Fame is a long project. Being findable is a dated URL. If you want the first, start a decade. If you want the second, you can finish the work this week.
This is a playbook, not a personality transplant. You pick one real fact, you put it on a wire, you wait for live pages, you put those pages on your site, and you search your name. That is the whole job. Cited will write the draft with AI, you will edit every word, and Cited will syndicate it. Packages are $79, $149, and $399. None of them book you on a morning show. All of them can put a timestamped sentence about you on domains Google already trusts.
Read the next seven days in order. Skip a day and the week collapses into a blog post you never published. Do them in sequence and by Sunday you will have something a stranger can retrieve. That is what “known” means here.
This week is findability, not celebrity
People buy press releases because they want to be famous. The product they actually receive is a public record. Those are not the same thing, and pretending they are is how you waste the money.
A journalist tour is a list of named reporters, a pitch, a follow-up, and a hope that someone assigns a story. Cited is not that. Pitching is a different instrument. A wire release is how a fact becomes public, dated, and citable — by Google, by ChatGPT, by a later journalist who already wants the story, and by anyone who googles your name. If you need the difference spelled out once, read how Cited works.
Syndication is reprint. Feeds copy your text onto publisher sites. Some of those sites a stranger would recognise: AP News, USA Today, Yahoo Finance, Benzinga. Most of the rest they would not. The report lists live URLs. Count those. Do not count “potential impressions,” do not count a logo pack, and do not count a promise that a reporter will call.
You will not be a household name on Sunday. You might have a news result, a screenshot you can send a client, and a sentence a language model can lift without losing the subject. That is a better week than posting on LinkedIn and hoping the algorithm is in a generous mood.
The week at a glance
Seven days. One fact. One release. One report.
- Monday — pick a real fact. Not a job title.
- Tuesday — draft it. Cited writes; you do not start from a blank page.
- Wednesday — edit until a stolen sentence still contains your name.
- Thursday — buy Indexed ($79), Get known ($149), or Famous ($399).
- Friday — wait. Fulfilment is not a button you press.
- Saturday — collect live URLs. Screenshot the ones that exist.
- Sunday — put those URLs on your site and search your name.
If you already have the fact and a free afternoon, you can compress Monday through Thursday into one sitting. Do not compress Friday. The wire does not run on your calendar.
Before Monday
You need four things on the desk or the week stalls.
Your legal name, spelled the way you want it retrieved. Nicknames, middle initials, and “known as” lines confuse search. Pick one string and use it in the headline, the lead, and every sentence you expect an assistant to quote.
A contact the wire will accept: name, email, phone. Cited does not require an account. The wire does require a human the publisher can reach. Use a number you will answer. A rejected release after credits are spent is a real cost.
A website, or at least a URL you control. The release can mention it. Sunday you will put the placements back onto it. If you have nothing but a LinkedIn profile, you can still ship, but you will have nowhere honest to display the URLs. A one-page site is enough.
One fact that already happened. Not a plan. Not a vibe. Something with a date, a place, and a verb in the past tense. If you cannot write that sentence on a sticky note, you do not have news yet. Stop and get the fact. Do not buy a package to invent one.
Monday: pick a real fact
A personal press release lives or dies on the first sentence. Company PR can hide behind a brand. A named person cannot. The sentence has to stand alone: who, what, when, where. If you need a longer treatment of why the name is the product, read a personal press release for founders, consultants and operators.
News is an event. A launch. A hire you made or a hire that made you. A book with an ISBN or a publication date. A study with a method and a number. A new practice with an address. A partnership with a named counterparty who agreed to be named. An award from a body that exists. A revenue figure you will still defend in six months. An office that opened. A product that shipped to paying customers, with a count.
Not news: a job title. A “thought leadership” posture. Being passionate. Being excited to announce that you are excited. A webinar you might run. A newsletter you started in 2019. “Helping companies grow.” Any sentence that still works if you delete the date.
The test is ugly and useful. Write one sentence on paper. Read it to someone who does not work with you. If they cannot repeat the fact, it is not a fact. If they ask “so what,” you are missing a number or a named object. If the sentence uses “we” or “I,” rewrite it in third person before you touch the draft tool. The wire wants “Maya Chen opened Northline Audit in San Francisco on 12 March,” not “I’m thrilled to share my journey.”
Thin facts produce a thin release. That is safer than a confident lie on USA Today. Cited will not invent a customer, a round, a quote, or a headcount. If you did not type it, it will not be in the copy. Bring years, named clients only if they agreed, and numbers you can source. One fact per line in the brief is enough. Ten vague bullets are worse than three hard ones.
If you have three facts, pick one. The inverted pyramid can carry background, but the lead can carry only a single event. A founder who launched a practice and also published a paper should ship two releases on two weeks, not one release that tries to be both. This week, one.
Write the sentence. Put it at the top of a note. Everything you type on Tuesday hangs off that line. If the line is wrong, the week is theatre.
Tuesday: draft
Open the compose screen. Two fields matter: what you do, and what you want the world to hear. The first is context. The second is the news. Mix them up and the model will lead with biography, which is how releases get ignored.
Your name. Your work in plain language — independent AI auditor, fractional CFO, clinic founder, not “visionary operator.” The announcement in the past tense. City and country, because a dateline needs a place. A website if you have one. Optional: title, company, a quote you actually said, the name of the person who said it. Leave the quote blank rather than making one up. Fabricated quotes are how wires reject copy and how you look like a liar on a masthead you paid for.
Facts the draft may use go on separate lines. Years in the job. Headcount. Revenue if you will stand behind it. A named client. A university. A previous employer. Do not paste a manifesto. The model is not a ghostwriter for your brand book. It is a wire clerk that turns supplied facts into third-person copy.
Cited writes inverted pyramid, third person, 250 to 1,250 words. Those are the wire’s hard limits, not a style preference. Short is fine if the fact is sharp. Long is fine if every paragraph adds a number, a name, or a date. Padding is how you fail validation and how a reader stops. Aim near 500 unless the story has real machinery in it.
The draft arrives in under a minute. Read it once for mood and ignore the mood. Read it again for facts. Highlight every claim. If you cannot point to the line you typed that supports it, cut it. The model is instructed not to invent. It can still over-smooth. Your job on Tuesday is to get a legal skeleton on the page. Wednesday is for making that skeleton quotable.
Do not start from a blank Google Doc unless you enjoy wasting the morning. The point of the AI draft is not magic. It is a first pass that already knows the wire’s rules: no “we,” no “you,” no “I” outside a provided quote, no “revolutionary,” no “world-class.” You can write that by hand. You will write it slower, and you will sneak an adjective back in.
Wednesday: edit until a stolen sentence still names you
Language models quote sentences that stand alone. Search engines retrieve pages that look like news. Both fail if the only place your name appears is the headline. Edit for extraction, not for brand voice.
Walk the body with a pencil. Every sentence you would be happy to see quoted in a chatbot must contain your full name, a specific fact, and enough context that a reader who never saw the rest of the page still knows what happened. Pronouns die the moment the sentence leaves the page. “She opened the practice in May” is useless in isolation. “Maya Chen opened Northline Audit in San Francisco in May” survives.
Pair every number with what it measures. “Grew 40 percent” is a fragment. “Northline Audit reported $1.2 million in first-year revenue, up 40 percent from the prior freelance run” is a sentence. If you do not have the number, do not hint at one. Hedging (“aims to,” “could help,” “may”) is how copy sounds like an advert and how retrieval skips you.
Kill the adjectives the draft missed. Leading. Innovative. Seamless. Passionate. Disruptive. Unique. If a word would also fit a vitamin gummy, delete it. Wire editors reject advert copy. Assistants ignore it. You are not writing a landing page. You are writing a record. For the sentence-level craft, use how ChatGPT decides who to cite as a checklist, not as inspiration.
Check the mechanical rules while you still care. Title between 5 and 200 characters, at least five words, news in the headline, name in the headline if the name is the point. Summary under 45 words. Body 250 to 1,250. At most five links and three images. One to five categories that match the fact, not the industry you wish you were in. Contact name, email, phone, company, city, country. A missing phone is a rejection. A cute headline under five words is a rejection. Cited validates against the same limits the wire will; do not fight the form.
Read the lead out loud. If you need a second sentence to understand the first, the pyramid is upside down. Background last: education, previous employers, the origin story. News first. If the most interesting line is in paragraph four, move it to paragraph one and let the rest fall down the page.
Stop editing when the facts are true and the extractable sentences name you. Do not polish for “voice.” Voice is how you hide a missing event. Save the file. Tomorrow you pay.
Thursday: buy a package
Three cores. No subscription. You pay once for this release.
Indexed, $79. AI writes a wire-legal release. Distribution to 300+ publisher sites. Google News indexing. A shareable placement report. A URL you can send a client. This is the floor: your name exists on the public record. EIN starts at $149 for a similar blast. If the job is “stop being invisible” and you do not need a masthead screenshot, start here.
Get known, $149. Everything in Indexed, then 500+ publisher sites, TV and radio networks, copy written so a model can quote you, and the option to stack USA Today or AP on top. This is the package built for a screenshot. Agencies bill $1,500 and up for comparable reach, and they will still try to sell you a retainer. Most people who actually want to be findable should buy this one.
Famous, $399. Everything in Get known, plus USA Today included ($179 value), AP News included ($199 value), the Yahoo / MarketWatch network, a podcast add-on on Spotify, Apple, and Amazon, and do-follow high-DR links. À-la-carte the same stack is $700+. Buy this when you will use the mastheads — on a site, in a deck, in a due-diligence folder — not because the word “Famous” feels like a personality.
USA Today is $179 as an add-on. AP News is $199. Those sit on Get known. Famous already includes them. You get live URLs on real domains. If the URL is not there after fulfilment, it does not count. A logo you downloaded is not a citation.
Distribution is handled by a third-party syndication partner. Pickup is syndication. That sentence again, because Thursday is when people talk themselves into a fantasy: nobody at USA Today assigned a reporter to you. A feed reprinted your copy onto a page that lives on that domain. That page is still useful. Google News can index it. Assistants can retrieve it. A client can click it. It is not a profile in the print edition. Do not perform surprise on Saturday.
Nothing spends automatically. The order sits as awaiting fulfilment until Cited tops up the wallet and submits. A rejection after credits are spent costs the house money, which is why the compose screen is strict. You will get a status page. You do not need an account.
Pick the package that matches the screenshot you actually need. Then pay. Then close the laptop. Editing after payment means you should have stayed on Wednesday.
Friday: wait, on purpose
This is the day people ruin. They refresh the status page, they email journalists the draft, they post “big news incoming” on LinkedIn with no URL. Stop.
Fulfilment is manual. Credits are not spent in the customer path. When the release is actually ready, it goes for publisher syndication. Status moves through draft, pending, in progress, published, distributed. Rejected and refunded exist because wires reject bad copy. If you followed Wednesday, you should not see those. If you do, the reason will be mechanical: title, word count, categories, contact, or a claim the wire will not carry.
Syndication is not instant. Hours to a couple of days is normal. Indexing in Google News is a separate clock. Assistants are slower still; they cite what they have already ingested, not what went live at lunch. Treat Friday as a lag, not a failure. For the indexing mechanics, read how to get into Google News with a press release and do not expect the News tab to update while you watch.
Use the idle time on your own property. Draft the two sentences you will put next to the links on Sunday. Not “as seen in the press.” A factual line: “Maya Chen’s launch of Northline Audit was syndicated on the AP News and USA Today networks in March 2026,” then the URLs. Prepare an about page, a press section, or a single paragraph on the homepage. If you have no site, register the domain now. Do not wait for the report to decide you needed one.
Do not pitch reporters with the unpaid draft. That is how you burn a name you have not even put on the record yet. If a journalist already wants the story, they can use the live URL tomorrow. If they do not, a PDF in their inbox will not convert them.
Do not buy a second package on Friday because the first one “hasn’t landed.” It has not been a day.
Saturday: wait for URLs, then count them
The report is the product. Not the feeling. Not the impression count. Live pages with your name on them.
Open every URL. Confirm the copy is yours, the date is right, and the page loads without a login. Screenshot the ones a client would recognise. Save the rest in a folder. The long tail of publisher sites is real and mostly unglamorous. That is still distribution. A page on a domain you have never heard of can still rank for your name if the domain is trusted enough and the copy is unique enough. Do not delete them from the report because they are not USA Today.
If you paid for USA Today or AP News, those URLs are the ones you will reuse. Check them twice. Copy the exact links. Do not crop a homepage and pretend. If a package included Yahoo, MarketWatch, Benzinga, Street Insider, or Barchart, same rule: the URL exists or it does not.
Count. Write the number down. “47 live pages, including apnews.com and usatoday.com” is a sentence you can stand behind. “We got national coverage” is a sentence you should not say unless a reporter wrote about you, which they did not. Syndication reprinted you. That is enough for this week. It is not coverage in the newsroom sense. Keep the vocabulary honest and you will not have to walk it back in a diligence call.
If the report is thin, check status before you panic. In progress is not distributed. Distributed with three URLs on a $79 package is a different shape from Famous. Compare the report to the package you bought, not to a fantasy of every masthead on earth.
Do not paste logos onto a landing page yet if you do not have the links. A badge with no URL is the thing this product exists to replace.
Sunday: put the URLs on your site, then search your name
The release is not finished when the wire is done. It is finished when a stranger can travel from your name to the record without a scavenger hunt.
Put the live URLs on a page you control. About is fine. Press is better. A short homepage line with two links is enough if the site is one screen. Use the publisher name and the date. Link the words to the live page. Do not hotlink a logo file you do not own and call it proof. Do not build an “as seen in” strip of 40 marks you cannot click. Three true links beat a wallpaper of dead marks.
LinkedIn is a résumé, not a source, but it is where humans look after they have already heard the name. Featured section: the best URL, not a selfie with a newspaper. Bio: one factual clause, not “featured in USA Today” as a personality. Instagram does not help retrieval. Skip it unless you want a story for friends.
Now search. Exact name, in quotes if the name is common. Regular Google first. Then the News tab. You want a news result, a dateline, and a domain that is not your own site. It may take more than Sunday morning. Indexing is not a checkout receipt. Search again on Wednesday if the tab is empty tonight. The page can be live and still invisible to the index for a few days. That is normal. It is not a refund.
Search the fact, not only the name. “Northline Audit San Francisco” should have a chance of hitting the same pages. If the only query that works is a private nickname, you named yourself wrong on Monday.
Ask an assistant later in the week, not as a stunt on Sunday night. Models lag. A clean answer that quotes your sentence is a bonus, not the pass/fail for the purchase. If you want the mechanics of what they lift, you already have the citation piece. Do not harass a chatbot until the pages have had time to exist.
What success looks like tonight: you can send one URL to a client without a disclaimer. You can point a browser at your own site and reach that URL in two clicks. You can google your name and see something that is not a forgotten Twitter handle. That is known, for a niche, this week. It is not a keynote. Do not move the goalposts because a stranger on the bus does not recognise you.
What you will not have on Monday morning
A journalist in your inbox, unless one already wanted the story. A Wikipedia page. Wikipedia wants independent coverage, not a syndicated release you paid to place. Treat the release as a primary document later sourcing can use, not as the article itself.
A guarantee that ChatGPT will say your name. Assistants cite high-authority, timestamped news with a named person and a specific fact. You just created that shape of page. Retrieval is probabilistic. Anyone who sells you a guaranteed citation is selling you a badge.
A career. One URL does not replace a body of work. It makes the body of work retrievable. If you have no work, the release is a dated claim about nothing. Monday’s fact still has to be real.
An excuse to spam. The report is not a licence to email every reporter in your city with “as seen in USA Today.” If you pitch, pitch a new story. Use the URL as background. Do not use it as a demand.
Next week, and the week after
Do another release when you have another fact. Not because the calendar flipped. A quarterly launch, a hire, a paper, a number you can defend — those are reasons. “I want more logos” is not. Repeating the same announcement is how you look like a mill, and how the second report is weaker than the first.
Keep the folder of URLs. When a customer asks “who are you,” you send a page, not a thread. When a model needs a sentence, the sentence is already on a domain it trusts. When a reporter eventually does want the story, they have a dated primary source instead of your memory.
If Sunday’s search is still empty after a week, check the report first, then Search Console if you own the site you linked from, then the spelling of your name. The failure mode is almost never “Google hates press releases.” It is a thin fact, a rejected submission, or a name nobody else uses the same way.
That is the week. One fact. One draft. One edit. One package. A wait. URLs. Your site. Your name in the box. Cited will do the writing and the wire. You still have to bring the news. If you have it, write the release.
Questions
Can I become famous in one week?
No. Fame is a long project. A week is enough to put a dated, named fact on domains Google already trusts, then put those live URLs on your site. That is findability. It is not a journalist tour, a Wikipedia page, or a household name.
What if I do not have news?
Do not buy a release. A job title is not news. A launch, a hire, a book, a study, a new practice, or a number you can defend is. Cited will not invent a customer, a quote, or a round. Thin facts produce a thin release, which is safer than a lie on the wire.
Which Cited package should I buy?
Indexed at $79 puts your name on 300+ publisher sites with Google News indexing. Get known at $149 is the usual buy: 500+ sites, TV and radio, and the option to add USA Today or AP. Famous at $399 includes those mastheads plus the Yahoo network. Distribution is publisher syndication, not a reporter assignment.
Is this real USA Today or AP News coverage?
You get live URLs on those domains when you pay for them — $179 and $199 as add-ons on Get known, included in Famous. Pickup is syndication: feeds reprint your copy. Nobody assigned a journalist. If the URL is not in the report, it does not count.
How long until Google shows my name?
Fulfilment and syndication take hours to a couple of days. Google News indexing is a separate clock and can lag past Sunday. Assistants lag further. Search your name, then the News tab, then again mid-week. A live page with no index yet is not a failed order.
Do I need an agency or a journalist?
Not for this job. Agencies sell retainers from $1,500. Journalists write stories when they already want them. Cited writes a third-person release from your facts and distributes it through publisher syndication. You edit every word. You still have to bring one real event.