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Resources to Connect with Journalists

Another way that you can get their email address is to check their masthead, so sometimes it has the email format right then and there, not every magazine has it, but some will say if you need to reach someone at our office, please use the masthead and use this email format, and they'll give you the email format right there. So takes all the guesswork out of you doing it, and they make it so easy for you. Now again, not every magazine has it, which is why I'm sharing with you so many other ways that you guys can get it one other way. That's. One of my favorites is to search online so you can search for the magazine name so let's, say, cosmo magazine, an email address, and sometimes it will tell you some of the email address is at cosmo magazine. And if you know the person's name, and if we see that all of the email formats are the same, then you can technically put two and two together again and come up with your own email address and email them that way. So super easy have to deal a l...

ittle bit of detective work here, um, but if you want to save money and build it yourself, the internet is really awesome for that. So now let's talk about another source that I really love on it's called media bistro and they talk a lot more it's a resource that's more for writers or people that are looking to get their articles published in magazines. So they have a lot of advice about how if you are a writer or an article writer how you can actually get your product or your articles featured in their magazine so it's full length articles that are written by you or you could actually get paid to write those articles so they have a ton of great tips and a ton of great advice but what I love about them and how would relate to us and our course today is that if you visit this specific site it's media bistro that com slash mastheads that html they give you the mastheads for all the top fifty magazines so it doesn't have some of the smaller regional ones. But if your dream is to get in top magazines, this is a great resource and they not only give you pitching tips but they also give you the email address for mad at some of these magazines. Now I do have to say some off this you can view for free and some of it you have to pay but I think it's really inexpensive I think the last time I checked there was maybe like fifty dollars a year or something like that just to access this and they tell you when it was last updated so it's a great way again teo save time but pay a little bit of money but you can imagine the amount of time you guys would save if you were just going care and I've personally use this it works really well and once you're there just go around their sight to they provide a lot of pitching tips and things that magazine editors are looking for things you should stay away from so I'm a huge fan of their resource another great resource that the question came from is to use linked and so almost every editor every journalist and every blogger has a profile on lengthen I think all of us here right do you guys all have linked in profiles yet so everyone's nodding their heads yes I'm sure everyone out there on the internet has linked in profiles to so this is a great way to connect with the journalists but outside of that e I love to use lengthen to find sales rubs and to connect with store owners and maybe marketing or affiliate partners but for our purposes today you khun definitely use it to connect with journalists and sometimes if you request them as a connection and they accept then it shows you what their email addresses their professional email address so you can get their email address from there sometimes if they don't um, you couldn't even directly pitch them on lincoln. I wouldn't recommend it as your main strategy, but sometimes that say they just wrote a great article that you absolutely love. Maybe what you could do is sure the article arlington with your audience than email the person that wrote it, or the editor or the blogger and say, hey, I just shared your article, I love it so much it's relevant to me because x y z reason I'd love to connect with you if you're ever looking for this type of content or for this type of product, would you consider mine so it's ah, more personal way to do it, even though lincoln is not necessarily ask person less email, but if you can bring in a personal touch where you've already familiar with their content, you love it for a specific reason, and you couldn't let them know that than lengthen is a great way to do that, and I've had people connect with me that way, too. I know robin. When tracy and I first started working together, it was actually through twitter and she tweeted some of my stuff and I was like, who is this person, you know, because she kept on tweeting, so I I went to check it out and I was like, oh, they're doing a lot of what I'm doing maybe there's some things there or we could work together and before I knew what we you know, we're having a phone call and talk about being affiliate partners and we've crossed promoted all of our products all because of twitter and because she tweeted something of mine on twitter and lengthen is pretty much works the same way and some journalists prefer lengthen some prefer twitter I know more of the business journalists arm or on lincoln that on twitter and I even personally this is a crazy story, but one of my other goals was to get featured an entrepreneur magazine, so I read an article and it was at the time that I was launching my pinterest scores, so I wrote an article on how to use pinterest and then I saw that entrepreneur magazine had an article on pinterest and there were two things in the article that I didn't agree with so and that were actually not correct, so I thought, should I approach the editor and let her know that this you know, this resource that they shared is not correct? Well that blacklist me because I'm telling her something that she's you know, that the magazine is not doing correctly, so I decided to reach out politely and she always has her twitter handle all over the magazine and she says contact man twitter so I know for her she loves twitter she uses it all the time so I decided to take a chance and email her direct or contact her directly on twitter and say hey I loved your article on pinterest but there is another resource that you can do this with not the only because they were saying that in the article there's only this one place where you can do this and I said there's another resource that would be really great for you so she rolled back to me right away she said oh my god I didn't know that thanks so much for letting me know and then she sent me an email she somehow got my email address and she said thanks so much for reaching out to me on twitter would you be interested in writing an article for us on pinterest so I said sure why not and now that never happened you know for some reason they pinterest was old news by then so they decided not to do it but again it was such a great away and now she follows me on twitter and every time I put something out it shows up in her feed and it's just again an indirect way where you never know what's gonna happen from a connection you make with someone and I think connections here connections the key word here because this is not necessarily about you just pushing out the product and saying right about them, but it's about connecting with a person that's, a human being who has a job, and you're helping to make their jobs easier by providing value so that's how this all fits into the whole publicity picture, and I think with your business as well, because it's all about providing value to your own customers and your own audience as well, and some of the chat rooms to see if they will get some of their experiences with linked in twitter, etcetera, we don't get many responses that some people are saying they found linked into very complex, very frustrating somebody else that, she said it was very rigid. I've got mixed experiences. I've actually recently joined it, and many people told me it's completely wrong to contact someone you don't know now I don't see that would be relevant. I think if you are trying to build a network, they be welcoming you if you have to think what's what's your real advice on this? Yeah, I'm a huge fan of if you want to connect with someone. Social media should be your first place where you're connecting with them, whether you're following them on facebook or twitter or asking them to connect with the on langton I think lincoln is all about connection and growing your circle, and I think there's nothing wrong with just request him them as requesting them as a connection on a link tonight, so that way you can have direct access to them. But I do think I was saying before there's a huge difference between requests and requesting them to be a connection arlington and e mailing them and saying, I have a product, please write about it as opposed to I just read your article brilliant, because x y z reason I love it, I learned so much from it if you ever are in need of the same topic or some research on this other topic, I know you also write about this other thing, then I'd love to connect so there's two ways you can approach it one is about you pushing out your products or services on them, and another one is about you providing value. So if you're pitching yourself as I'd love to be a resource for you, if you ever write on this topic again, that's totally different. Then saying, please write about my company or feature meat on your blog's so yeah, I love twitter because I think people are there to connect and you request connections, right? That's what he'd do on twitter I mean on linked in so it's totally fine to do that, so don't be afraid to use lengthen to really couldn't even if it's somebody you don't know because you have to grow your network some somehow right? We all started without having connections or most of us dead, and you have to build your connection somehow, and social media is a great tool for letting you build those connections connect with people and again, it's not about pushing your products onto them, it's about providing value and having connections with people. I think that's really great advice the way andress phrased it there, I think, makes perfect sense because some of our chat rooms are saying, well, if you try to contact someone you don't know and they like you, they ignore you that you could be flagged a spam, but if you are approaching it with the right tone and the right way, then you they think they're going to respond exactly yes, yeah, and it's all about the approach yeah, exactly it's all about the approach, and I know personally if someone approaches me and says I love what you're doing or even the email that I was sharing yesterday with I saw your soaps in the magazine I love what you're up tio I checked out your web site I'm definitely gonna not going to take that as someone who spamming me and someone who just want something from me I'm going to take it as someone who's interested and something that I have to say or something that I've shared and I think editors are are the same way I mean in some way you know I'm the media because I write about entrepreneurs all the time and I'm totally not thrown off when someone shows interest and what I've done and it really is a two way street it's not all about what can I get from you but it's about what can I give you first and then if you get something from a great if not that's great too because you're still providing value I'm giving something and it really is about the relationship that you're trying to build there so value on relationships I think are two things that you constantly have to be thinking about as you're doing your your publicity efforts yes robin did you have a question and it's going to say doing the research on these editors is great too because you never know what kind of connection you do have we have one of our jewelry designers was having a meeting with a buyer and this could pertain to an editor to, but she found out by going and doing a little research on this person, that they both went to the same college and they graduated the different years. But it was a conversation that they could have when they met that would actually it makes it a lot easier to yeah, it does. And that's again, such a I'm so happy you mentioned that because just going to the same school or even growing up in the same town, you already have a connection with that person. So if you find out that they want to a certain college, you can bring that up when you reach out to them and you could say, you know, hey, I went to this college too. I see that you want their tio, you know, what year were you there? Maybe we ran into each other at some point, and you could sort of start the conversation on dad foot instead of right about my products and here's, why I have this amazing product. So, yeah, lincoln is amazing for that. And you could even find companies that maybe you both worked for or work that or maybe that you're both somehow involved in or family member works there say that the more things in common that you confined with them the better and the easier it's going to be when you actually reaching out yeah like a friend you don't know you have yet exactly and that's why I love social media so much because it really helps you to expand your network to get out there but also to get to know what other people are doing and to get to know them a little bit better then you would just from you know, from an email that you're sending out so just take full advantage of that because people are sharing all of that information because they wanted to be known and they want you to know that they went to that college or that they worked at this company otherwise they wouldn't be sharing it on there yeah, so take advantage of that in a good way not not in a bad yeah so I think we talked a little bit about twitter but it's another one of my favorites I think a lot of journalists especially for the consumer magazines they're all on twitter and you confined their twitter addresses if you go to their their own website for the magazine's website sometimes the list their tutor profiles so you can just go ahead and follow them and you can start out with just retweeting something that they did or leaving a short comment or saying I loved your article on or loved your research on this other thing and it doesn't have to be crazy I know then and I actually I think we first connected on twitter like you yeah yeah so it's he's here now because he reached out to me on twitter so there's so much power to social media if you could use it the right way so just considered twitter as well a not just pitching via email but starting a connection on twitter and then following up with a pitch via email eso another great thing they that you guys could do is you can research the publisher so if it's a really large magazine aa lot of times and there's only really a few publishing companies left now and usually what happens is they oversee a lot of different magazines and all of their email addresses are exactly the same. So for example, time bank publishes people, sports illustrated, time in style and fifteen other magazines. Probably so if you have the email address for the email address format for in style and you know that time is also published by the same company, chances are that they're probably going to have the same email formats as well. And if you google email published are our magazine publishers or companies that publish magazines, you'll get a list of all of them and which magazine they specifically specifically published for them so you couldn't really just get their email addresses there now if you're working with bloggers this is super easy because they always have their contact information up there so there's no mystery and how you can get in contact with them they either have their email addresses spelled out for you right there or they have a contact form that usually goes the wreck please write to them and if there is nothing like that there which I haven't seen too many bloggers that don't have any way to get in touch with them if you can try social media just try to find them on twitter or on facebook and see if you can find some information there and if you are trying to work with an online website like maybe about dot com I know they publish a lot of articles or yahoo small business or things like that go ahead and visit their site for more information and a lot of times they'll obviously tell you who wrote the article but the person who wrote the article also has their social media profiles on there so you can connect with them that way and then you can also maybe google them and see if they have another site where maybe it's a professional email address or or something like that so another great way to get their email addresses so many of these sites have it I know in my sight I have my email address listed right there I have a contact form anyone who wants to get in touch with me, my email address is there because I want people to reach out, you know, and I don't want to make it hard for them to find my contact information, so oh, I'm sure a lot of bloggers and people and editors feel the same way a lot of times, too. Now, if you are trying to get into a newspaper, this is super easy because almost every single newspaper, if you visit their website, they're gonna have something that looks like this where this is from the new york times, actually, and I just put this up a couple of days ago, but right here it tells you who wrote the article, and if you click on it, it gives you this extra information here, and you couldn't go here and say, send an email to elaine and she's going to get an email. Now it doesn't it's not going to tell you her actual email address on here, but you can reach out directly to her through here and whether this goes directly to her email address or it goes to the newspaper first and then gets filtered onto her directly, then she wants to be contacted, which is why all of this information is on here, so don't be afraid to think outside of the box if you can find information when you're googling, just go to the magazine or the newspaper's web site on a lifetime's, you'll find all of their profiles there as well, and if you're reaching out to a tv producer when we're going to talk a little bit about tv tomorrow, but one great way to find it is to just go to the show's web site and what happens aa lot of times, producers are gonna have their own block it's going to tell you what their name is, what they do there and what they're into at that point, or sometimes they share stories about how show went and you can take all of that information, read their blogged and actually, when you reach out to them, you could mention maybe something you've read on their block so you can say something like, I just saw you shared a story about your experience working with this person. I can totally relate to that and sort of have your segway in that way, as opposed to just saying right about my products, please s o aa lot of tv producers, they have their own blawg, they have their social media profiles there sometimes, it even says, click here to contact me. And you can contact them directly so you might again you might not get their email address but you will be able to contact them directly through that site yes, I do tv shows well, they have kind of a media calendar to or should you just kind of go off of the general media calendar that's like okay this time of year they're talking gift guides and come february it's valentine's day like more of the obvious is you're always to find that are I think they have both so they definitely like all of those things that we're talking about with magazines definitely apply to tv as well, but the other thing about tv is that if you go to the show's web site aa lot of times they'll say things like we're looking for and there tell you a couple of topics I know on the oprah show on I don't know I can't remember if I if I put this in a slight or not, but you can go there or when the oprah show used to be you can go there and it tells you what kind of people they're looking for and you could just put yourself for that show directly through their sites, so if let's say they are looking for they're doing the show for moms or something like that and they're looking for moms, they want an audience that's full of moms right they're going to tell you that that's what they're looking for so if you have baby items that say maybe you're not a mom and you don't want to be in the audience, but when you're pitching, you can say, you know, I saw you're working on a show for moms do you ever do any product giveaways or something like that? I have a product that I think moms would love that would be perfect for this particular show, and I actually did that with the tyra banks show and I was able to get on her show where my t shirt while is on the show and just from their website. So there again think creatively they provide so much information nowadays on their websites that you've really couldn't get that calendar, or at least ah, few shows that they're working on in the near future because I don't think they go six months out first, you know, on their website, but a couple of months out a couple of shows out you'll be able to find a lot of that information there, and if you don't find it there, you can definitely just pitch according to the main editorial calendars that I was sharing with magazine and I know the way I was able to get on the bonnie hunt show, which were she wore my t shirts and her guests were my t shirts I pitched it as a great product for earth day because it was my shirts are made out of bamboo and I thought outside of the box and I reached out to a producer and I said, hey, I'm not sure what you're working on because I really had I didn't know at that time what they were working on, and I was honest said, I'm not sure what you working on for the next couple of weeks in april, but I know earth month is right around the corner and your readers have an interest in getting products or finding more equal friendly products. And if you think this is a good fit, I'd love to do on audience giveaway and give away my bamboo t shirts, which are organic or made of equal friending materials for your birthday show during the month of april and the producer wrote back and he said, what a brilliant idea! I love this let's do it, and I ended up being on their show, them wearing my t shirts. You know, all of the staff are in my t shirts, and it was just a lot of sales from that and just the fun experience to to work with someone who's doing the show and to actually watch it and be like that's my t shirt, you know? So so again you just if you sometimes you don't know, but you know there's a certain type of event going on or a month or something like that, just try and put yourself for that and the same goes for morning shows. I know if you're going to watch the morning shows, all of them are going to be talking about equal friendly products during april to celebrate earth day and sometimes it's just that day when it's earth day, sometimes they deal hole earth day, month and every day they have something that's equal friendly, but even now with the holidays, and I don't think it's too late to be pitching tv shows for holidays now, because that's what they're working on right now so if you have a product that would make a great gift, maybe for you ana, it would be a great gift for kids. I'm sure your local show is going to be doing a story on dad that today show is going to be doing a story on that. All of the shows are going to be talking about gif ts yeah, way I got like six models and some of their parents for the shiloh and for halloween we did how our garments can be used to create halloween costumes, that then you can reuse the actual garment so we went on that little local like today show version and it was really fun. Oh, how cool. That's. Great. Yeah, awesome. Yeah. So, just if you have a product that would fit in any sort of theme, just go ahead and pitch it. And if you saw the editorial lead time yesterday, tv shows it's not too late to be pitching them for that. So, sandra, just phrase something brilliantly in a way that's almost like a switcheroo. You may be the first person who's pitched this idea to produce you never thought of doing it. So once you get your proud of them as well, you've given them a new idea, and they're more likely to keep coming back to you then with other things in the future. That that's a great suggestion. Yes, exactly. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so think outside the box and all of these ideas. A lot of times you really can get from your customers if you're just listening to them because they're going toe put things in a perspective that you might have might not have overthought before. So just listen beyond the lookout for feedback, whether it's, positive or negative. So I do want to leave you guys with one thing to keep in mind from this session today, is that the larger your list? The more chances you have of getting covered now I'm not saying to do what I did and email five thousand people at the same time because I was just really excited to get out there and I got access to this media database but if you do have you know if you reach out to onley ten editors or ten bloggers you might get into just one or two if you reach out to fifty you might get into five or six so look at what are your goals how many publications do you want to be in how many guests post do you want to write and then sort of work your way up from there and if you want to be in ten different things and you're only reaching out to ten different people you're probably not going to be in ten different outfits so you might have to reach out to one hundred off them or so on die don't have a percentage to tell you where one percent of people will respond or ten percent it really it really depends all across the board but I would say on average it something like five percent so at least from my experience so if you want to be in one magazine you're gonna have to do the math and figure out how many you need to contact and it might be higher or lower for you it could be forty percent who knows hopefully but you'll see that once you start reaching out to see what kind of response we're getting and if you do have a big list just make sure that it's relevant so even if you're pitching one hundred editors because you want to get in five different magazines if those hundred editors are not relevant to what you're doing, you're probably not going to get covered so it has to be a good quantity but it also has to be a good quality of a list that's relevant to you as well and with that in mind you guys I think you know what's his you for when you start pitching your next products or stories yeah jotting down names of magazines and tv is great no wonder is going to cover this a lot later on but of course it's the other way around the editor it's kind of in charge of the program but each segment has its own producer, which is, you know, slightly the opposite way over the way print media works but it's so about your individual producer maybe doing something very specific on a topic that's very relevant to your your business the course andrew's been becoming a lot about tv later on today, so when we come back this is one of my favorite things because this is where I've actually emailed editors and I said I'm doing the course for creative live on publicity if you had to get out one message to people and entrepreneurs that are pitching you, why would you tell them so in the next section, we're going to talk about exactly what the editors have said, and these are some editors at really top magazines, somewhat our local magazines. But I think if one editors feeling this way, a lot of other ones are going to be feeling the same way, too. So we're going to talk a little bit about what they want from you guys when you're pitching them. So we'll do that when we come back. Well, we're definitely looking forward to that, andre. We also have a guest coming on, not in the next section, but in the last section of today, and perhaps you'd like to just give a little introduction about how, what, what he's going to contribute and give him a little intro to our own views. Sure, great. So I know we talked a lot about magazines, but one, and this is great for entrepreneurs that have a product. But if you have a service based business it's really important to have a block so corbett bar who runs think traffic that net which is a great web site that has a ton of strategies on how you can get more traffic to your site how you can get more traffic to your block he's going to talk about the importance of having your own blogged especially if you are a service based entrepreneur to establish yourself as an expert so he'll be here I'll be asking him some questions robin is going to be answering some questions as well there because she has her own personal block as well and we talked about magazines but blog's and having an online presence is a great way to get yourself out there and be an expert I have a block teo and it it's brought me so many opportunities that I would have never had if I didn't have one so we're going toe get into blogging focus a little bit more on entrepreneurs that have a service and corbett has done so many great things he's had successful companies, he has a successful blawg and he'll be here to answer some questions for us. Well, we're definitely looking for to that say that's in the last segment today but we're going to coming back rate all right after a forty five minute break thank you to everybody and who's watching it today for one of you wonderful comments carla keino is saying I so love the andrey is not selling absolutists. She's, a great provider of information, she advocates putting in the work, which is great and so realistic. This is also great for those who have so sorry. This is also great for those with services for article writing. I'm angela about er, who joined us on twitter saying she's, currently watching a weapon or at the moment to help me, because I'm clueless about public. So great, welcome, everybody, who's, just learning this from some of the very basics.