Are you an expert in any given field? No? Come on, you have to be if you want anybody to listen to what you have to say (and coincidentally plug your latest project.) If you run a blog, you're an expert on blogging. if you wrote a Young Adult book, you're an expert on teenagers, etc.

At Annie Jennings PR you can sign up to list yourself as an 'expert,' which will put you in the pool that supposedly media outlets draw from when they need an expert to appear in their article or news segment.

While there are testimonials swearing that the service put their book on the bestseller list, there is something weird about the service: You have to pay for each mention. How much per mention? They don't exactly tell you that on the website.

I personally have never heard of somebody paying to put themselves on TV and call themselves an expert: if your company does that via ProfNet and they pay the flat fee, that's a different scenario.

Has anybody worked with this company? Has it been successful for you? Or does paying per media placement set off any alarms for you? There are testimonials on the site, but...I've never heard of any of the people who have written them.

UPDATE: Actually, now that I've looked around a bit more I've seen some reputable freelancers say that they've had good experiences with Annie Jennings, but more in terms of FINDING experts than BEING experts. On the other hand, I read some horror stories about being contacted as a 'perfect expert'. But I want to hear it from the horse's mouth: what has been your experience?

(thanks to Joyce Cohen for the heads-up.)