Get Your Business Published in Top Media Outlets

1. Introduction: Hi, and welcome to how to Get your Small Business Published in Top Media Outlet. My name is Jonathan Maxim and I'm going to be your instructor over the next few days and weeks. Together, I'm going to teach you everything you need to know about public relations so that you can get your business published in top media outlets way faster than you think, whether that's Forbes, Ink, Entrepreneur, BuzzFeed, or whatever. I've had my businesses published in all those before. I'm going to show you exactly how. By the end of the course, we'll work up to what your class project is, which is your mini PR plan, so that when you're finished with this course, you can hit the ground running with the strategy and outreach list, even a pitch templates. You can send e-mails over and over and get published and time and time again using the same template and all of the publications on your target list. If you're a small business owner, whether that's an e-commerce store, a bakery shop, or a tech startup, it doesn't matter. We can get you published it and we're going to do it faster than you think. I'll see you inside. 2. Intro to PR: Welcome back, right now we're going to talk about the introduction to public relations. You've probably heard this called PR, media relations, or press on a lot of different occasions. Media and public relations are kindness anonymous and I want to give you an overview of what it's for because, I don't know if you remember back in marketing class or if you took a marketing class in college, but ours was told that media and PR are separate from marketing. They are actually very closely intertwined with marketing. PR is one of your marketing channels, So if you think about marketing strategy is having five channels, social, website, newspaper, PR, and TV, it's one of the channels that feeds into a bigger strategy. However, it can be the only channel and that's okay too. So what is PR? Public Relations is a communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and the public whether that's your customers, whether that's the public audience just from a political perspective. It's about understanding your own agenda as a business, and sharing that out so that others don't misinterpret your business so that your storyline is told authentically from your voice as the founder, as the entrepreneur, as the strategic, media relations director, whatever it is. So it's about controlling the narrative on our business so that it's favorable and so that it drives new business for us. Why do we use PR? Well, what we can expect and not expect from it, is really important. So PR isn't a direct sales driver, it's a storyline tool. So we're building this aura of our brand when we do PR, we're creating an image of who our company is and that's different than saying, "By now 20 percent off," that's called demand generation marketing. In PR we're creating a poll, so in marketing there's push and there's poll. Push is promotions and, "Hey please buy now," and poll is "Hey here is an interesting story, here is a gripping story," and then it draws that person in, and so you're actually pulling them into your business. A pull strategy is generally much preferred in my opinion, but it's not as predictable from a business perspective so a lot of people defer to push strategies, which is why you see flash sales. So be strategic, think with a long-term vision, and think about creating such an attractive business that your customers can't resist but come to you. It's the same way in relationships, you want to be such an attractive partner that your partner comes to you so that you don't have to go explain your value to somebody else, you want them to find you because they recognize how much value you have. Lastly, how PR can transform any business. PR changes people's perceptions, it's the art of the narrative, it's the art of storytelling. So you could be some Joe Schmoe living on your mom's couch and having been there for the last 10 years but if you tell a good storyline is social media, you can completely change people's perception of you. In fact, some of the biggest influencers are still living in their parent's basement, but yet they have a mass amazing followings. It's because their storytelling, their creating a narrative that other people relate to. Even if that narrative is living on your mom's couch, and making it as a video blogger on YouTube. As long as people can relate to it they'll share with you, they'll create reciprocal value, they will follows, will engage with you as long as they can relate. It's not necessarily about presenting a particular image, it's about relating to people, and PR is the act of relating through media outfits. Hope you enjoyed this one and I'm excited to jump to the next, we will see you in the next video. 3. Storytelling: Right now we're going to talk about how to find your, why, how to understand your own story line. It's easy to think that none of us are special, right? When I was starting my first business I didn't really have anything crazy about me. I was just this standard college kid who worked his way to college and came up with an app idea. An app idea was novel, but there wasn't really much of a story behind it. It was just cool idea that came to me one day, rewarded people for working out. But as I learned over the next few years and after I got featured in Forbes, ABC 6, CVS, many other big stations, I realized I did have a story but the whole time I was overthinking it. What I want you to understand is how to let your natural story come out. The whole time I was trying to come up with the special story line and what I realized was I should've just gone with what was true to me. By the time I got down to that point where I knew my own story, that's when people really started to bite on to it for the press. For a while I was telling them, Oh, I just want to give everyone motivation or workout. I created a reward and incentive structure to help people find motivation. When in reality, the idea came to me when I was running with my brother, and he had read a book about a guy who ran away from his problems. My brother literally took us for a run of indefinite distance, and we ended up running like seven miles at night. We went on a highway. It was very dangerous. We were like knees buckling by the end of it. It was a very memorable and gripping experience. That story ended up getting a lot more tracks, somewhat depressed. My one about, hey, I want to help people find motivation and work out. Think about your own story line. What brought you here today? What upsets you? What pisses you off, or what do you see for the world? What's your big dream? Think about these bigger, more zoomed out concepts and that can really help you understand how to develop your own story line. In business, you can get your business covered and a publication or you can get your personal story covered. Both of them can work. For me, my business didn't really have much of a reputation as my personal story, when it comes to finding your personal story, you can look at a low point and a high point. A story line can be how this 20-year-old entrepreneur went from living on his couch at his mom's house to sitting in Tony Robbins office, right? Not that hard to fabricate a story like that or even come up with a story like that. Because those high and low points, I'm sure if you think about your lowest low and your highest high, you could come up with something pretty amazing. However, if you can't, there are some other strategies. You can do a roundup style stories. You can help a reporter find five startups that are revolutionizing the way people work out and you could put yours as the top and then give some other friends to contribute theirs. Roundups are always sit easy way to get press coverage. Or you can think about what you are super passionate about. For me, I'm really passionate about fitness, about meditation, about well-being and health. I found that weaving my love for meditation and health into my business created a good story line. We're accompany that revolutionizes how people do business. We're creating an understanding empathetic community of people. When we're talking to the press, is very unique to have this feelings based approach in business. That was kind of a story line I came up with that was a little stronger, and we ended up writing on it for several publications. One of the stories did really well on a platform called [inaudible] for about a million readers. Think about what your mission is in your business. What's that bigger goal that you want to achieve? Is it to feed a million people?. For me, it was to help America lose a million pounds, whatever that big story line is. Think about that dream scenario, that big picture scenario. Figure out how that story line could be compelling for a reporter to write about. You can also base your story line on novelty, right?. You can find something unique, special, or catchy about your business and use that as the basis. For me, again, my fitness app gives people a reward for working out. It makes lot of sense to talk about, hey, now you can earn money for working out. Pretty novel idea, right? Most people have never gotten paid to work out. In fact, they usually pay to work out. A very counter-intuitive and easy to jump from. Whatever your businesses it's solving a problem. There's a good chance that you have some uniqueness, you have some novelty of the business that you can leverage from there. One way to figure out your story line is to look at all of the achievements you've had in your life. All of the low points you've had in your life. Look at your goals, your objectives, and create your own personal story line out of this if you're just starting out because oftentimes your business doesn't have that story line yet. Writers are very weary about reading just a profile story or a highlight story on a business. It's not that engaging from the readers' community perspective. You need to really give them a story to tell rather than just a factual snapshot of your business right now because chances are in business, isn't that interesting yet, right? You're just starting out, or maybe you're a medium-sized business. But your story line is that you sell batteries for cars. Maybe not the most compelling story lines, but you as a person have a unique story and you can leverage them, whether it's paying through your own college and faking it till you make it or being discriminated against for this or that or any restriction has been placed on you and you work past, that can be part of your story line. Think about challenge and solution perspective, right? What have I gone through? What was my low point? What was my high point? Create your story line from that. All right, let's jump to the next one. 4. Your PR Plan: Let's talk about your PR strategy and your PR plan. So like I said in the first video, you want to have a plan for any business endeavor that you go and take on. In fact, for any life endeavor that you take on, you're going to want some kind of plan. A plan doesn't just explain to you what you're going to do, it also explains to you what you're not going to do. So it's important to draw barriers on your workload so that you don't get distracted by a whole bunch of different plans, a whole bunch of different opportunities or ideas along the way. We want you to be focused and to really knock out those goals. Then once those are knocked out, those initial goals, then move on to bigger and better things. So the components of a PR outreach plan, and now we're doing a mini plan to make this a little bit simpler for you. If you are interested in a full PR plan, tweet at me TCG style on Twitter and I will send you a sample one from a client that we've done in the past. Now, your PR plan should cover some core components and a lot of marketing plans have the same components as well. First, you want to have your target audience. Your target audience is that people that you're talking to. You want to relate very deeply with somebody. Because there's a chance that there's a few million other people, just like you, who have that same passion as you and you want to find who that is. There are seven billion people in the world, I'm sure there's enough people who share your interests in say, gaming and block-chain or whatever it is, that they're going to be interested to read your story and it'll be enough to make a good customer base out of. So be very smart and very articulate about who you want to talk to with your PR. Now, if you get pressed in an outlet that doesn't necessarily resonate directly with your writers can still be beneficial. But you of course want people who are going to turn it into customers. So choose your audience wisely. When finding your audience, you can look at characteristics. Say you're targeting people like yourself if you're solving your own problem with your business. Look at the characteristics you have, which Instagram accounts do you follow? Which Twitter accounts do you follow? Which news outlets do you read? Think about who is that customer? Eighteen to 34 male living in Los Angeles, California, whatever it is, get those parameters and understand a couple of data points on your customer. That's who you are going to want to talk to with your press. Next, understand timelines. We set timelines so that we have enough time to execute tasks and so that we have smart deadlines that hold us to our own word so that we can get published on smart and intentional path. So we have a product release coming up in two months. What tasks do we need to execute up to then? Which media outlets do we need to reach out to on month one? Which are the outlets in month two and so on. So set some timelines, talk about them with your team, find out what's reasonable and stick to them. Next, you'll want to include, what kind of positioning you're going to be using. Your positioning is what problem you're solving and for who? So for me, I'm a growth hacking agency owner so I am solving the problem that most people can't get an ROI from their marketing. I'm doing that for tech businesses, block-chain, not-for-profit organizations and more. So my positioning is we're the guys that bend the rules to get you the highest ROI. Simple, we go to tech companies and we get them the most app installs or the most sales. We go to e-commerce companies and we get them ROI and Tenex and above. Just simple as that, that's what we do. Makes it really easy to tell our story from there. Because that positioning is going to become your angle. It's going to become what you pitch to the writers and how they can easily grab onto it. You don't want to make them have to do the work of thinking about how your business is special and different. You already need to know so you can empower that writer with your positioning. "Hey, we're the company that got ten influencers on board that made this product go viral." Boom. From there, you're going to have a to-do list. You're going to have your media list of people that you want to outreach to. You're going to have your target audience, your timelines and all of the structure you need to go start executing and to go have your team to start executing. So make sure to refer to the template in the provided files. We have a file called, 'mini PR plan outline explained.' In this document you're going to see the executive summary. You're going to see the target audience. You're going to see the media list, the to-do list, positioning and more. It's important that you read through the explanations I've given you in this plan so that you can understand how to fill it out. I would recommend some paragraphs and some bullet points for now, this is just a very simple planning document, a couple pages, not a full big unwieldy plan so that you can get right to work, not have to spend a lot of time doing planning, just filling out the document as I've shown it. Remember to do your executive summary last. So your executive summary is the short and sweet version of the whole plan. So it'll talk about timeline, positioning, strategy, and what to do next. But if you try to do that before, you're not going to know what's in the content of the plan. So it's important you do after you've written the plan, after you've thought through all these components like timeline, like strategy and things like that. So that the executive summary comes to you easily. Sometimes it's even cut and paste from other parts of the deck to create executive summary. Okay, I hope you enjoyed this video. Make sure to go and grab that document off the Skillshare server in this course so that you can go on and start filling up your own. Make sure to copy and paste the Google document into your own Google Drive so you can pull it out for yourself. Don't edit my file because you're not going to be able to and do let me know if you have any questions. Otherwise, have fun filling out the first part of your PR plan. Right now all you need to do is read it and get a good download. Over the next few videos we're going to get that filled out. All right, I'll see you in the next video. 5. Networking with Top Contacts: Welcome back. Now, we're going to talk about networking. Networking is extremely important in developing your business. Most businesses, for the first views of their life, are run on the founders network, right? I drive a lot of referrals and inbound leads for my business because I'm friends with a lot of people, and they tell other people about my business. But networking is also extremely important when it comes to your public relations strategy. You have to have good contacts who read a different publications or can introduce you to people who read a publication, and who owe you favors, right? People who you want to feel like they want to give you something. People who are in your good graces, people who want to help you because they heard your story line that we talked about in the last few videos. How to approach networking with top contacts. What I always say is approach it like a friendship, don't approach it like a business relationship. If you approach it as a business person, basically what ends up happening , "Hey, what do you do?", or "Here's my business card. " It creates an understanding and expectations from the beginning that I'm only in this to get some value exchange out of you. I don't really care who you are as a person, I'm just in this for whatever the business benefit is. That creates a bad precedent because that makes it a functional relationship without the pleasurable component of friendship or at least likability involved. Don't try to become everyone's business partner, instead approach them like you would anyone else, like you would a family member or friend, be nice, be talkative, be willing to communicate and connect with them, and be open and candid and humorous. Bring lovity. Don't be too serious. If you're serious, you scare people away. Trust me on that one. Second, how to show up every day. I talked about this a minute ago, but you want to approach relationships with mindfulness, positivity and humor. Mindfulness, being present in the moment. Don't be all distracted by your phone. Don't be half having another conversation. Don't have a big gap in communication with somebody that you're trying to connect with, be there, right? Next, be positive, right? Be somebody that people want to interact with. Cheer them up, put them into a good mood, say something that makes them laugh. Either way, you want to break what's called the third wall, and we'll talk about this in a later video, but break this expectation that we need to behave a certain way. Instead, jump right into being casual with somebody. You don't need to have a bunch of small talk. Small talk usually scares people away. Instead, jump right into what's fun for you. Talk about, "Oh, I have drive my son's skateboard yesterday and I fell over". Whatever it is, hopefully you didn't hurt yourself. Break that third wall. Break out of the expectation that this is a business relationship and approach it like somebody who you want to talk to because you're interested in them. The last part to showing up every day is to actually show up every day. Be persistent, come back and communicate regularly. Don't just hit somebody up on LinkedIn and connect with them one time and then forget about it, they'll never remember you. It'll be a complete waste that both your time, instead have a consistent communication pattern with them. Consistent but not aggressive. Last, where to find your top contacts. I want to dig into this a little bit more. But you can download Press lists. A lot of people provide them all over the internet with different Facebook groups and stuff like that. You can go to the websites of the publications that you want to get published in, and you can find their e-mails and contact information through the writer profiles on those pages. There are a lot of hacks like Hunter.io, which is a tool that scans a website and captures e-mails for you. When it comes to finding new contacts, you can find them in press lists, you can find them on LinkedIn by searching the writers at a given company, you can find the websites or the publications, so there's actually a lot of ways to do it. We're going to talk about those a little bit more. For now, let's jump to the next video. 6. Your Pitch List: Now that you've compiled the contacts that you want to connect with, you started putting them into your media list, which is part of your PR plan. You can check the documents that were included with this course. Once you've compiled who you want to connect with, in this case, which publications you want to connect with. You have a few tools at your disposal. First, LinkedIn is my favorite. It gives you the immediate access to people by job title at a given company. For me, I use the search function, I put coin desk or say Forbes, and then I put a filter on it. All the writers at Forbes. Then it shows me all of the people who have the title writer at Forbes. Then I shoot a personalized request with a note, "Hey, I just read your article on so and so about this looming debt crisis, and it's really interesting to me, because I'm in the commercial lending business and I'd love to learn more about what you do." Hit send, it's much more personal and much more expected and relevant, when it's done on LinkedIn, on email, it can be a bit abrasive because if people get so many emails sending back [inaudible] these day. That doesn't mean your not going to use it though. Whenever connecting on Linkedin, make sure to include a personalized message and make sure to use the search function, which is super powerful. You can set parameters by job title, function and location etc. Next email we have the pitch format for how to reach out to people by email, how to establish relevant with your top contacts. Make sure you download the template and fill it out for yourself and use email as a compliment. I use email as secondary method. If I can't get hold of them on LinkedIn, I'll go and email them. Once your connection on LinkedIn, you can actually access their email through the dropdown feature in LinkedIn profiles. Good plus stare. You can also get emails by using the hunter dot IO plug-in for Google Chrome, you can use snow V0, which is an another email capturing app for Google Chrome. Use email, use it as a compliment, use it as a touch point, not as your only outreach method, because people are sick of getting email, they might prefer Facebook Messenger, they might prefer LinkedIn. They might just have a higher open rate on Facebook Messenger, but you want to get them where they'll actually answer. Next, you can also use what's called Haro, helper reporter out. This is a daily email that has a whole bunch. I'm talking about thousands of pitch requests, from different reporters throughout the country who are writing stories and they need participants for the stories. Oftentimes the stories are very relevant, you can almost always find something worth responding to. Haro, responding to a request from this email is the first time I got published in Forbes. Now, that story has stayed with me for years. It's one of my favorite stories and I found it on Haro, free, easy, extremely effective, completely underutilized. Make sure to get Haro as a place to find contacts. Once you secure the story from Haro, you'll be able to have a regular [inaudible] that writer so you can have communication. Lastly, Twitter. Twitter is great for tweeting at people on a very casual basis. When I did outreach for the last campaign that I worked on, which was a non-profit finding donors for their inner city kids programs. I cashed it all that e-mails from the website of K4 and the new station in the area to TV station using the Snow V0 app, downloaded all the emails, also match the emails to Twitter profiles, and then also connect it with the people on LinkedIn. That way I had multiple touch points and it seems like a lot when somebody hits you up in three different places, but at the same time, that's where you get responses. You need to be persistent and you need to be present with these contacts. I connected with them on LinkedIn, I shot them a tweet and I email all of them. I got two TV segments out of that one, outreached to took one name. That ended up adding to over a $100,000 in donation for my client. It's a really valuable tool to use an integrated effort between all these different connecting tools. I'll leave it there. If you have questions, make sure to ask them in the comments and I'll see you in the next video. 7. Establishing Trust: Welcome back. Now we're going to talk about establishing trust. Establishing trust is your main factor in building relationships, especially with media contacts. You want them to depend on you. You want them to know that your word is true. You want them to know that you're telling the truth about your product or your business or whatever it is, because that's when they will trust in you, that's when they'll invest their time in you by humoring your responses and that's when they will cover you, is when they trust that you're somebody today actually enjoy talking to, you're an authentic person to do business with and more. So first authenticity, be yourself. Don't try to explain everything about who you are. Just be whoever you are in that moment. For me right now, I'm feeling pretty relaxed, I'm feeling interested, eager. These are all things that will come out in a conversation with an immediate contact wherever you're meeting them in person or on LinkedIn. So oftentimes when I'm talking on Linkedln, I won't even use perfect grammar. I won't even use like perfect capitalization sentence structure because I want to signify that I'm being casual with them so that they let their guard down. I'm an authentic guy, I'm engaging and I'm fun, and I don't want that to show so i have to give I might crack a joke, I might make some remark that I know has relevance with them. Next, understanding your own story, when you come into contact with these people on LinkedIn or email or whatever. Have a story line down path before you talk to them, they're going to say, "oh, well what do you do?'' You don't want to just do like, "I do marketing". You want to be like, "Well, I run campaigns that have generated an average of 10 or so y for clients, and I thought you might be interested in something similar for your business.'' So having an understanding of what your story line is, is really helpful. That way, when they ask, you can start sharing your successes and create a pull interests rather than a push Interests, you're not going to be forcing your product down the the throat. But you may say," Yes, we just finished doing a campaign for another client in South Florida where we got 10 influencers just to work on this campaign, and went great.'' How about yourself? Boom story, established credibility, established trust didn't force a product on them. Lastly, reciprocity. When you're having communication with these reporters, you want to have an exchange of value, even if it's just emotional value. "Hey, hope your day is going well, just stopping in to say hi". Then you might say, "That was nice I'm not used to getting friendly treatment from a business contact, thanks". And you say, "What are you up to today?" Or you might say, "Hey, did you see this?" And you share a story about their business that's in the news, whatever it is, just exchange value. If you can't offer value up front, always do it. You could say, "Hey, I'm helping organize a conference in Las Vegas and we need two speakers, do you know anyone who might be a fit? Or would you be interested in doing this?" If you offer something like that, people almost always reply because they want to have their own name in the shining lights. So offer value and you'll get value in return. You'll get a commitment from that writer contact so that you can have this reciprocal relationship where you're exchanging value on a regular basis and they're giving what you want and you're getting what they want. So with that, I'll leave it there and let's jump into the next video. 8. Managing Relationships: What is up? Let's talk about how to manage relationships with PR contacts. If I haven't made it clear already, your PR contacts are going to be writers, reporters, producers. Anyone who works at a media outlet and can offer you a story on their publication, they're going to be a good contact for you. How to manage relationships with media people. Well, one, they're getting bombarded with emails every day. Some people get as much as 1,000 emails of inbound pitches per day. They can't sort through it all. So when you're managing relationships with these people, you need to be understanding of their time constraints. A few things to keep in mind when you're working with media contacts. One, cadence, how often do you follow up with this person? I think it's a good standard to follow up every other day if you feel like this person is interested in covering your story. Once you've established communication on say, LinkedIn with them, come back in a couple days, message them, say, ''Hey, any word here? Hey, interested to share another idea that I have with you. Hey, how's everything going on your side? How is your holiday?'' Whatever. Next, tone. Don't try to impress people. Don't come off desperate. Just be straightforward, be humorous, be light, and show stuff of value. Don't be overthinking your agenda. Don't be thinking about what you can get out of it because that'll show through in your tone. You want your tone to be honest, clear, and to the point. Because again, these reporters just don't have much time on their hands. These writers are inundated with requests from entrepreneurs like ourselves, who are asking them to cover their business. So it's important that you respect their time needs and their space. Not be too much in their face, just gentle persistence. Every couple days, shoot them a quick message and eventually, you'll get through to them. Persistence always pays. Lastly, create the connection. A connection is a point of relevance between you and this media contact. So if you see that somebody is into blockchain, then you might say, 'Hey, I see that you're into cryptocurrencies and blockchain. I'm a big-time investor in cryptocurrency myself. Hold on, this has been a wild ride lately.'' That's one thing I always use and I always get the connection requests from people once I establish connection on LinkedIn. So I'm establishing a point of relevance where they actually care about me because they have something in common with me. We have a mutual agenda of something we want to grow together. That makes it really easy for them to relate to you. Lastly, when you're creating connection, you want to understand what that writer's objectives are. We'll talk a little bit about this in another video but you want to do research on your writers. You want to understand what kind of topics they're writing about, what are they passionate about, so that you have points of relevance to talk about with them. Or, maybe they're looking for points on their new story and you're going to help them out. So do your homework, be respectful of people's time, and be persistent about how you connect with them, and consistent in how you have your tone with them, so that they learn to trust you, depend on you, and come to you. That's it for this video. I'll see you in the next. 9. Pitching: What is up and welcome back. Right now we're going to talk about the most important part, arguably of public relations, pitching. This is also really important in any business endeavor too, because you're always pitching your ideas, right? You're always pitching your stuff, your credibility, your business, whatever it is. Your story. Pitching is sales work, so you need to treat it as so. You need to be respectful of the fact that you're pushing your own agenda on somebody to some extent, you need to be respectful of their time and you need to be respectful of yourself. If it's not working, you can get out, right? When it comes to crafting your pitch, a public relations pitch or media pitch is structured generally as three concepts. Establishing relevance, finding some point of commonality. Remember the trust and authenticity wants from the last video. Second, stating your why, why are we talking today? Why am I reaching out to you? And then third, what's my ask, right? That structure is how a standard e-mail pitch is written. Why do I care about you? Okay, that's where I establish relevance. Who are you? That's where I tell my story, and then why are you calling me? Why are you e-mailing me? That's your ask. You want to have that structure to your pitches. That's if you're doing cold e-mail outreach. Oftentimes your pitches will come up in just regular conversation. It's also important that you understand from a foundational perspective what your story is so you can tell it in real time on DM or on a messenger app. Before you go and draft your pitch, you want to understand what those writers are passionate about. I mentioned this in the last video. Go, find all the writers at TechCrunch who are in your media-list. Click on their profile picture on TechCrunch and take you to their author page and then look at all the stories they've written. Read through the headlines of their stories. What are they passionate about? Are they passionate about Bitcoin? Are they gamers? Are they into travel and tech or whatever it is. Use those as feeding points for your pitch. If you know somebody is interested in fitness apps, it's much easier to say, "hey, I saw that you wrote a story on Strava, the running app. Maybe you should check out ViaFitness, it's another one like Strava, except that gives you rewards for working out." Then you feed right into an agenda that they already have, makes your job a lot easier as a connector. Next, when you're writing your pitch, you really want to make it grabbing, right? You want it to be something that people like instantly are interested in. So, refine your pitch outline. Remember to check the one in the course documents. There's an outline that I've provided there. Take that and do a lot of refinements on it, run it by other people. Run it by yourself multiple times. Take time when you step back, let the answer percolate. All those things I was talking about around creating space around your creative endeavors and get a writing you'll want to do that with your pitch. So before you go and send out your pitch, make sure that you run it by some other friends. You can tweet it to me at TCG style on Twitter. I'll take a look at it, I'd be happy to review it. And we'll make it refined, so that it's short, to the point, and grabbing, right? Interesting. Makes sure to leverage your angle when you're writing the "About Me" section. Remember, it's establishing relevance, "Hey, I saw you wrote an article on Bitcoin I'm really interested in Bitcoin myself and I actually went in big, mortgaged my house and put it on Bitcoin." Next would be, why am I here? Right? And this is the story where you make your pitch. "I'm also a crypto investor myself, and I've actually developed an app that manages your crypto assets for you, and I thought you might be interested because you have so many Bitcoin holdings yourself. Is this something that fits into any of the stories that you're working currently?" And that's where you make your ask. You've got to be articulate about your ask. Have some reason for shooting your e-mail out to this person. That's all I have today on pitching. Remember you have the template provided. You can go ahead and start working on your pitching template, once you've started filling out your PR plan. Now would be a good time to start filling out your PR plan, read through the document that I provided and understand the components of it, and start filling it out with bullet points through now. Alright, I will see you in the next video. 10. The PR Process: Right now I'd like to do a short video explaining a bit around process. Process can really make your life easier. A lot of people see this as the boring part of business, but what ends up happening is they don't have a process and they end up reinventing the wheel slightly different every time. That takes a lot of time, it's mentally exhausting, and it'll really burn you out as an entrepreneur or as an employee. Figure out what your process is. I've provided a simple three-step process for your media outreach. Step one, craft your messaging and calls to action, a.k.a., your pitches, distribute the content, send out your emails send out [inaudible] requests, tweet out the media contacts, and then lastly, actively measure and optimize. Have all your media contacts in the media list that I've provided, create your own copy of that and have your touch-points as different columns. I emailed on 11-7, emailed again on 12-1. There are also CRMs, customer resource management systems, that you can use to track those. You could use something like Salesforce or HubSpot, and there's also CRMs for PR specifically. You may want to track your interactions with contacts with that tool or you can just use a standard spreadsheet and actively monitor your outreach to these contacts. But the important part that you want to know is three simple steps to get in your business published in these top publications. One, craft a pitch, make sure that you're happy with it, run it by some friends, get some good reviews. Second, distribute your pitches; and third, actively measure the success of that outreach campaign. Your PR plan should be executed in these three steps. Say you have a three month plan. Month one would be crafting messaging and calls to action. Month two would be outreach and distribution; and month three will be campaign, performance, and tracking. Likely, in month three you'll have a bunch of stories so you have some progress to measure. Check out the depth that is in this video and I will provide more information around process in the PR plan that's attached. But make sure to just standardizing this so you don't have to think about it every time so that you're not sending pitches one day and doing tracking and measurement in the same day where you get pulled from one task to another. Be articulate about when you're going to work on what and then work in serial order. Step one, step two, step three. Let's jump to the next video. 11. Tracking Your Progress: You've written your PR plan, you've figured out the timelines, the publications, the target audience that you're going for, and you've started your outreach, phase 2 after you've crafted your pitches. Now you're starting to get responses coming back in from different writers and different reporters at these publications. It's really important that next step is tracking. So take your media list, your pitch list, with all your publications in it, and track every time you do an outreach, each contact. If you haven't reset to a contact in say three weeks, but you're checking this document every single day, you can see in a column there on the right side of the document that I provided, it's time to reach out to this contact. Until they tell you to stop reaching out, you should continually follow people up. Say you have 100 different media contacts, you're going to want to be tracking the progress on each of those. So you'll have a column for it in the PR plan that I provided, in the media lists I provided, and you can track by contact what was the last touch point with them. Again, you can also use a CRM for this, makes it easier, but sometimes it's good to just stick to an old-fashioned spreadsheet and check in with that every single day. That's another thing to know about this. When you check tracking progress, check in every day, if you're having your team members doing outreach on behalf of you to these media outlets, make sure that they're checking the document every day. It's really important that you are measuring your own progress and seeing which ones work and which ones didn't. Oftentimes it'll feel like I'm not working on a large enough scale to really need tracking, but it still helps, because what might happen, is you reach out to 100 reporters and only 20 responds. So it feels like you only got 20 of them going on, but really you have 100. You might need to make second [inaudible] with those other ET, so that you can have that next point of contact with them because oftentimes people don't respond on the first outreach. Oftentimes it takes three or more outreaches, just like any sales. So go ahead and get your media-list drafted from your PR plan. Put columns for the first touch point, for the third touch point, for the fifth, and whatever, beyond. Get your media-list built out so you have a tracking documents, so you can know where you left off the last time. 12. Bonus Strategies: When it comes to getting published in top publication, it's not a whole lot different to go into Forbes versus Huffington Post versus a small blog. All you have to do is convince one person of your story. When you're putting together your media plan, include contacts from all the top publications you want to get in touch with because you might have a mutual connection with that person on LinkedIn, they might be interested in the same type of business that you're running. Don't restrict yourself based on the quality or the size of a publication that you can't get it. Instead approach everyone as somebody that you can work with. When you're doing your outreach, you should talk to somebody from Forbes, just like you'd talk to somebody from a [inaudible] blog, treat people respectfully and candidly and they will respond to you. The way that I got connections with a lot of these big publications is, I joined Facebook communities. I found out who are the writers and the community. I messaged them on Facebook, and I started connecting with them. Once I had a couple of connections, I reached out to their friends and asked them for introductions to writers and other publications and just started using a web type of effect. Another tactic that I used, which was helpful for generating more writer leads is I started contributing to publications myself. I started contributing to one called Influencive. It gets about 300,000 monthly readers. From Influencive, I went to Thrive Global, to Foundr Magazine, to Huffington Post, to Mindbodygreen. Mindbodygreen has something like 40 million visitors per per month. I really ratcheted up from 300,000 visitors up to 40 million, but that was just by establishing my own contributor role at Influencive and ratcheting up every day. Now, if you're going to take on contributor roles, you should set aside some time to actually write meaningful articles for those publications. Don't just go and promote all your friends all the time because they're going to recognize all these press backlinks. You're going to want to be writing authentic stories that are unique and different and really drive your value as a writer. This is a great way to become an influencer as well. You can establish more writing connections by becoming a writer of different publications. Also, if you become a writer of different publications, you'll often get invited to their Slack group. The Slack group will be a writer's circle where there'll be other writers at that publication. Most writers write for multiple publications. You can chat with people in that Slack conversation and build other writer connections that way. I hope you enjoyed these extra bonus hacks here. I will see you in the next video. 13. Sealing the Deal: Welcome back. Let's talk about sealing the deal. PR is just like business. Getting publications to write a value is selling them on your story. You need to be articulate about your ask, what you want from them, you need to know how to get it through publishing, and lastly, you need to know how to maximize the impact. When it comes to the ask, again from the pitching section we're persistent, we hit him up every day or so, and we're respectful, but we are consistent. Politely and persistently get what you want. Be fearless, don't be afraid of what they think. You might never seen this person again, you might never have contact, or they might actually say, "Thanks for the follow-up I've been swamped, but I really liked your story," it happens all the time, and we want to move on if it doesn't feel right. Next, when it comes to publishing, oftentimes writers will commit to doing a story on you, but not actually put out the story. You might get the sale, you might get the person to commit to writing a story on you or doing a new segment, but oftentimes they don't come through. It's up to you to remind them and keep them to their word about committing a story to you. Lastly, maximize the impact. Once you get the story locked in, once you know the date that it's going to go live, then you can play in your team to really amplify the success of that post. Any story that you get published on, say, Forbes or Inc Entrepreneur, you're going to want to have all your friends comment within the first five minutes on Facebook. You're going to want to have ensure that out on their own Facebook pages. You're going to want to tweet it out and impersonal on your company page, you're going to want to put it onto your LinkedIn wall. Maximize the impact, get people to come, get people to rally up before the actual release. When I first got on TV, I had a Facebook event where all my friends could see when I went live, and then they can click the link to go watch me on live TV. That was a huge success tool for amplifying the effect of my first TV slot. That's it for sealing the deal, if you have more questions, remember to tweet me otherwise comment in the section below, remember, check in on your PR plan, make sure that it's about 80 percent filled out at this point, be going through those sections, discussing them with your friends or your family or your business partners, and understanding how your PR plan is going to look, because we're going to be building up to that toward the end of this set of videos. 14. Recap: Congratulations. You made it to the end of my course, on how to get your business published in top media outlets. Now, let's talk about re-cap in what's next. We talked about how PR can be an asset in your business, how you can use creative storytelling, to get people bought in, and to build trust with your audience and get them to actually make sales once they trust you. We talked about how to write a PR plan. At this point, you should have glanced at it a few times. Ideally, you filled it out about 50 to 80 percent with your own content and the PR plan. Then, also started composing your media list, so that you know who to outreach to, in your media campaign. We also talked about how to find your angle, how to find your story-line, digging deep on who you are, what's your different story, what's your unique story, what's the high and low point, and how do you use that in your PR outline. Next, we talked about networking with top contacts. Don't be afraid to approach the big dogs, connect to people on LinkedIn, be candid, be friendly, be fun, be honest. From there we use different methods to get in communication with these people, whether that's email, LinkedIn, contributing as a writer at a publication, Twitter, email. Remember to use the channels at your disposal, there's a lot of stuff at your disposal and there's a lot of ways to connect to somebody, that you can find online. Next, we talked about establishing trust. Establishing trust is important to have a candid and honest business relationship. It's important to any friendship, anything. Being honest, being straightforward, and being fun and humorous, so that people like you, so that they want to work with you. From there we talked about managing relationships, how often to follow people up, what kind of tonality they use to stay positive in our demeanor and to be friendly and likable, and then we talked about creating connection, having a point of relevant to them. Once we have all of these media contacts and relationships going, then we go and craft our pitch. Our pitch is our outreach email asking them to write a story on us, in their publication. Remember, there's a template provided that you can use there. Once you've done your outreach and your pitching, you put all those names into your tracking list, decision media list that has tracking points as columns, and you can figure out exactly how often you've reached out to somebody, and how much more you need to reach out to them to get that next step. From there, we talked about closing the deal. This is a business deal, you need to get somebody to commit to write an article on you, and we need to get them to actually write it, and once they write it, you return the favor by sharing it out on all your social channels, having all your friends like and comment, so that you can amplify the natural virility of that post. That is the recap of the course. I hope you got a lot out of it, and if you have questions, make sure to tweet me or comment in the section below. 15. Conclusion: My question for you, have you started your PR plan? Let's talk about the project. So at this point you should create a copy of the PR plan that I provided in the media list and the pitch email template. Once you get copies of those, save them onto your Google Drive. Next, you're going to fill out the PR plan based on the body content that I've put it as templates there for you. It gives you a simple outline of how to approach it. I've also included a document from a real client for a PR plan planning in big release. So you have a sample document and then you also have the template. So you should have all that you need. So from here, get to work filling that out. If you have questions, make sure to tweet at me. But you should work on filling that out, even if it's just bullet points, get the PR plan developed, get it written, keep it concise. Don't be too extensive. Then once you have the PR plan written, you can go ahead and build your media list. That should be go tracking document, it's a Google sheets or say an Excel file and that [inaudible] your track or your media outreach in lists for contacts. That is pretty much it. If you have trouble filling out the document, make sure to comment or reach out to me for more help. It's pretty self-explanatory, once you get that all in place, you can get right to business of reaching out and getting your business published in these top outlets. But you need that PR plan in place, you need the media list in place to actually begin that outreach. So I hope that you've enjoyed this course. Remember, fill out the PR plan, fill out the media list, and fill out the pitch template. If you have questions, reach out to me, I'm happy to help. Then once you get those all done into a place that you're happy with, and you've done a few reviews internally, then you can share it with me and I will double-check it for you. If not, you can just hit the ground running to start your outreach. You're going to want to get right down to business. You're going to want to check in with this PR plan every single day so that your outreach process is airtight and you actually build real contacts. That's it for me. I hope you enjoyed the course. Thank you so much for joining and I'll see you next time.