How To Position Yourself As Famous (And Get Free Publicity!)

Welcome back to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. I'm so excited to have you here today. We get to listen to Steve Harrison. Steve Harrison is going to be sharing with us how to position yourself as famous and get free publicity. Now, if you don't know, all of these are made available to you for free. However, a lot of these were recorded in Gold and Diamond level calls. These are the two active pieces of the Magnetic Marketing membership, and I was actually listening to a member the other day who is getting the newsletter every single month and going through the strategies inside of it, and she decided that she was going to take just one strategy every single month and just see what happens if she spent the entire month applying that one strategy. For you, this strategy of creating publicity may be that strategy that changes everything. In a world where everyone's trying to outperform each other on social and create ads that are cheaper just by a little bit and get on the new platform that's promising to make things cheaper, maybe going the traditional route and getting true publicity, be it national or local, might be the shift you've been waiting for. So let's listen in as Steve Harrison, a practicer of the phenomenon principle, shares with us how to position yourself as famous and get free publicity.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy.

The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril.

They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws. Laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.

Uh, our next speaker is a couple things I'll tell you about Steve Harrison. Number one is we spent a lot of time yesterday talking about The Phenomenon, and him and his brother are both together. They are in The Phenomenon that's coming out in the middle of October. They are what we call practitioners of the phenomenon. So they have an amazing phenomenon story. And although Steve is not going to tell you a little bit of— he probably won't tell you about it. He's not required to. He maybe shouldn't. But just to give you a little glimpse into it, they— after 9/11, their business, because of 9/11, suffered some setbacks. And these guys triggered the phenomenon in their business in order to not only get it way back to— right back to where it was, but also to take it way beyond where it was. And today they have one of the most successful businesses of their category that there is. They own a bunch of different publications, Radio TV Interview Report being one, which deals in the world of getting publicity out and getting people publicity. And they also have something that's very interesting called the National Publicity Summit, which I assume you're going to talk about, right? Which is— you're not? Well, forgetting the fact that it's sold out. You can talk about it not to sell it. You can talk about it, but it's a very interesting thing where they bring in how many different producers?

Over 100.

Over 100 producers.

And journalists.

Where they basically, it's a very interesting business. They teach people a lot of things, but one of the things they teach them is how to talk to producers of very, you know, companies that producers that are like with Oprah-sized companies. They teach people how to talk to producers in order to properly communicate with them in order to get themselves on major publicity and magazines, et cetera. It's a very interesting situation. Then they have what we call speed dating for producers, right? Is that— I'm screwing it up.

Now I'm going to have to describe it.

Well, then do it later. But you go around, you get 3 minutes, right? 3 minutes?

Yeah.

3 minutes with each producer to go tell your thing. Anyway, so that's a little bit about them. Now you might have to fix it later, but that's pretty close to the truth. Then you also, what else do Steve? Steve has worked with Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul, also with Rich Dad Poor Dad, and helped them to launch their books. They're very famous for helping people launch their books. I'll tell you that I've known Steve for some time. In Dan Kennedy's Platinum Group. Actually, I knew him before you were in Dan Kennedy's Platinum Group, 'cause we actually, years ago, we had what we call marketing junkies, where we actually, him and his brother and Yannick Silver and myself and Rob Olic, we would get together about once every 6 weeks for dinner, and it was like a little private group of dysfunctional people that we would get together and we would discuss what are we doing in our businesses. And back then, I still was running my menswear retail store and in the marketing business, These guys said, "Well, we'll get you some publicity." Within 30 days, he got us an article in the Baltimore Sun. He also got me an article in DM News, which is the industry of record for direct marketers. They're the real deal. They know how to do what they do. What we thought was in this whole Keeping with our theme of sales, that there's probably no better strategy to get sales than building yourself up as a credible person that somebody will look at you and say, gee, this is an expert. And that helps the job of the sale much, much easier. Plus, at the same time, is when people see free publicity that you get, they often now seek you out versus you having to seek them out. So we asked Steve to drive here all the way from the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia. What are the Eagles doing today? Probably losing.

What are the Phillies doing?

Hopefully losing.

Oh yeah? Eagles play tonight.

Oh, well, I don't wish them well. So we asked him to drive here today to talk to you about how to get publicity, to make yourself famous, to make the job of your sales job much easier. Steve Harrison.

Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I'm here today to put money in your bank account. I'm here today to get people talking about you. Word of mouth. At their office, around the water cooler, at the dinner table. I'm here today to get people who right now might be kind of price sensitive to not care at all about price. When you're selling. I'm here today to get people, when they look at your sales copy or when they're sitting with you in the office or talking to you on the phone and they're thinking about, hey, you know, hmm, I'm kinda on the fence whether I'm gonna buy or not. I'm here to eradicate that person that's on the fence. I'm here today to show you how, what you can do, easy, easy things you can do to have that person just buy, in fact, not just buy and increase your conversion, but to buy without you having to sell at all. Without even having to see your literature many of the times. Now how many people are interested in at least one of those things? May I see a show of hands? Good. Glad that I'm in the right room. What you and I have as marketers is that there's a couple just No matter what we're marketing, there's a couple of universal laws. One thing is the more people who know about us, more good things happen. Second thing is the more people who trust us, more good things happen. Well, I'm here to talk about free publicity. I'm gonna show you how to get free publicity. But one of the things that I find with salespeople and entrepreneurs, you know the biggest thing that holds them back from getting publicity? The biggest thing that's gonna hold you back is just this thing up in your head that says, "Eh, that's something that other people can do, but not me. I don't have the credibility. I haven't been doing what I do long enough to be able to get free publicity." So what I'm gonna do, okay, I have seen in my life, I haven't seen anybody who can't get free publicity. I've helped over 12,000 people get publicity by training them what to do, We have some services we offer, but basically I'm not a PR guy. I'm here to teach you what you can do or have an assistant do. I have not seen anybody who can't get publicity. I'm gonna prove it to you because I'm gonna show you examples today of people who had no right whatsoever to get publicity. I mean people with like no real track record, people who may be selling some kind of outlandish things so that you can see that, hey, if they can do it, I can do it. I'm going to show you somebody who's really basically a complete fraud. You're going to get a sense of that. Here's how we're going to go ahead and— Here's my PowerPoint. Here's the main point for today. You can have anything you want. You want if you just position yourself to become famous. You can have anything you want if you just position yourself to become famous. That could be famous in your local area, famous in your niche, famous in your state, nationally, internationally, online, on radio. You can have anything you want if you just position yourself to become famous. I want to tell you about a guy named George. Ordinary guy, This story is totally 100% true, as all the stories you're gonna be hearing. This is a bald-headed Greek guy, owns a restaurant, works 80 hours a week in Atlantic City. On the side, he loves going to the casinos, playing blackjack. He's read a bunch of books. Now let me just do a little quick survey real quick. How many of you, if you saw an ad in the paper, you saw an ad in the paper that said, "Win at blackjack 78% of the time," how many of you would be rushing to buy that book? Okay, now for the two of you, 1-800-GAMBLER, okay, is perfect, perfect resource for you for today. Yeah, you know, not a whole lot of people. We've got some closet gamblers here, but not a lot of people are going to rush to that. Why? Why would you not respond to that headline? Because it's not what? Believable. Too good to be true. And that's what you and I face as marketers. They're reading our sales letter or what have you. Well, George, his girlfriend comes to him, Francine. She says, "Listen, I heard about the internet. I want to sell some kind of ebook or something." And he says, "Well, we should write what we know about. I could write a book on blackjack." And she says, "George, you haven't written anything since high school." And even then it was like you probably got your girlfriend to write the book report for you. He said, "You know, I can put something together." So he grabs out a legal pad, one of these yellow pads. He writes down a few tips. He writes it up. She gives it to her sister. She takes it to the local copy shop. Now, to call what they have a book is a big kind of a stretch. This is like a 24-page pamphlet with staples. Okay? But he puts a price on it, $1,195. I meet him at a trade show. He's like, "Hey, how can I get the word out about this?" I said, "Well, you know, you can do radio interviews and give a phone number out where people can order, or website, and they can order what you have." He's like, "Ah, how hard should that be? That's not very hard. That's just talking to people." Well, sure enough, what we do is we give him an idea for a A headline. This is an example of the copy. Quote, I put it in quotes. I told them put it in quotes. "I win 78% of the time playing blackjack and you can too. Lotteries and big money game shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire are more popular than ever. But the chances of making it on the hottest TV show in America or beating the million-to-one odds of the lottery are next to none. But what if you could gamble and win 78% of the time?" Basically, he's got some tips in here, 5 golden rules of blackjack. How to spot a hot table. How to get hundreds of dollars in comps. Well, from this copy, he's getting dozens of interviews by phone with radio stations every month. He's sitting there on the phone. He's a character. He's telling stories. He's giving out his phone number. And he's making a six-figure income just doing interviews for free, free airtime. All right, so then we say, look, you know what, how can you jump this to the next level? The stock market had plummeted, and we gave them this: Why Blackjack is a Better Investment Than the Stock Market. Tying in with what's going on. The rest of this release is the exact same. It is one piece of paper. One piece of paper. Well, what happens? Well, turns out that a producer from Fox News sees this. Says, "This kind of looks kind of interesting." And old George gets booked on Fox News with his pamphlet. Never been on national TV ever before. Can we go ahead and click and give this a whirl?

Welcome back. If you've ever played blackjack and have come away from the table discouraged and broke, you will want to pay close attention to the next magazine feature. We went to the center of the action, the casino at Resorts International in the gambling mecca of Atlantic City, for an interview with a man who claims he can make you a winner at that nasty, elusive game of 21.

Play blackjack, write books, do speaking engagements.

Now I'm doing TV.

Meet George Papadopoulos, author, instructor, blackjack guru.

This is home right over here. This is home.

I feel more at home here than I do sitting on my couch. Casino gambling is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and blackjack is a major part of that excitement. So what if you could have a book that told you how to play blackjack and beat the odds 78% of the time? Blackjack's Hidden Secrets: Win Without Counting.

And that's a key word. Without counting cards.

George's books don't teach you how to count cards. Rather, they detail 5 basic rules of play he's developed into a winning game. First rule is bankroll. Second is basic strategy. Third rule is money management.

So here's George. How many people want to see more? You know, oh, now you're interested. You weren't interested when you heard about this ad, but now you've seen him. Well, here's the amazing thing. From that, I think it was about a 7-minute segment, he would have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe millions for that airtime. He paid nothing. He gave out his book. You could see how thin that looks, right? Gave out his book, did $80,000 in sales within just a few hours. Why is it that— now let me ask you a question. How many of you have something that maybe is a little easier to believe? Maybe you have a little more credibility? How many of you, raise your hand, how many of you make more money off of the customer than $11.95? All right? So you can kind of see here why this little voice inside that says, "Oh, that's kind of for other people." Oh yeah, it's for George. But not you? This is a miracle. Why is it that publicity, though, makes miracles happen? 3 reasons. One is it's free. You pay nothing. One of the things that sets me apart from a lot of experts out there is I've interviewed over 600 media on how they want to be pitched, how they want to be presented. Guess what the number one way they like to be presented is? Phone, fax, or email? Email. Exactly right. Email. And that's free. And when you know how to craft them, exciting things can happen. It's totally free. Okay, next thing. It's more credible than advertising or any other form of marketing. I'm sure— how many of you are familiar— how many of you are familiar with endorsement marketing, affiliate marketing? Show of hands. Pretty good stuff, right? What happens when Oprah tells people about a book? She's like your JV, except you don't have to pay her a commission. When you're in the media, in radio, TV, newspapers, you are getting really an implied endorsement. Jim Trepann, you'll see him mentioned in one of these things, financial CPA, took just a few hours to craft a press release during Christmas vacation, didn't have much to do, sent it off, got booked on CNBC. Person saw him on TV, he's a CPA financial planner, and gave him $4.5 million to invest. They had never met. It is more credible than advertising. It is more credible than marketing. And that is why it's selling without selling. It multiplies. It multiplies. How many of you, when you run an ad in the paper, do they ever call you and say, "Hey, we liked your ad so much, we're gonna run it for free in our other publications." Okay? All right. Well, the great thing about publicity is when people see you and hear about you— you ever notice the media kind of all latch on to a lot of the same stories? Well, they like to find, you know, good stories. And often, I'll give you examples how it leads to more publicity and more publicity. For example, with old George, Blackjack George. Gets on Fox News, has done these interviews. Remember doing radio interviews? He said, "Hey, how hard can that be? It's just talking to people." Well, his next call was from Howard Stern. Howard says, "George, what's all this crap about winning blackjack 78% of the time? I wasn't born yesterday." Howard's expecting to have this guy on for like 3 minutes, make fun of him, and move on. George says, "Well, Howard, do you play by the 5 basic strategies?" He's like, "I didn't even know there were 5 basic strategies." George says, "Well, Howard, maybe that's why you're losing so much." Howard loves it. Keeps him on for, like, quadruple the time. And then he starts defending George to the callers. From that appearance, he does $60,000 in sales for his booklets that are $11.95. It multiplies. A little bit about my story and kind of how I fell into this. My very first job in high school was working as a journalist. My brother and I worked for the Gannett newspaper And you know what? Every Monday night we had a deadline. And I don't know about you, I'm sure you all probably can't relate to this, but I have a confession, and that is when I have deadlines, I tend to wait to the last minute. You know, I'm sorry, but that's kind of something I'm working on, you know. Well, here's what I would do is I'd have to find an idea for a story. And Monday night I'd start looking around, what can I write about? What can I write about? And that's what I've really seen is so exciting for you. You see, the media are not there to try to, you know, it's not like Harvard admissions to college. They've got to do a story. That producer has to have a show. If you give them an idea, if someone gave me an idea, I would write about them. And I could get home early, okay? Watch Monday Night Football. That's what I was interested in, something that would be of interest to my readers. Well, after college, my brother and I started a magazine for the media called Radio TV Interview Report, RTIR. It's become known as the Bible of the industry among producers looking for guests. And what we found is, you know, essentially what happens is people give us their material and we write up copy, and the magazine is really made up completely of like one-page pitches, press releases essentially, in a catalog format. So the media can instantly go and flip through and find people that are available for interviews. But you know what we found? If we let the people write their own copy, it didn't do very well. But as we kind of started to write the copy ourselves, they did a lot better. Now we read books on writing press releases and stuff. In the beginning, that didn't help us. But what did help us was the realization that when you write copy, you want to do what you saw in the example with George. You want to give a headline that immediately tells me, the journalist or the producer, what the hook is. Okay? We're going to talk about hooks today. I want you to leave today with ideas for hooks. Well, let's I'll give you an example of that. This is Robert Kiyosaki, full page. "What the rich teach their kids about money that most of us don't." Do you see how that is an instant "coming up"? "What the rich teach their kids about money that most of us don't. We'll be back." It gets you to kind of want to stay for the commercials. It's kind of like one time I was going through the grocery store line, 6 AM. Live outside of Philadelphia. Going through the grocery store line. It's 6 AM. I've got my stuff. You know, I'm walking out the door. It's cold. And the Eagles now were in a big playoff game. This is last fall. And the headline on the Philadelphia Daily News— this was a game that people were trying to get into. Couldn't get tickets. And the headline in the paper said, "Sex for Tickets." And I'm there with my stuff. I got a busy day ahead. I got to get going. And I understand the power of headlines and how they write a headline to kind of grab you. "Sex for Tickets." I'm like, "You know what? I got to figure out what this is about." So I get back online with all my stuff to wait to give the lady 50 cents for this newspaper. So that I could know what this is about. Good news is you don't have to go to those lengths to get publicity. But when I interviewed Rush Limbaugh once, he said, "You know what?" He said, "I'm in the business not of getting people to be conservatives, I'm in the business of selling advertising, getting people to essentially tune in." And that's what you want to do, give them a hook. One way Robert Kiyosaki did that and how we helped him there in Rated TV News Report is He talks about, um, one of the things that you want to try to do if you can is take a myth and turn it on its ear. So people think your house is an asset. He says, "No, your house is not an asset." Okay? And that's an idea I have for you. What is it— write this down— what is a myth? What is a myth that people believe that from what you teach, it simply is not true? You know it's not true. It's they all believe it, but it's not true. In my case, the myth is that people figure, oh, I can't get publicity. Okay, I know they can. See? But what about for you? Now, that's a hook. Okay? Now, for Robert Kiyosaki, what's interesting is he began doing radio interviews. He had self-published Rich Dad Poor Dad. He had 3,000 copies, like garage full of books. He was trying to figure out, "Well, how am I going to get the word out?" He figured, "Okay, I've got to get publicity." So he came to us and started getting a lot of radio interviews and did— he was on this big station and they asked him, "So how can people get your book?" And he said, "My book is available everywhere." His book wasn't available anywhere. But sure enough, that got people to go into the store, start asking for it. Then he got a distributor. Then bookstores started to stock the book through word of mouth. He then sent us a letter about 2 years later. He says, "The interviews I received from my ads in RTR were an immense kickstart to the success of my book, Rich Dad Poor Dad. By doing radio and TV interviews on a regular basis promoting my book, doors throughout the publishing world opened for me. Your company gave me the initial boost I needed to create momentum and sell my first 250,000 copies." A monumental task for any publisher. He became a bestseller while he was self-published. Then Warner bought the rights to his book, and here he says, since then more than 10 million copies have been sold. He says, you know, I've been on the New York Times bestseller list. I'll be presenting another live seminar, only this time it's going to be not in a hotel room, but it's going to be in Madison Square Garden. That's the power of publicity. We've gotten a lot of publicity for our company as well, and what's really cool is we used to do a lot of cold calling, a lot of following up. We find we get written up in articles, people just contact us, and they just want to know where to send the check practically. I mean, they're just so sold. This is a piece from Entrepreneur Magazine about a book that we do for the top TV talk shows. This is instructive because sometimes you will be doing an article Sometimes you'll be interviewed and you know that the journalist is gonna write about other people. You'd love it for it just to be about you, but in this case Entrepreneur was writing about how to get on TV. And what I said to them and kind of talked to them is about the idea of doing like a special box, kind of like a call-out. And sure enough, they did 3 different boxes in their story where they interviewed me and got tips from my book on how to do different shows and what different shows are looking for and ended up just being great for sales coming in over the web. You can have anything you want if you just position yourself to be famous. Let's talk about how to do it and why. Basically, what we're talking about here is when you start getting publicity, we're talking about no more cold calling, no more chasing prospects, Working long, crazy hours. You know, Brian Sachs is a mortgage broker, was for many years a mortgage broker in Baltimore. And what he found was that people, you know, if you're a mortgage broker, people are calling you on the phone. What's the question that they all ask? What's your rate? Yep, click. Next guy. What's your rate? Click. And he realized he'd become a commodity. And he's like, I gotta do something about this. And so what he realized he needed to do is he had to position himself to be not a salesperson, but an expert. To position himself as an expert. And so he started to get publicity. Small radio station led to a bigger radio station, led to him getting on TV, led to his getting his own radio talk show, led to him being a regular on TV talking about credit issues and whatnot. And now what happened is people were calling and they weren't saying, "What's your rate?" They were saying, "Hey, you know, you're the expert. What do you think I should do?" He said what he found was people would come to his office and they would sit there as he was talking and they felt privileged just to be in the room. With him. Because they'd seen him on TV. They'd seen him on radio. They'd seen him. You know, I've got a real estate client where one of the ways he leverages his publicity is as part of his marketing sequence, he just sends a bunch of articles that have been stapled together, and that's part of a sequence. Boy, a lot of people buy. If you're good enough for the Wall Street Journal or the Philadelphia Business Journal. And so This helps get rid of working long crazy hours, worrying about competition, being afraid to raise your prices, because you stop being a salesperson and you start being an expert. Stop being a salesperson, start being an expert. And here's good news for you. Some of you are like, "Well, I'm not— I can't really say I'm an expert." Well, here's the good news. You may not be the foremost expert, but you know more about what you do than I know, more than that journalist knows. And so the good news is to get publicity, you don't have to have the number one product or service. You don't have to be the most knowledgeable expert. You don't have to have written a book. You know, it's great if you have, but many people, many, many people get started without doing that. You don't have to have gotten publicity before. You know, every brain surgeon, okay, well, even that brain surgeon who went through years of training at one point was a total fraud. Because he had to look somebody in the eye who was breathing and said, "I'm a brain surgeon. I'm going to operate on you." Even though he had never done it in his life. So at some point, you know, if you have been in what you do for more than 6 months and you answer questions for people, you know, they talk to you, they email you, you have information. You're an expert. You don't need a PR firm. They charge about $5,000 a month. You don't need that. You don't have to have a fancy press kit. And you don't have to wait until you're quote "ready." George didn't wait until he was ready. And you just have to have that leap of faith and get started. And the other good thing is, you may be relieved to know, you don't have to have something profound or even important to say. I mean, look at Paris Hilton and all the publicity she gets. Okay? And you don't have to be a good writer because there are templates, there are ways of doing it. But here, what do you need? You need to decide. You need to decide to be famous. And only you can do that. Have you made that decision? That people will know who you are in your niche, in your industry? You know, that you're going to get started. And it's real important, so this is an important part of this, and so this is— I know some of you want to get on your feet. I want to ask you right now to stand up. Stand up real quick. We gotta get this taken care of. Come on, let's go people, let's go, we gotta roll. I'm on a time and you're on— okay, now raise your right hand. Repeat after me. On my honor, I promise to do my best To help other people by making myself and my business more famous. Now shake somebody's hand and congratulate them. Awesome. Awesome. All right. Decided to help other people by making yourself more famous. So we're going to do that. How do we do that? We do it by knowing what's important to the media. For radio, what are they looking for? What's a TV producer, radio producer looking for? They want, it begins with an R, ratings. They want ratings. What that magazine wants is readers. You're gonna need to show them how you can help them do that. You're gonna do it by giving them a hook. It's kind of like if you're flipping around and you see Oprah says, "How to be an automatic millionaire on the next." Oprah. David Bach actually learned from us after he did his Finish Rich series all about hooks. He created that book and it's a great title. It's a perfect example of a hook. I'm gonna give you some strategies for creating them. You need a good one-page pitch. That can be an email with at the bottom of an email a nice one-page pitch. Here's the exciting thing. You are just one publicity hook away from getting anything you want. Just one publicity idea away from getting anything you want. What's the secret though? How do we figure out what that hook should be? Actually, there are many hooks that can work for you. What you want to do is you want to only use proven formulas for fame. Proven formulas. Okay? You want to look at the kinds of stories that are being done by the media that you want to get covered, and then just give them that formula. So for example, here's one. One is to tie in with a specific time of year. You know Pizza Hut gets more publicity during the month of the Super Bowl than any other time? Because that's when people are thinking about pizza. How about you? I want you to right now to write down a time of year. When is everyone thinking about your topic? Write that down. That is probably a very good publicity hook. Now, somebody who, again, remember this idea of— I'm gonna show you examples of people who had a much tougher road than you. Okay, you're promoting what you have. How would you like to be marketing yourself as a dream interpreter? Okay, I mean, like, you know, how do we know if she's right? Okay? Well, that's the problem that Lori Lowenberg kind of, you know, has is that, you know, there's people out there. It's not like there's any recognized, certified place that the public knows about. And yet she came to me and she had done radio, but she wanted to get on national TV. She wanted to go to another level. And I said what I just said to you. Great thing is you're just one publicity hook away from getting whatever it is you want. And so what we did, and in fact at the back of this, at the very last page, you'll see her one-page pitch. She emailed the producers and this is the one page within the email that she had. Halloween is around the corner. Had any good nightmares lately? Tonight 14 million American adults will have a nightmare. Half of them won't be able to get back to sleep. Now I want you to remember that statistic, 14 million. This statistic almost doubles during Halloween. Find out why nightmares are actually good for you. Remember that idea of turning the myth on its head? Okay. Nightmares are the most important dreams of all. 5 most common warning symbols. This is kind of an interesting hook down one of the bullets. Why do Republicans have more nightmares than Democrats? Okay? And so you see this one-page pitch. Well, as a result of this, what happened was the producer of The View really liked that and went ahead and booked her. Now, the formula for The View is having fun with the hosts, making them look good. Okay? Unless you're Rosie O'Donnell. You know, okay, and let's just double-click on— let's click on that and we'll give a play a clip of that if you can.

Nightmares are freaky, scary, and sometimes just plain bizarre. But did you ever wonder what your bad dreams really mean? Well, we're finding out right now from the founder of thedreamzone.com. Lori Quinn Lowenberg. Welcome, Lori.

Thank you, Sally.

Okay, we've all had scary dreams, nightmares, from time to time. What causes them, and are they a reflection of what's going on in our daily life?

Well, actually, our dreams do reflect our daily life. So what you do today, you will dream about tonight. But nightmares, however, the dark side of dreaming, they're trying to get our attention. They are alerting us to something that is wrong in our life. Perfect. So, and it went on. But here she is getting on there. Then another producer finds out about her. Remember this idea of publicity multiplies? And now you'll get a sense of what that segment on Good Morning America looked like. Go ahead and click on that.

There's a new study out which shows that 14 million of us are having a nightmare.

Where'd that number come from? From. Okay, now, Good Morning America, I believe, does verify these things. But do you see how it's set up? We've set up the show. We've given that busy producer what they wanted— a reason they can go home early. We've— in that one-page pitch, we've given them the segment. All right, go ahead.

Every single night, 14 million people thrashing around. And for instance, last night Felicity Huffman, who plays Lynette on Desperate Housewives, dreams that in fact she's being handed a gun by her friend who is suicidal. Lori Quinn Lohenberg is the author of So What Did You Dream Last Night? founder of dreamzone.com, is joining us this morning with some tips to understand our dreams and nightmares. But I want to just play a little of the clip we all saw last night.

Take a look.

I'll give you a screwing.

Now what's going on here? ABC is using her to promote their own TV show, which actually is a great hook for you. What is a TV show that you could tie in with? What's a movie that you could talk about how it's inaccurate or, you know, to tie in with? And by the way, how many of you saw how They introduced her. They showed her book. They said, "Founder of thedreamzone.com." Okay? And let's go ahead and just see.

There it is. It was the dream zone. —beginning, her head was down on the table. And Laura, you have said the main thing to know is that a dream like that is not a dream about suicide. It's a dream about changing your life. Your dreams are problem solvers first and foremost.

So now we're at a talking head interview. This is the formula for Good Morning America. OK? All right. Now, what she did is on her website, she leveraged the publicity. If you notice, it says in the copy— this is why we're talking about publicity and sales— "My dream techniques are so effective that I've been featured on Good Morning America, The View, CNN, Jane Magazine, The Seattle Times, and thousands of radio appearances." And you see her there. So now let me ask you a question. You get a dream, you're dying to know what it means. You get on the web, you start searching, you start seeing some crazy people with long hair, and you're just like, you know what? But now you go to this site and whoa, she's been on Good Morning America. She's been on The View. Now she maybe charges 4 times as much. Are you, but now are you more comfortable buying from her? Of course you are. Well, what, let's, how do we apply this formula for fame to your business? What time of year can you tie in with? Now we asked you that before. How many have, anybody here have a good idea for what you could tie in with? What could you tie in with, Jim? April 15th. Tax time. Yep. Financial CPA, tax time. Perfect. How about anybody here? Jim? Spring. Spring. Real estate. Okay. Absolutely. Very good. Here's another idea for you to think about. Instead of getting publicity around yourself, get the media to do a story about one of your customers. All right? One of your customers may be a lot more interesting than you. Okay? For example, this is a publication, O'Dwyer's PR Service Report. How many are familiar with O'Dwyer's PR Service Report? Yeah, nobody. And that's because this is my industry publication. This is for PR people. I bet you have an industry publication. Okay? That I probably am not familiar with. Well, what happened— and I want you to— by the way, very, very important. I'm giving you national examples here because it's harder to get national than local. It's harder to get national than trade and industry-specific media. And you really should be getting local. You should be getting in your industry. Maybe that's all you need. But the techniques are still the same. I wanted to get in O'Dwyer's PR Service Report. One of our most famous clients and success stories is Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hanson. With Chicken Soup for the Soul. Way back before anybody had heard about them, they were wandering around Book Expo with their credit cards maxed out, trying to figure out how they were gonna take this chicken soup idea someplace. And they began with us right off the bat when their book came out and did lots and lots of interviews month after month. Gave us a great quote. And, you know, we wanted the world to know, hey, we helped Chicken Soup for the Soul. So we pitched a story. Actually, I did a couple things. We involved giving an award. And you'll notice it says, "Nine ways to get book publicity. Chicken Soup authors share tips on how to promote book." It doesn't say Steve Harrison shares the tips. But guess who wrote the tips? All with their approval. But the point is that one of those in there, it says, "Be sure to get listed in radio TV interview report." And it lists the phone number, okay, as a tip. This is total endorsement, all right? And yet it's part of a story. Now, for a number of reasons and different things that came out of this PR strategy, in this unknown publication, it was worth over $1 million to me and my business. And it cost nothing. Maybe a dollar in those days. This was before email. We sent something off. So here's another idea for you. How about a trend? Write down an idea for a trend. What is going on in your industry? What's going on in your industry that other people don't know about? Something that's happening faster. More and more people are doing X. Fewer and fewer people are doing Y. Let me tell you about what happened with us. Back a number of years ago, we were having a tough time trying to find an assistant. You know, and we were Running all these ads in the Philadelphia Inquirer, all these classified ads, and we get all these phone calls from people who could barely speak English. And it was just like, wow, this is not working out. So then I had heard that it was possible, there was somebody that was selling a billboard that you could put something up in downtown Philadelphia for a week for like, oh, maybe like $700, and you could have a billboard. And I thought, you know what, this is a great guerrilla marketing type thing to do. So we ran this whole billboard in downtown Philly. Well, it bombed. Zero leads. Okay? And so then I'm thinking, "Geez, what are we going to do?" I said, "You know, I'm always saying to people, 'You can have anything you want if you just position yourself to be famous.' So let's make publicity the solution." Well, I pitched to the Inquirer, I said, "Do a story about a trend that's hurting small business." You know, that it's so hard now for every— you know, the unemployment rate is so low that it's hard for small businesses to really find great people. And do a story about this company. They did a billboard and it still didn't work. Well, sure enough, they run the photo of our billboard on the front page of the business section. Okay? Again, now what's here is great. They've got the photo, I've got my phone number, all right? And this, what did I pay for this after spending thousands of dollars advertising? This cost me nothing. And now I was in the front page of the business section. Guess what? I wasn't just in front of people now who were looking for a job who had been laid off 5 times. These are people who are happily employed. They're reading through the paper like, "Wow, I think I'd like to work for a creative company like this." We were able— we got more than 100 inquiries about the job in one week and were able to make an offer that week. You can have anything you want if you just position yourself to be famous. And by the way, sometimes you might want to go ahead and share your failures. It was kind of a neat thing that they liked the idea that, hey, you know, that we'd run this billboard and even that hadn't worked. Another key point is to offer some really unique tips on how to do something they want to do. Alright, if you're in real estate, don't say, "Great way to sell your house quickly is to get it painted." You know, give something, a better tip than that. Like, do a mailing in the area and, you know, give something. Another thing is to think about is to do something with the audience. For example, this one page says, "Never go on a blind date again. This man's system replaces dating services." Now look at the subhead. Have him match up your entire studio audience live in minutes. Well, that subhead got him booked on Oprah, and he was the only guest for the full hour. He said, I can't believe it. I got millions of dollars worth of publicity just from this copy. This is not Rocket science. Just need a good one-page pitch written and giving them what they want. Here's a fun thing. Election year. We've got election year coming up now. This is another formula, okay, is to comment on each of the candidates regarding your area of expertise. So now, okay, let me give you another example. A ghostwriter. Why would Fox News or any show ever want to interview a ghostwriter? I mean, for those of you who want to do a book, you might want to hear about a ghostwriter. But why would the masses ever want to hear an interview with a ghostwriter? That's a pretty niche thing. Well, Mahesh Grossman is a ghostwriter. One of the things we kind of showed him was this strategy in training him on getting publicity. And if you can move the cursor just down a little bit, but click, just click on that screen there. Move it up a little bit. Okay, go ahead. Just click on that.

All right, 14 minutes before the top of the hour. These days it seems like every presidential candidate needs to write a book as part of their campaign process.

It's an easy— This is his first time on national TV. See if you can tell.

Easy way to get pub. Yeah, and apparently it's much easier than I thought when I tried to write a book and it didn't work. Why? Well, because our next guest says that most aren't even written by the candidates themselves. He's the author of Write a Book without lifting a finger, ghostwriting guru Mahesh Grossman. He joins us now from Mountain View, California. Good morning. Good morning. So ghostwriters are behind apparently most of the candidates' books.

Almost all of them. The exception would be Wesley Clark and Dennis Kucinich.

All right, so let's go down the list. You say that Howard Dean is pretty honest about the fact that he has some help in terms of what he writes.

No, no, no. Howard Dean is the worst of them all. He didn't thank anybody. He has no acknowledgments to his book. His book was written by Ian Jackman, who writes James Carville's books. Uh, he has no acknowledgment section to his book at all.

So, you know, you get a sense. Now, did you notice how they introduced him? They called him the ghostwriting guru. He now has that on his website forever. Fox News calls him the ghostwriting guru. Again, you're looking at the website, you're seeing maybe he charges more money than other people, but hey, who am I gonna go with? Okay? That's what one of the many things that publicity does for you. Now, alright, here's another guy. A dentist. How do we get a dentist on Fox News? By using a formula for fame. In fact, one you already saw. Let's click on that.

Welcome back, everybody. Our next guest here says when picking a president, consider their pearly whites, their teeth. Joining us is Dr. Chris Kammerer. He's a founding member of the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry.

And, Doctor, good to see you. Hey, nice to meet you, Mike.

Thank you. You know, not since George Washington's dentures has there been this much discussion about presidential teeth.

I don't think any of them have wooden teeth, but let's get right into it. You say you can pick a president maybe by looking at their teeth. Absolutely. Let's start with the president of the United States right now, George Bush.

Typically they say the Republicans, one of the charges they level against them is they're too white and too straight. Yes. I'm here to say that's not true. Just take a look at their teeth. Now what we've got here is we've got some teeth that are, that are actually a little bit crooked. Yeah. And they're duller than a party at Al Gore's house.

I mean, oh, I'm sorry, but you're not saying he's crooked because his teeth are crooked.

No, no, no. He's, uh, he's, he's got a characteristic here of grinding intensity. I mean, this is a man that, that, uh, very intense, and he's grinding his teeth down. I wish he would stop.

But he could go get fake teeth like veneers and things like that. What would that say about him?

That would take 20 years off his appearance, and they say that he's aged as a president. That would be one way of reversing the clock.

Okay, he could never do that during his presidency.

That would just— well, I think that would draw—

you couldn't do it during the presidency, could you? No. That would—

I mean, he— yeah, he absolutely He absolutely could. I mean, it would make a statement that— But people would go, "Oh, look, he's trying to be fake." Beyond being fake, there are health reasons for restoring his mouth. He's losing tooth structure. All that clenching and grinding, his teeth are being ground down to nothing. Dang.

What about Vice President Dick Cheney? He's got kind of— well, some people say it's a sneer.

It's a sneer. He's kind of got the same thing going on. He's got a very dull smile. He's wearing these teeth down as well. So, and look at this. Where are his back teeth? He needs a complete rehabilitation of his teeth. It's not just a cosmetic issue. He's losing his—

Do you see how you take a formula for fame, you apply it, you make it entertaining. Here's my question. Can you at least get on your local TV? Can you at least get on your local radio? You know, absolutely. You can have anything you want if you just position yourself to become famous. What you saw from that example is make your story visual for TV. Even works great for magazines. You know, he suggested that he do that segment. You know, show the pictures. We had a real estate professional who is Barb Schwartz, who started the whole home staging, one of the early people to really start home staging.. And got on Twenty20 by saying, "Let's do a makeover right on Twenty20." Incredible things happened. You saw a before and an after. The couple wanted to sell their house for $400,000. They were told that they probably couldn't. The house was staged, and you literally saw people come in and somebody make an offer. From that, she reached 5.9 million people. She would have paid $729,930 if she advertised. Of course, she paid nothing. 10-time credibility multiplier. You know, a PR firm would tell you that that exposure would be worth 7.29, 10 times what you would have paid for advertising because of the implied endorsement. And she got tons of emails. She got 2,300 requests in the first hour alone. She was discovered by an editor from John Wiley. She received a big advance for her book. And that segment, as many of these segments, became really like an evergreen sales tool. For her. Now, there are two things that I find when I'm training people that kind of comes to mind. Some people say, "Well, geez, I couldn't handle that kind of response right now." Well, hey, they're just emails. You know, raise your price. If you're doing a lot of manual labor, just raise your price. It's amazing. Once you've been on local TV or in a major magazine, they understand why you're busy. I mean, I used to— we used to be doing all this calling and all this promotion And we stopped the calling. We went with a recorded message because people could see the publicity we were getting. They understood why we couldn't answer the phone. Another fear that happens is people are like, "I don't want to get on. I get a little tongue-tied." You know Mahesh, that was his first time. He was a little rough. Hey, you're gonna be rough. Do a small station first. But here's something else to keep in mind, and that is that you're not really going to totally screw up because they're trained to make you feel comfortable. That's what they do. They interview you. They're trained to make you feel comfortable. And you know your topic better than they do. You know your topic better than they do. You can start small. Now, let me ask you a question as a hook idea. Is there something in your business that other people think is really, really hard to do, but you know It's not that hard. Maybe it's making $50,000 in real estate. Well, other people just can't see that, but you can. Or maybe it's getting a mortgage if you've got a bankruptcy. You know you can do that, but other people don't think you can. That's a great publicity hook. And one of the things I know is that anybody, all of you, can get publicity if you just decide to and apply smart things. Now let's be pessimistic. Publicity is money in the bank. And here's why. Let's just do the math and let's do some pessimistic assumptions. Let's just say you get one piece of publicity. Just one. Could be a radio show, could be a local newspaper, local TV. Let's say you get 6 new customers. How much is that worth to you? To get 6 new customers? Actually, write a number in there. Write a number. How much is that worth? 6 new customers. And let's assume that now, because you can show and make mention of an article And let's assume that we leverage the publicity and your closing percentage increases 1%. So you get 6 new customers, but your closing percentage whenever you're speaking, selling, or internet marketing, it goes up 1%. Now, for a year. So, because it's now part of your sequence, it's now on your web copy. What's that worth to you? Interested in a number. Can we hear a volunteer to kind of share what you would calculate on these pessimistic assumptions, what number would it be worth? $1,500. Okay, how about anybody else? At least $20,000. Okay. $100,000. Now let's look at return. How much does it cost you, you know, once you know what you're doing, to send out an idea for a story? Nothing. Phenomenal return. Phenomenal return. Now, remember I mentioned to you that there was— again, I'm just trying to give you this sense how you can do this. No question. And I told you I was going to tell you about somebody who was like a total fraud. And this person had no right whatsoever to get publicity because they had never done what they said they were going to do and no track record. You know, you at least have been in business. Well, I can say that and end with this story because that person was me. All right. Now, and this story is gonna kinda take you through everything I've just shown you about how you can have anything you want if you just position yourself to be famous. Because, you know, we all— there are things that we like to do, you know, outside of work, things that we enjoy, you know, doing. And for me, one of the things that I really am passionate about is William Shakespeare. Now, just for a show of hands, How many of you are really, really, really passionate about William Shakespeare? Okay, not a real big audience for that. Well, for me, it began 10th grade English class. Mrs. Ortman showed us a video of Sir Derek Jacobi and the Royal Shakespeare Company doing Hamlet. I was blown away. I thought, "Man, this language is incredible." And I'd go home, I'd put my robe on, I'd look in the mirror, and I would start reciting these soliloquies because they kind of gave me something to cathart with. And, you know, it's like when I had too much homework, I was able to sit there at my desk and say, "How weary still, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world. Fie on it!" Or when that girl that I was in love with blew me off and turned me down for the prom, I remember walking home with my book bag over my shoulder And I was able to say, "Frailty, thy name is woman." Okay, I was a little different. But I loved it. And I said to myself, "You know what? Someday I'm going to play that part live on stage." Well, I'd love to tell you that I went off and I studied classical acting. I didn't. I went to college, majored in English. That's about as far as I got. Turn 30, I'm driving to work, and I Thought, wow, you know, I just feel so blessed. Helped so many people get publicity. I love who I'm working with, love what I do. But it's like I heard that little voice that said, well, yeah, but you haven't played Hamlet. We all have our issues, right? Well, I go to a Presbyterian church outside Philadelphia that I really love. Well, guess what? They have a little drama group that does a show once a year. Guess what show they're going to do? Hamlet. I had encouraged them a little bit. Well, you know, the thing is now, the thing is, I knew a year ahead of time. I decide to go into training. I hadn't really acted much. I mean, I had played the Frog Prince in Alice in Wonderland, but that was the extent of my resume. I know they're going to have people from around the area auditioning. I get an acting coach. I decide to show up to that audition having memorized, being completely off book. Get a voice coach who teaches me to breathe and speak like this. Well, to make a long story short, I go to that audition and I put everything into it. I'm completely off book. And I got the part. Thank you. And that's when my problems really began. You see, because along the way I'd kind of shut I said, "Listen, this is great, guys. I know you usually only do like 2 or 3 shows usually, but you should do like 10 performances of this. This is the greatest play in the English-speaking language. People are going to come from miles." And they said, "Listen, Steve, no offense, but who's going to come to a church basement and sit on folding chairs and hear language that was written 400 years ago And no offense, but who's going to come, really, Steve, see you play Hamlet? A lady even said, "Hey, I'll do ticket sales." She figured this would be the easiest gig that she would ever have. I said, "Tell you what then, guys. I'll do the marketing. I'll do the PR." The problem is I didn't have much time. I had to work on my sword fighting. I had a business to run. I had to play the part. Much like you. You're busy. You don't have much time. Didn't have much of a budget at all. Okay? And I think, you know, I'm always telling people publicity can solve any problem. You can have anything you want if you just position yourself to be famous. Well, first thing I did is contact the local media and said, "Do a story about this businessman. We all have dreams that we want to fulfill someday. This businessman is finally getting around to fulfilling a lifelong dream of playing Hamlet." Got some publicity. But then I knew I had to get my target market. And each of you have a target market, places where you know you've got to be. For me, I had to get in front of the artsy-fartsy people, the people who would come see an unknown play Hamlet because they love Shakespeare. That's the Philadelphia Weekly. Now, if you call up the Philadelphia Weekly and say, "Hi, we're a church drama group and we'd love to have you write us up," they're going to say, "I'm sorry, we only review professional productions." click. So what I did was I looked at the formula. I had a freelancer do a little research, write to famous people who had played Shakespeare at some point in their life, and then wrote a letter saying, you know, this guy's going to be playing— on my behalf, I'm going to be playing Hamlet, can you give me one piece of advice for acting Shakespeare? I then said to the Philadelphia Weekly, do a story. Well, here's what happened. I end up getting— this is what I end up getting. I end up getting feedback and photos from Dustin Hoffman, Mel Gibson, Patrick Stewart, Emma Thompson, Ben Kingsley, and Charlton Heston. How appropriate, with his gun. Okay? I then say to the Philadelphia Weekly, "Do a story about an actor." Now notice I didn't say the truth. Rank amateur. "Do a story about an actor who's playing Hamlet, but do the story about what these famous actors said to him and what advice they gave him. Well, the story ran, "Hamlet seeks advice from past princes." How many think I look better with the beard? Yeah, my mother would agree with you. Well, the story runs, and all of a sudden you can see at the bottom of the article it says how to order tickets for $8, has the phone number, the plug right in there. Well, people are calling the lady who had volunteered for ticket sales, thinking this would be the easiest thing in the world. She comes in. Look, this is crazy. She says, I've got to get some help with this. I mean, you know, my phone is just ringing off the ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding ling. I mean, people are calling up and they're all saying, I want to see Steve Harrison play Hamlet. Well, you know, I'd love to tell you that the actor in me is thrilled to tell you that every night I played that part, it was. I got a standing ovation. And it wasn't just because they were glad it was over. Okay? But the publicity guy, the marketing guy in me is even happier to tell you that every single night was a full house. What's your full house? What's your full house? What's the dream that you have for yourself, for your company, for your kids? What is that dream? Because one of my favorite Bible verses is that unto him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine. That's amazing. When we take that leap of faith spiritually, and we take that leap of trust, and in a publicity context, when you take that leap of faith, that leap of trust, and say, you know what, I've got something to offer. 'Cause you do. You've got something to offer. Publicity will bring you and, More people calling you determined to do business with you, hoping you're available. More word of mouth and referrals. More freedom. Less time having to cold call or spend time on the phone with people who aren't prospects. Higher fees. Instant credibility. Your own show. Bigger deals. Celebrity dealmakers now calling you. More customers with less selling on your part. Higher closing percentage. More publicity in the form of radio, TV, print, online. Reputation as the expert in your field. Anything you want and more. And again, remember, you can have anything you want if you just position yourself to be famous.

Thanks very much. Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow, and the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever, designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time. This free gift comes with almost $20,000 in pure money-making information for free, just for saying maybe. You can get this gift from Dan right now at NoBSLetter.com. Not only do you get the $20,000 gift, you also get a subscription to 2 marketing newsletters that will be hand-delivered by the mailman to your mailbox each and every month. One from Dan Kennedy, and one from me, Russell Brunson. To get this gift in your subscription, go to NoBSLetter.com right now.