Not much in life is free, but a lot of it can be bartered and traded.
Influencers that are just starting out (say under 10k followers, subscribers, etc.) would usually do promos for free or next to nothing. I'd recommend taking a look at those in that target range that have a similar audience as yours to get the most exposure. This will especially be fruitful if you have something to offer the influencer, like an audience that will probably like their content too, so be sure to showcase that in your pitch to them.
One way to figure out which press might want to cover your project - what you should also do is reverse engineer other successful campaigns for projects that are similar to yours. To do this:
- go to Kickstarter.com
- search for [product name] and filter for worldwide most funded
- copy the link of one of its main images and past into Google Images:
https://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en- now Google will give you results of different sites that have posted the image, which will undoubtedly include niche blogs and sites that have covered the Kickstarter launch story.
Make a huge list of that and start outreaching. More often than not, those niche sites are the ones that will be more fruitful for your campaign since it will be the most targeted, happy to cover a crowdfunding campaign, and excited to get new niche content for their reader list. As a side note for those interested in figuring out this PR thing for themselves, I wrote a really in-depth article about it here:
https://crushcrowdfunding.com/the-crowdfunding-pr-strategy-that-works-2019-and-beyond/Remember - if you're low on budget, then what you're going to have to put into this is time! This will take a bunch of time, but it will definitely be worth it in the end
Best of luck out there everyone!
- Nalin