 1 to 2: Research. Build your shortlist of writers. Read their recent work. Identify two to three writers whose beats fit your story best.
Weeks 3 to 4: Craft the pitch. Write a different version for each writer, tied to their specific recent work. Send them one at a time, spread across a few days.
Weeks 5 to 6: Follow up. Track which pitches got responses and which went silent. Refine the pitch based on what’s working.
Weeks 7 to 9: Expand. Add three more writers to the list. Pitch those. At the same time, keep your name in front of writers who replied but didn’t commit — respond to their social posts, send occasional relevant data points, build familiarity.
Weeks 10 to 12: Either the coverage has landed or it hasn’t. If it has, use the coverage to open doors at other publications — it becomes a credential for the next pitch. If it hasn’t, reassess. The problem is usually the angle, not the pitching.
When to give up on Forbes
Not every business is a Forbes story. A pre-revenue startup with an idea is not a Forbes story. A bootstrapped agency with twelve clients is rarely a Forbes story. A local services business that just opened is not a Forbes story. Forbes writes about businesses with numbers, stakes, and a reason for a national business audience to care.
If three rounds of pitching different angles to different writers produce nothing, the signal is that Forbes is the wrong target right now. That’s fine. Go earn coverage at tier-two publications first — Inc., Fast Company, Business Insider, Entrepreneur, and the trade press in your category. A year of that coverage usually creates the paper trail that makes Forbes possible later.
The founders who end up in Forbes are almost never the ones who started by pitching Forbes. They’re the ones who built a track record of smaller features that eventually caught a Forbes writer’s attention, or who reached a milestone that made the pitch obvious. The path is usually indirect.
The honest bottom line
Forbes coverage is earnable without an agency. It takes work, research, and patience, and it takes a business that actually has a story worth telling. The tactics in this post will get you in front of the right writers. Whether the story lands is about the business, not the pitching.
And if anyone tells you they can guarantee you a Forbes placement for a fee, they’re selling you contributor content, and you’re buying something that isn’t what it looks like. The real Forbes is free. It’s also harder. That’s why it’s worth something.