While it is harder to cold call for sure (the fact that you are referred to someone means they will at least read and/or listen to what you have to say) not being referred is not a show stopper at all.
You just have to be more creative in your approach in order to stand out.
If you don't have that skill simply practice at it with less valuable targets to start. Make your mistakes there and learn from them what works and what doesn't.
I've been cold calling from back before the internet. But one of the first things I learned from when I used to get free press by writing to reporters was to start out the email by telling them what a great article they wrote as opposed to telling them something that they could add to the story that they might have missed.
The emails where I contacted them that way almost always got a reply. So I continued with that formula and got a pretty good amount of major press writeups (NYT, WSJ etc.)
While it is harder to cold call for sure (the fact that you are referred to someone means they will at least read and/or listen to what you have to say) not being referred is not a show stopper at all.
You just have to be more creative in your approach in order to stand out.
If you don't have that skill simply practice at it with less valuable targets to start. Make your mistakes there and learn from them what works and what doesn't.
I've been cold calling from back before the internet. But one of the first things I learned from when I used to get free press by writing to reporters was to start out the email by telling them what a great article they wrote as opposed to telling them something that they could add to the story that they might have missed.
The emails where I contacted them that way almost always got a reply. So I continued with that formula and got a pretty good amount of major press writeups (NYT, WSJ etc.)