Lessons

Lesson Info

Pitching Q&A

So dan you had a question is so interesting you know after looking at all these quotes that I'm I guarantee you there's a ton of people out there that sort of take kind of a lazy route and just try to hit as many editors as possible and see which ones come back without doing the research and you would think if they're so if they have certain rules that they love why play this cat and mouse game and just hope that you're going to do the correct pitch they should have a guide or just have a pages says you want to pitch give us this and then they're going to get such so much higher quality stuff it's just so amazing that you have to kind of learn and figure it out yourself and half the people are not going to know how to do this it's just funny to see yeah it's so true though yeah I totally agree with you and and I have seen some magazines more the local ones though where when I pitched something they'll write back to me and they'll say here's our pitching guidelines and it's a page on th...

eir web site that I never would have been able to find on my own I don't know if it's published or not published but some of them do have that but it's really hard to find and I think you have a great point I think everyone would save a lot of time if this information was available, but I also think at the same time all of the media databases that you might want to invest in aa lot of them do have this information so that information is kind of out there but you sort of have to pay for it, unfortunately, but but it is there out there if you do want it, but a lot of times it's not and if you're building your own media list, you're sort of going in blindly because you don't know what they want you're hoping that you know what they want, but I think a lot of these probably a lot of the editors feel the same exact way and if one person is saying it probably ten or twenty or one hundred are the ones are feeling the same way. So yeah, but I feel like there could be a business just in having media profiles of what they all of to do it yourself yeah, thank you so much for proof sharing this I mean, my goodness that's yeah yeah and I had I wish I had known all of this when I was first pitching to but all of this stuff took me so long to learn and it is valuable because you could cut out so much time and you could really get your products out there super quickly if you just know all of this so I'm glad you guys are here and for everyone who's watching um I'm hoping this is going to save everyone a lot of time national school students what sort of experience that you had with pitching the rejection you've had and then how you've taken your approach tio really get over those hurdles et cetera is in line with how andrea has been explaining this or we really learned something new today maybe down if you try pitching to any yeah I mean to be honest, I haven't done much pitching and a lot of it you know stems from being vulnerable and you know this for all of us this is our baby you know and when you extend yourself and you put it all out on the line you hope that you get some positive return and if you hear those knows you know it stings but you're you're right on that you got to do it you know you got to get it out there people are not going to come to you and uh it gets easier from what you say you know it's easier to handle those knows as they come in and you don't take it as personal right that's true, yeah robert I'm sure you have quite a lot of experience of pitching your business business ideas and I've had the pleasure of working for a lot of different companies and um I've been also very fortunate that those companies were a lot of products that were in demand so a lot of times the press would come to us but we did trade shows so trade shows was great and majority of trade shows have a press room or they reach out to press so you know press is coming even if the press doesn't make it to your booth they actually are given information about you if you if you provide that information over the trade show so there's a ways to go about it at a trade show but it's a huge investment I mean nowadays it's even ten thousand dollars for a booth it's not just a thousand or a few so it's a huge investment but I was talking during our lunch break I was talking with tracy my business partner and we both been in the industry for each of us over twenty years and we were saying how we're learning so much from you business the whole realm of things has changed since the internet and how in the part that even write magazines are changing and how a lot of them aren't around anymore and the ones that are mean everything's changing and people want answers faster and all sorts of things so tracing I work like giddy over the fact that we're learning so much on we've both been in the industry a long time yeah great great now dorothy, you've obviously had some success recently to go at the very top of the show with actually reaching an internationally is perhaps an accident have you ever thought of pitching maybe to international magazines? I mean, is that something that you've ever thought might be in your business plan no, I haven't may limit is a shipping this expensive internationally it's gotten much more so recently but I did in a previous business do a lot of contacting magazines I was an illustrator so I contacted magazines and book publishers and I learned a lot of those lessons the hard way doing that, you know, calling them at the wrong time or, you know, calling to say did you get my postcard and getting a very, um, abrupt response? So yeah, I have had some experience with it but not not pitching my curtis is right yeah, and I have to say a lot of these I learned the hard way too. So sometimes it's great as disappointing as as it can be sometimes but you do have to learn those lessons and you just have to move on and learn from your mistakes and I think that's how we all can grow as business owners and entrepreneurs so yeah, everything is a learning experience recitation of you try pitching high half that sounds very good, I've had a little bit um of surface was more smaller um bloc's um no magazines or anything recently s and out a lot of um pitches to haro um but I wasn't including any pictures I was including the images so I I was wondering why no one was found it s so I think that's probably the biggest thing someone does you know we attached a photo and, um see effect how works with, you know, canada anymore responses create yeah and we're definitely going to talk about haro and I'm sure all of you know about it some of you might not but it's a great service and I use it all the time so we're going to talk tomorrow about how to actually pitched them the right way so that your story gets picked out because they get hundreds of pitches for everything that they put out there so that will be tomorrow on and a house with your pitch history um I haven't I've got my my dream list so that's step one but it's kind of stopped there. And so every bit of like publicity I've gotten has been them coming to me, which is nice and as a result, like I've seen the results coming out of that whether it's people coming by my booth at a show um thing like, oh my god, I just saw you on the good day morning show or oh, I saw you in x y z publication you know so I know that it's getting me out there and then now I'm not really doing anything with my list because of the intimidation and because of the like where we're going to find the time and so that's why I'm glad that I am here participating and getting this you know firsthand because now I have a lot of clarity and I can kind of what's the holidays died a little bit start you know, the fresh air with kind of a new approach and and see that like no, just because it's it's a huge publication and I you know and they're reaches a lot bigger than mine doesn't mean that I can't add value to what they have to give to their readers, you know, right exactly oh, fantastic advice and I think personally as well I can really relate to a lot of what you've been saying today on jurors for interesting I've worked for a long time as a freelance writer on dh I think sometimes when you're pitching it may sound arrogant, but you kind of assume that they're going to know you are a reality they don't on dh they're not going to go to the trouble of googling you and looking like they want you to explain that in your picture I think it's a really cool thing and I've often mean sort of felt slighted as tow somebody else is in the same field got the article that I didn't get that they probably pitched it better yeah these are all different things toe very mind I mean the questions yeah, that kind of ties into a question that curio so was asking so they say you know, we've touched on a little bit of this but there is really no like one prototype for how to do a pitching it varies depending on your business depending on your product but they want to know if it's somebody who has been sort of putting this off but now they're finally ready to take this first step to pitch what are the three most important things that they should have prepared before they go out and pitch? Are there three that people should focus on? Yeah, I would say the first one is to know your product and your story really well because if you're not really sure where your audiences and we're customers are when you pitch someone they're not going to be really they're not really going to be sure either because you're not sure and you not coming across this confidence so really knowing who's buying your products why they're buying it and how they're using it is really important and then obviously having knowing who the person is that you need to pitch and what their contact information is because if you don't have their email address then you're not going to be able to reach out to them and then third and I think that's something we've talked about a lot, but is really providing value and treating this more as a two way conversation as opposed tio here's my product, I'm selling it to you, or I'm pitching it to you and please write about it because that seems desperate, and it really only seems like right about me because I'm important, but it's discounting the fact that they're working, they're trying to provide value to their own readers, and they have a story that they're trying to get across to. So I think keeping in mind those three things is really going to take you a long way and that, yes, there's a lot of other things that we talked about, like how long your email should be and what your subject line should be, but if you don't really have those basics, then I think as your pitching it's going to come across either not confident or you're not really sure or it's not going to go across to the right person, that would be more receptive to hearing that. Device now I should just want to jump back and we can because mary he was actually a really great question when she's at the second one is more to do with social media that we're talking about a little bit earlier today but I think this would be very useful if she's saying if you're just getting started on something like instagram so you don't have any followers or twitter I suppose you don't have any followers yet how do you get people to follow you editors etcetera is by following them is that going to attract people to follow you is that something you've had experience or should you designate yourself as a new users that people might want to follow you I think that's such a good question and I'm a huge fan of when you're starting out on social media if you want to grow your following you have to go out there and follow other people first and some of those people will follow you back some will not if they don't don't take it personally again I think that's a huge theme this next few days is don't take things personally if they don't follow you but if you're just starting out and you're not really sure how to grow your base I think following other people is one way to do it the other way to do it is if you already have a nest ablest customer base reach out to them and be specific and asked them to follow. You couldn't send out one email and say, hey, we're so excited! We just launched our our facebook page. Can you take a second and follow us? But you can't stop there because again what's in it for them. So you have to say, if you follow us, we'll give you more tips will share more strategies, will do more of this will give you more of what it is that you're looking for, so simply reaching out to your customer base that's already existing and asking them to follow you is a great way to start. I know with my soap business, I wasn't sure which social media networks would be the best fit, so I decided to set on facebook and instagram, so I send out an email to the smallest that I had at the time and ask them to follow me and a lot of them did some of them didn't then that's fine, but some of them did and then I just started following other people who I wanted to follow me back. So that's a really basic, simple strategy to sort of do just get going until you have more followers, but then if you want to keep them there, you obviously have to provide a ton of value aa lot of stuff that's relevant to them. So that way they can keep coming back and share it and the more they share it the more followers you're going tohave so it's sort of ah thing where if you want to grow your base you could start out really basic but if you really want to grow you have to provide a lot of value and focus on providing content that's relevant to them so that they're more likely to share it and comment on it and their friends khun see it and they'll follow you so it's ah it's a long term strategy but short term following other people is is pretty simple to do and can get you a lot of results definitely question here from jessica k they want to know when pitching to a shop or a boutique do you follow a similar protocol or is it completely different from magazines like say for instance you're trying to get your product into a local store a local boutique is it a different idea then do you go in in person and kind of have a different mindset or should they stick to traditional emails and the same methods we've been taught about? Yeah I have another great question and I think for me I've had a ton of experience pitching to stores and my t shirts were in over three hundred stores and now my soaps are I think in almost thirty stores or so so what I've done with stores is I really did pitch by email, but I made sure that I got to know the store's a little bit to make sure that there were a great food, whether they were carrying similar products or products that I thought were complimentary to mind. But I've done a lot of it via email, but it was really all about providing value so money reach out to them again. It's not about I just launched this new product. Please take a look at it. I think you would be a great fit. It was more like I know you your store is located in a higher and booty or higher and mall, for example and if you're looking to add more product is that our higher end? Here is a great company that I just launched the soap st tail for eight dollars, would this be something you would be interested in or something along? The lines of I saw you were featured in this magazine and the local press, and you said that you love products that are new and innovative here's a product that I have that I think would be new and innovative as well for you, so sometimes you have to get to know them a little bit if you're doing more like a mass outreach, which I've also done with stores as well, I again started my email with saying something about them and even something as basic as if you're looking to add more products to your gift offerings has gone a long way as opposed to starting your email with I just launched the new company and here's some soap is that I think you would love so started out by addressing them with you and why they should be interested in why they should keep reading and then hopefully that'll get them to be interested in request sample so it's sort of a really similar approach with stores, I do like to follow up more than once, as I was saying before I usually have a year long plan well off, I'll write the initial email all right, another email a month later, another third email two months later, and then I'll wait another up until it's six months and then all right again a year later, so that way I'm I'm getting to them a few times a year or if I get some really major prize that's super important like maybe oprah finally puts my simpson and the magazine, then probably I would email all of them, even though it was not at the one month or two months or three months time, and I would say we were just featured an oprah magazine, and I know a ton of readers across the country are looking for this now to buy locally would you be interested in trying them out for your store? So if it was something like that, I probably would I would check in with them to let them know that that happened, but other than that I usually have a year long follow a plan and I'm assuming give I still don't hear back from them by the year mark I probably would move on to a different store and assume that they were not interested actually going out I'd be curious because you just set it up right now your businesses, what twenty years old you probably do pre seed the twitter, twitter, email and he contacts here is this we are expensive when you actually we're going to direct stores correctly you're dating me, I weigh thirty nine exactly, you know it's really interesting because there are different avenues and over ways to go I mean, I definitely love calling and I love getting in front of the customers specifically sales wise because it's developing that relationship but you know, it really depends back tio what andrea said its research do your research because there are there definitely store owners and boutique owners that don't get email, I know that sounds crazy, but they're so consumed with what they're doing that they don't have time, so going to a trade show is really sometimes where they go to get their goods and and if they have the relationship with you, they're going to open your email so it's really learning more about them and how they were going into the boutique with your, you know, specifically jewelry with your jewelry on and learning how they work and you know what products they have but also having a conversation with the the man or woman behind the counter getting to know how, you know, I've learned so much and gotten direct emails from going into stores and talking with them and saying, you know, what would be the best way to approach the buyer for this it's just about getting to know them? I think email is a great, great source and image speaks bounds I mean, if you don't have an image, you're just I mean, it's silly it's really not to have some sort of image and images speaks its king, but getting to know who you're going teo and and it's, same thing make that list of the top twenty, fifty stores and get to know them and that's going to really bring your set the success and I keep getting what I love is you can't say provide value, you're not you're what you're telling people tio say are too right is so non pitchy I love it, you know if you would like more information, I would be happy to provide you it's so unthreatening, which is really great, yeah, great, and it definitely doesn't put them on the defensive side where when we feel like we're being sold to were automatically have a wall that we put up and you're like, wait a second. But it's interesting that you say that about the stores because I am a huge fan of research. And just like I reached out to editors, I decided to do a three month long survey and reach out to stores to see what they prefer to do. And I was kind of surprised by these by these results because most of my outreach to them was either at a trade show are I had a couple of sales reps that we're working, but my own personal outreach was via email, so I emailed one hundred store owners and I said, I'm doing the survey love your feedback, it'll help me, teo, teach my students and my audience how to pitch you, and I'd be more than happy to share your share my results with you, and I ask them a whole bunch of questions, but one of the questions was, how do you prefer to be pitched? And I was really surprised because I was expecting for everyone to say email and it was only about fifty percent of them that's had email and the rest were split up between I'd love a postcard, which, again, I was really shocked with because who really thus postcards anymore, but store owners love that, and a lot of them said I would love a phone call and then to set up an appointment and if I'm interested, you can come into my store so it's really does like you were saying, you have to know their store owner and what they're doing and what they prefer because only half of them said that they prefer to be pitched on ly by email, but the other half they wanted phone call, they wanted a person or in person meeting, they wanted a postcard so it's just all really depends. But I would say what? The price is a little different because ninety nine percent of them one the email but with store owners it's a little different? Yeah, and also it's really great to and what's important is is once you have your client base, talk to them. How do you like me to continue keeping you updated on on new product and they're going to tell you yes, so exact learning from them. Absolutely great. Yeah, well, we are coming to the end of this segment I know we mentioned earlier, but for our final segment of the day today we do have a special guest. So, andrea, why don't you remind us who is going to be joining us in the next segment? Sure. So I'm so excited to have corbett bar, who is a really successful blogger. He started a couple of blog's and now he runs a really successful one called think traffic dot net and he's going to be here because he has a lot of experience with using his blawg to establish himself as an expert in his industry. So we're both going to be here. I'll be asking him a couple of questions about how he got started. What are some of the things that he recommends if you're looking to start a block and then robin is actually going to be joining us as well because she and her partner, tracy they also have a really successful blogged where they used the blawg to provide value but also to establish themselves as jewelry marketing experts in the industry. So we're going to be talking about that, and I'm going to be interviewing both of them for about fifteen minutes each, and then I'm going to talk a little bit more about if you do want to start a block, which I highly recommend water. The ten things you should have on your blogged if you want to use your block to get yourself out there, to become an expert, and to get publicity opportunities from itself, will do all of that when we come back. Great now sounds exciting. Looking forward to that, and before we wrap up the signal, I do want to share a few more comments from the chat room. So in the chat room earlier, chiluba, batman said, such great advice. I love that name, by the way, such great advice. I'm constantly starting my e mails with I'm just, and I really need to cut it out. Thanks for that, you know. And mary, one says, absolutely loved the video pitch idea, and I agree that it would be a great idea for my product versus sending an expensive sample up front.