Lessons

Lesson Info

Why You Need Publicity

I want to move to talk a little bit more about how you might be feeling about publicity. So how many times have you thought, you know, I'm too small to be featured in magazines anyone has thought that? Sure, oh, or maybe I just don't know how to do it, and I don't know what to say. I know I've thought that same exact thing when I would think about writing an email and then I would think, well, what am I going to say? How am I going to capture their attention? Um, you might also have been thinking, you know, I'm afraid that they'll sell that they'll say no or that I'm not going to get an answer and our ego a lot of times gets in the way and it's like, you know, I'd rather not deal with rejection, then put myself out there, so I'm just putting all these out there because I have felt these and I still do feel these at some point or another and another thing that you might be thinking or I know a lot of other people are thinking too is I just don't have the budget to hire publicist I know ...

pr firms are quite expensive, they can range and price anywhere from one thousand dollars to ten thousand dollars a month, depending on what they're doing for you so it really can get expensive to hire publicist, so if you feel like I don't know how to do it on my own and I don't have the money to hire publicists, then again, you're sort of stuck and not sure what to do or this one. I definitely couldn't relate tio I'm shy, and I can't imagine being on tv or speaking in front of people I know I feel that all the time, and despite that, I'm standing here standing here today, talking in front of you. So again, if I could do with you guys khun duet tio and a few more thoughts that you might have that I wanted to share with you is I don't have any connections and you need to know people in this business. I know publicists, a lot of them have already established connections with editors and magazines and bloggers, and they could just send an email and say, hey, I have a new client, you know, do you want samples of the products? And before you know they're going to be featured in magazines, on dh, as entrepreneurs that are just starting out, we just don't have those connections, so I know you're probably feeling that as well. And lastly, this one as I hear all the time, whether it's about publicity or a new social media network but it's, I don't have time to take on anything else. I'm already feeling overwhelmed with everything else that I have to do in my business, right there's already so much on our plate just taking on something new could really seem overwhelming, and lastly, I've tried it before and it hasn't worked. I know when I first launched my t shirt business, my dream was to get an oprah magazine, so I found out with the fashion editor was that oprah and I e mailed I think it was a woman at the time and I never heard back from her, so I just thought, ok, she probably got my email and she's not interested, and they're probably never going to be interested, so I've tried it before that hasn't worked what's the point and try and get again, right? So I don't want to get you guys all down, but I know these are all fears and doubts and things that all of us probably have thought at one time or another, but I wanted tio share with you that yes, all of those things might be true for some of you might not be true for some of you, but if you have a story and you all do have stories because it's, the reason he started your businesses, you can get publicity, and this whole course today and over the next two days is all about what's your story why's an important, and how can you make make that story appealing to the media so that they're interested enough inviting about you and your products? So is that making sense with everyone? Right? I'm sure everyone has felt those things at one time or another it's interesting, andrea, some people not chat rooms, saying that when they think of pr, they think of things like spin and spin doctors and all the rest, but there is very much a distinction, isn't that, yes, there is definitely, yes, and I'll be talking about all of that over the next few days, so, yeah, definitely all right, so let's talk a little bit about marketing versus advertising versus publicity, because they're sort of all in the same gray area, but I wanted to go a little bit over what, exactly, is marketing what's advertising and what's publicity, which is what we're going to be talking about today? So marketing is all about the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research or advertising, so marketing is basically everything that your business does to get out there in front of your customers whether it's you speaking at an event or you're writing a block post or you doing a trade show? Maybe if you have a product based business even buying advertising in the magazine, all of those things that you're doing to get out there in front of your customers is in under the umbrella of marketing now advertising is a part of that and it's ah much smaller segment just like publicity and basically what advertising does is that you pay to be featured in a magazine so you take out an ad whether you do it for a month or longer period and you pay them a certain amount of money based on what they charge and then you design an ad or your designer sets up an ad and you send it to the magazine and they publish it in their magazine or this could also be on tv or on radio on a different web site and I'm sure a lot of you have tried advertising I'm actually curious disease has anyone bought an ad anywhere before? Hey dan, you have robbed. Yeah, so and I've done ads teo the thing about ads is that you have to pay for them so right if you're already starting out with a small budget actually having to pay for something that might or might not work can can get expensive so that's our publicity comes in so publicity's the notice or attention given to someone or something by the media by the great thing about publicity is that it's free you don't actually have to pay for it it's part of the magazine's editorial features if you want to be in a magazine and it's completely free, the only thing you might have to invest in is actually sending out samples and products for them to test or to try or to photograph if you have an online course, they might ask you to give them access to the online course so they can review it so there is a cost but it's just the cost of your product you don't have to pay anything else on top of that. So this is the really great thing that I love about publicity is that you can be in a magazine with two million readers right alongside some of the other top brands that have millions of dollars to spend on advertising so itself we all couldn't really appreciate things that are free, right? Okay, great. So there are a couple of different ways you can get publicity, you could get offline publicity and that includes magazines and newspapers whether you're writing an article for a magazine or newspaper or they're quoting you as an expert or they're revealing your products or services there's also radio and tv and I've been on both radio and tv, and they're completely different from being in a magazine. The results could be different as well. There's also events and conferences, so if you are let's, say, doing tech and teaching people how to fix their computers, maybe you might be speaking out of relevant conference where your audience is hanging out and or there they're there to learn from you so that's another type of publicity and then there's celebrity endorsements as well. So sometimes you might see celebrities in the celebrity magazines using certain products or talking about certain services are going to certain restaurants. Some of those they get paid to do that, and the best ones are the ones that were they don't get paid to do it s o there behind your brand, even though you haven't paid them to do it, so it could be either that they're in your neighborhood and you have a restaurant and they love it or you couldn't send them something. For example, with your baby stuff, you can just send them someone's ease or t shirts and their kids wear it, and before you know it, it's going to be featured in the magazine and that's a really great way to get publicity as well, so we're going to be covering all of those over the next three days. And then we're also going to talk about online publicity eso those are things like blog's and new sites. How do you get featured on yahoo dot com? Or I don't know dailycandy dot com for those of you who might have products that would be relevant to them, and then there's also podcasts and interviews on dh there's a ton of people now podcasting is really huge everyone's talking about it as the next big thing. So how do you get yourself on a podcast and be interviewed by whether it's, an influential blogger or a really big website and that can definitely lead tio increasing sales and more traffic to your website and more influence that you have? And then lastly, there's, tele summits and webinars and those are basically places where, again, they're all done online, where you are either in front of a gnawed eo or, ah, video and people interview you and talk about you, and you can share your expertise as also all of these are ways that you can get publicity online. So now let's, talk about why you need publicity. I think I've convinced you guys that you need it, but I want to talk a little bit more about this specifics behind why you actually needed and how we can help your brand, so the interesting thing is that publicity itself can lead to even more publicity if a magazine editor comes to your site and they see that your products or services have been featured and aa lot of other sites they're more likely to feature you as all now there are some places that really only want a feature brand new things on things that are new to the market I know with wedding photography or things like that they really want to be the only one who is writing about those products or the the wedding photographer or the wedding services but the majority of them if you already have press they're more likely to mention you as well and this is the best one is that it can definitely increase your sales so when you get your products mentioned in a huge magazine or when you're on tv a lot of people are going to come to your web site because they love what they've seen in those magazines so they're going to buy your products this happens to me every single time I know my product this featured in a top magazine or on tv somewhere or the exposure is huge traffic to my website skyrockets people are buying more stuff and ultimately obviously that's why we all want publicity and it could not publish that it can also increase your influence so if you are trying to establish yourself as an expert in your industry if you have a lot of different maybe events you've spoken at or conferences you've done or podcast you've been interviewed on it couldn't really contribute to increasing your influence and people that are willing to write about you already know that you're an expert because you've already been featured and so many other places, and it also levels the playing field. So, as I was saying before, if you are featured in a national magazine along other really big brands, you sort of are on the same feel or are in the same level with them at that point, because there they are, and there you are, too, um, it's just a great way to really catapult your business and be seen as a really important and influential brand a couple of other reasons it could increase your conversion rates, so if you have a website and where you're selling something and people see that you have reviews from magazine or they see that you've been on tv or your products have been featured in something else that's a really great way to get social proof, and what social proof does is that it really helps tio to gain trust from your customers who are coming to their website because it's so different when you're going on a site that when you go to a store, when you can talk to someone in person so when someone comes to your website, they really have nothing else to go on except for all of the testimonials that are there, all of the press mentions that are there onda information that you provide, so if they see that magazines are writing about it or you've been featured, they're more likely to trust you right away, and that trust leads to people buying more things from you and your conversion rates increasing. It could also increase traffic to your site, so I know I've talked about this before, but any time you get a big publicity mention and even smaller ones people are curious to find out more. They're going toe google you or type in your your girl, and you're going to get a lot more traffic as well, and it can also increase your social media following. So I know a lot of times when I do a review with a blogger or I do a giveaway, especially a blogger has a huge audience people come to my say they automatically sign up for my newsletter they follow me on twitter, follow me on facebook and before I know it you know I have four hundred fans over the weekend on it's, all from being interviewed or being mentioned on an influential blogger. So this is another sort of side effect of getting publicity is that your newsletter could increase your twitter following in your facebook and all of your other social media following as well? And lastly, it's really an important tool and your success? Imagine what would happen for your business if let's say every month your business was featured in a magazine or you were doing a guest blogger appearing on other influential blog's right that's a studies theme of stream of traffic, lots of people always known about you and having you in their mind so they can come visit our website and find out more information. So I would say, out of all of the things that I've done in my business, publicity has been one of the most important ones and that's why I'm so passionate about it because I really think it can I mean, I've seen it, it can really increase your sales, it can establish your brand, or it could just help to establish you as an expert if you have a service based business. So I think I've convinced you guys that you need publicity, right? Yeah. Okay. All right. So let's, talk a little bit about some examples of publicity, so here are a couple of different ways that you can imagine eso a short story about you on the local news, for example, that a screenshot he saw before me being on the local news that was publicity, and I wasn't my local news because it was in rhode island, but it was still a great way was ah story all about my t shirts. So what happened with that is that I knew that it's earth day it was in april, and a lot of tv stations talk about equal friendly products, and they want to share equal products with their audience, so my t shirts are made out of organic cotton and bamboo, so I thought, well, it that probably would be a great food. They're looking for products. I have a product, let me go ahead and email them and see if they would be interested. So it really was just me sending an email and saying, hey, you probably birthday's coming up, you're probably going to be writing about or wanting to feature product. There are equal, friendly, I have a bamboo line off t shirts, would you be interesting and featuring it? And they said, sure, why don't you come on up to rhode island and we'll have you on for our morning segment? So before I knew what I was taking the train to rhode island and appearing on their morning news and again a ton of sales that day, just for me being on the morning news and it was my first time doing it I really had no idea what to expect, but I just sort of went in there and she made it super easy, which was asking me a bunch of questions and again a lot of pressure but totally worth it and now the next time I do a tv appearance, I'm obviously going to be a lot more prepared for it so just know that sometimes it's just taking the first step and knowing that you can do it and that's going to lead to other things down the line. Yes, the content was really good in the email that how did you get them to open it? Because that's that tends to be a little tricky yeah that's such a good question and I'm going to talk about email subject lines and how to get people to open it, but for this one, I was actually really straightforward and I said, um, a great product for your upcoming earth day show, so it was sort of I didn't tell them what the product was, you know, I didn't tell them a new organic company launches on organic t shirt line I just said a great product for your upcoming show and if they're working on that show, which I knew they were because that's when they were you know the timeline was done she was like, ok great product let me see if it's something I could include so on and we're going to talk about subject lines and what to write about um and I'll give you a really specific examples over the next few days but yeah that's a great question and I think so much of getting featured is getting them to open your email because I know way back three years ago when the internet wasn't so and I'm just getting about three years ago but the way it used to work you know you used to call up an editor or a journalist and touched them your story by phone and sometimes they would actually pick up their phone but now they never pick up their phone unless it's something that you know they're expecting and or it's someone that they know so if you're working with a pr firm and they already have a relationship with that publicist they're probably likely going to be picking up the phone call but all of the publicity that I've done has been doing get via email just sending out an email I did end up working with the pr firm one time when I first launched my t shirt business and it's one of the things that I talk about as a mistake but looking back at it really wasn't a mistake even though it was really expensive but what I learned is I learned what they do and how they do it and that sort of helped me to be like, ok, they could do that and you know, this is the process I can do it too so I didn't get many mentions on the media from that but it really helped me teo figure out that you know I could do this to and I could do it on my own and then I started learning how to do it so a mistake but really alert more like a learning experience and a good investment and a lot of ways um so thanks so much for that question robyn yeah so another type of publicity mentioned it could be a block post that you wrote for another block so for example with design sponge which is ah design block that I'm sure some of you are familiar with it's kind of hard to get featured on to have your products actually featured on there so what I ended up doing is that I email them and I said they have ah section called these ladies where they teach women how to be business owners and different things that you could d'oh so I emailed them and I said, hey, I have a great article idea from you for you I'd love to talk about how your readers can get affiliate partners for their products and services so I pitched my article they really like the idea they hadn't really had anything about affiliate marketing in there before I'm sorry, that of writing a block post the entire thing, I wrote it for them, they just put it up on the site on again, puns of new traffic to my site, lots of sales and lots of people signing up for my newsletter and follow me on social media just because I thought outside the box and I said, ok, how can I help them? What types of articles have they not written about before? And what what am I suddenly are familiar with? And what do I love to dio and how can I be of value to them? So I'm going to be talking a lot about being a value, and I have, you know, a lot of people think when they think about publicity, they think about it's me pitching my products, and I kind of don't like the word pitching, even though that's what we're doing. But in your pitch, I want you to always be thinking about what kind of value can I provide and the more valuable you are to the editor or to the blogger, the more likely you are going to get featured because there's you're providing you're helping them to do their job easier, and you're giving them resource is so think about being a value, as opposed to thinking about pitching or selling or marketing. And that should be with everything in your business. I think not just publicity, whether it's you posting something on facebook or, you know, reaching out to a store that you want to sell your products to you and lastly, another example of publicity is a speaking gig at an event. So last year I spoke at a conference called craft cation on, and it was a conference for crafters and artists on dh. There were teeth. They were learning how to do certain things, but also how tio run their business. So because that's my audience, I work a lot with people that sell on at sea and that hand make their own products. It was a great opportunity for me to not only meet them, but also to get myself in front of them so they could know by my products and services and how I can help them. So there are two ways to approach publicity. You or your products can be the content on dh that's things like you, your products being featured in the magazine or you can actually create the content like I was talking about it, actually either speaking or providing a guest block post for for the block so here are a couple of more example, so be, the content could include having your products reviewed in a magazine and obviously this one's a lot easier because the only work you have to do is you have to send out the email and possibly send out the product they might be interested in, and you don't actually have to write the content for them, though they're going to be writing it for you. It could also be a celebrity endorsement, so when I had my t shirt line, I decided to reach out to celebrities because it made sense they were t shirts, they could be photographed with my t shirts, they could wear them out in public, and I decided to launch a whole celebrity gifting campaign, and we're going to talk about more more of that on day three, but I reached out to sixty celebrities that I thought would be a good fit for my brand send them my t shirts and them a nice letter with it, and I got I think about five or six back, so that's, the other thing I wanted to put in perspective, not everything you put out there might work or might come back to you, so you probably if you're expecting a response for every single email that you send out. That's probably unrealistic, so you have to sort of think about the more I put out there, the more I'm going to get back, even though not everyone is going to respond. So if you are reaching out to only ten editors, maybe one my respond, but if you're reaching out to two hundred, maybe twenty of them I respond, so just think about, you know, you sort of do have to scale this if you want to constantly have publicity mentions, but again it's all about being relevant and not spamming them and reaching out anyone who works at a magazine just because your chances of being featured might increase because you're reaching out to more people, you do have to be strategic, you do have to be relevant, um, and you have to think about whether or not that's a really good fit for your business. And lastly, another way where you can be the content is a mention on a popular blog's. So for example, when I launched my t shirt o mice, so plein, I decided to do reviews and giveaways with other bloggers right away just so I can get some more traffic again, more social media followers and I send them an email those that were the road back, they requested my products, I send them off, and then I saw the review that they actually wrote about my product, so I didn't again have to write anything. Sometimes this works with service based businesses as well. Sometimes a lot of bloggers were journalists will contact me, and they'll say, hey, I'm working on an article about, I don't know, reducing, overwhelm and your small business can you give me a quote so it's just me coming up with a short quote about how to reduce overwhelming your business? And then they print that along with my name and my website. So again, I don't really have to write the content for it, even though it's it's my quote, but it takes two seconds, right? Because we all know about overwhelm, um, in our businesses, so next time wanted to talk a little bit about creating the content. S o, this is an article that you might write for a magazine, and this is really great for service based entrepreneurs, and it applies more to them that entrepreneurs that have a product because let's say, if you have a baby product, you're probably not going toe email kiwi magazine to write an article for them, right? You're going to email them so that they can feature your product, um, but what I did here is I launched a new course on pinterest and I wanted to have a lot more traffic and people coming to my site and knowing me as a pinterest expert s so that way I had credibility from my course. So what I did is I reached out to a lot of the magazines that were that my target audience would read, which are things like gift shop magazine because they all have products and they all want to be featured in those magazines, and I pitched them and I said, hey, I know pinterest is really hot right now. It's, the fastest growing social media network I'd love tio, I'm sure your readers are thinking about how to use pinterest for their business. I'd love to write an article for you on how to use pinterest for your business and believe it or not, I reached out to about fifty magazines and about ten of them wanted articles on pinterest, so I was busy for a while, but I ended up writing all of these articles on how to use pinterest that appeared in their magazine now aa lot of these magazines also have writers aren't on staff who write other articles, but they also do accept guest articles from time to time, so it's best to think about, you know, one magazines were your audience read and can you provide some value to those magazines again? I'm talking a lot about value because I didn't approach them saying, you know, hey, can you write about me in my business? I approached him and I said, hey, I have a great article that I think your readers would really be interested in it's all about pinterest and they're all wondering how to use it would you like me to write it for you so you can see all of like, making their jobs easier? I'm providing value for them and it's kind of hard to say no to that yeah, yes then yeah, I'm just curious let's say you pitch a whole bunch of magazines and you do get ten back do you have to make each one of those articles unique or can you recycle sort of that same content of the article to all of those magazines? Yeah, that's a great question and you could sort of have the outline of the article be the same for all of the magazines, although I wouldn't recommend sending the same exact article to each magazine, so I know for example gift shop magazine was a little different from independent retailer magazine, which is another one that I pitched teo and I sort of had to do one article about how vendors and people that actually have products can use pinterest and the other one was more for how retail stores could use pinterest but I mean the outline was still pretty much the same I just had to change a couple of things here and there but yeah great question I definitely wouldn't send the same article to ten different magazines because if they all publish it and it's the same article they're going to be really upset so yeah great question so another way that you can create content is to write a guest blogged for another block so this was my example with design sponge and how I pitch them that I could write an article and I've done this over and over and over again on it works every time I my content has been featured I think in more than one hundred guests blog's or more than one hundred blog's by now and it's something that I try to do on a regular basis for launch grow joy again because it's a great way to get that study traffic on dh once you sort of have an idea for what you're going to write you already know the topic you're going you know because you're an expert in it you've done it you you know how to do it you don't have to do a lot of work to create it so I definitely would highly recommend that especially if you have a service based business that you focus a lot on writing content for other blog's, especially blocks that are or where your target market is hanging out and things that they're reading. And lastly, another way to create the content is a speech that you give at a conference so again this can apply to entrepreneurs that have a product, entrepreneurs that have a service and you know your topic so you know what you're going to be talking about? And I have to say the first time I spoke at a conference, it was definitely not an easy thing um and I thought me speaking at a conference in no way you know, I'm shy I don't stand up in front of people and speak, but the truth is that the more you do it, the easier it gets, you know, and I probably wouldn't have been able to do this the first time I spoke, you know, it took some some practice and some working up to it, so if you just start somewhere and you may be like a small conference first, where maybe there's like ten people or or your local business meetings or I'm sure every town has them on and you speak in front of them and you practice, then you can sort of just increase your audience and the more you do it, the easier it's going to get and I think that's true for pretty much everything you do in your business like the first time you're going to send out an email to a publicist is going to be really hard cause you're going to be thinking about all of the things you have to say all of the points you want to make but the more you do it the easier it's going to get and it's the same with guest blogging or working with other bloggers through the your products basically the more you do it the easier it's going to get so I just want you guys to start thinking about all right this has to be part of my weekly strategy or monthly strategy depending on how you run your business and how much time you have but I can't stress how true it is that the more you do it that easier it's going to get so think about providing value and doing it more and it's really going to become second nature you know when I launched my so business um and I launched in july to pitch all of those magazines I already knew what I was doing because I had done it so many times before with my t shirt business but again it took a while to get that going get the confidence to actually approach them and get a system down so is that making sense? How is how is everyone feeling so far you guys really awesome okay are there any questions from we do have a couple of shots being clear so I'd like to hear dorothy's opinion on this because he was saying at the start that you definitely had some challenges with facebook and pinterest and all these other things I mean what andrew's been saying is that made sense to you in terms of how to slim this down on how to approach each one com because she's more been talking about approaching other media that I feel like it hasn't been addressed right now okay yeah so we'll be getting out you will be getting their roles yeah okay so yes we have a couple questions skeeter was asking with this different ways of approach how do you know which approach and editor prefers um yeah we're going to talk a lot about that tomorrow when you're assuming steve's talking about magazines but I want to say most editors prefer to be pitched by email rather than by phone or by just sending out a package with your product and tomorrow we're going toe I'm going to share those quotes with you where I reached out to the editors and I said hey what's your pet peeve what do you prefer oh but overall just to answer his question I know a lot of editors preferred the pitch to be short to be relevant to be to the point and to come via email so it's pretty straightforward you know there's sort of on ly one way to do it if you're taking this approach there you're going to give a lot of information about contact information in the mail, etcetera but says arias says our mx who I believe is in mexico is just asking when you are trying to reach reporters and influential magazines and they don't include their contact information do you have a method for actually finding how to contact them? I do yes, yes on we're going to be talking about that and building your list tomorrow so I'm gonna walk you through you know if you want to reach out to an editor, how do you actually find their contact information and how do you build your list? So when you do want to reach out, you're all ready to go and there's a couple of ways you could do that some are easy some are more difficult some cost money some don't so we're going to talk about all of the pros and cons of all of those different ways to get their email addresses. One more question here on magazine articles and you may get to this as well but snappy gourmet wants to know do you get paid for these articles? I guess when should you be asking for some sort of pay for these or these just strictly to try to generate more traffic to your site when do you know where to draw that line? Yeah, what a great question. And I think the answer is both of those. When I first started out pitching magazines, I did it more for exposure and to increase traffic to my site. But then, after a couple of those magazines appeared, I got contacted by another magazine, and they said, hey, you know, we're in need of three articles we're willing to pay you three thousand dollars. Would you be willing to write these three articles for us so and sort of took a while to get there, but it's it's a combination of both, depending on what it is you're trying to do. I think if you're trying to get your products and your brand out there, it's more about doing it for free. If you're trying to make money from it, like let's say, if you are an expert and writing is your thing, then it would make more sense to focus on making money. But usually that comes after you've written a couple of things and the magazines come to you.