3 Easy Steps To Free PR

A lot of my content I've covered is actually in the book Double Double, which was my first book that came out. You got a copy of Free pr, which is there as well. The reason I want to switch gears and talk about free PR for a second is this. I want to give you an example of one skill that I brought into a company as coo and how it can really supercharge a brand. Because sometimes we're a little nervous about bringing a COO into our company. I want you to think about, if you brought in a second in command into your business, what could they do to actually supercharge it? So I'm going to switch gears and go into some free PR for a second. So everybody stand up for a sec. Okay, so we think about the media, right? Bloggers, podcasters, tv, radio, newspapers, magazines, ezines, all of that stuff. If your business or you personally have never been covered at least five times in the press, I want you to sit down, okay? So everyone sitting has not had five pieces of media. If you've had 25 or less, sit down. Okay? So everyone here has had less than 25, less than 100, almost everybody. Less than 1,000. Both there, okay? So even at the two that are less than 1,000, we still at 1, 800, got junk, had 5,200 individual stories, and I left the year that Facebook was starting. Imagine what we could have done with 5,200 stories if I could have shared them three times on Facebook, five times on Twitter, five times on LinkedIn email lists. We didn't have any opportunity for amplification. I'm going to walk you through how to do this. And I've done this with company after company after company globally. I've worked with clients in 28 countries on six continents teaching PR as well as operational growth. This stuff really works. The first thing to recognize is how does the media make money? So how did media outlets make money? Advertising. Okay, why now? They don't make it off circulation, right? No one's paying for the blog or paying for the podcast episode, right? They make it off advertising. So why will people advertise? We advertise because they have a lot of listeners or viewers, right? Or readers. And if they have listeners or viewers or readers, companies will advertise there because they have that viewership or listenership. Well, the only way they'll get that viewership or listenership is if they have good content. So the clue, number one here is the media needs us because every day they need good content. In fact, every single morning Every single journalist sits up and thinks, what the heck am I going to write about today? Every writer, every journalist, every podcaster's first thing in the morning is what am I going to cover today? So you're actually doing them a favor by giving them a story. So I'm going to walk you through what I call the three easy steps to free priority. The first one is to know your angle. So every business has at least five core angles. So I'll think about Brad Wymart for a sec. So, Brad, you run a payroll process? Not payroll processing. A credit card processing company. What's a company? Give us like a one sentence. What do you do? Okay, so Brad Weimar, guy with a Mohawk, helps e commerce companies accept credit cards online. Okay, so you've got a story. That's the boring story. No one wants to talk about that. We don't. Right. No one actually wants to talk about picking up junk or painting houses. So how did we get 5,000 stories about picking up garbage? So what was your job before? You have a quitting something and starting this business story? Right. What would you do before this? Okay, so you did hardcore sales to this or how the Cutco. Didn't you do Cutco sales? How like somebody sold knives. Right. Is doing payroll, prior credit card processing. So there's a story there, right? About leaving something. That's the inspirational entrepreneurial story. And then you've got your hero's journey story. Right. Overcoming kind of this adversity and going through the trials and tribulations and coming out the other side. I'm sure you have tough times. Right? And then you have your story about how you're learning because you didn't know all this on your own. But it's a story about mastermind groups that we're in and how we're learning and sponging from Baby Bathwater and mastermind talks. And this is the third mastermind group I've seen you at. Right. War room Genius Network 4. Right. So how you've learned from other members of other groups and how you've shared and learned. And there's a story there. So you have to think about for your company, what are your four or five angles that you can talk about? Right. One of mine for the COO alliance is we have this unlimited number of groups for entrepreneurs, but no one was teaching the second in command how to actually grow the company. So we have that story. Then you need to come up with a headline. If you think about your angle when you. What would the headline be? Right. If they were Writing your story in Forbes magazine, what would the story angle be? And then I want you to think about the bullet points that are going to support that angle. So what points are you going to use to support the angle? But you only need five. You need to have five core bullets for each story. So if you have your overcoming adversity story, what are the five core points that you're going to communicate to that journalist? Step number two is to know your target. What I mean by know your target is to know your target audience of the media outlet itself. So let's say, for example, you're talking to Forbes magazine or Forbes Magazine online. I've been covered in the physical print edition of Forbes, the full page article about my Vivid vision concept. I've been covered in Forbes online a number of times. Very different target audiences. Fortune magazine is different from Forbes magazine is different from Inc Magazine, from Success Magazine, from Entrepreneur Magazine. I've been in all of those print editions. They're all very different viewers. And then you go to the Wall Street Journal or CNN Money or the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, Boston Globe. Again, all those places have covered us. Very different business audiences. And then you've got a podcaster like EO Fire or you've got John Le Dumas, you've got Jordan Harbinger. They're different. So you have to think about this audience. What do they care about so that I can not spin my story, but I can position my story for that audience so they'll care. Because when you're calling the journalist, you have to remember that when Bloomberg is covering you versus Entrepreneur Magazine, they have very, very different audiences, even though they're both print. And the last one is pick up the phone. This is Tyler who worked for us in PR. Tyler's the guy who got us 600 of our first stories. He's also the guy that got us on Oprah. We had a six minute piece on Oprah. We got us on Dr. Phil. We ended up on Dr. Phil 17 times. Tyler never sent an email to a single journalist. As his direct outreach, we taught Tyler to pick up the phone and his pitch was, hey, do you have two minutes? I think I have a good story for you. That was it. Every single morning, your PR person picks up the phone, contacts 20 people a day and says, hey, do you have two minutes? I think I have a good story for you. Because from 9 o' clock until 11 o', clock, every journalist is sitting at their desk wondering what to write about. Now think about this for a second. How many press releases or newswires do you think a journalist gets in a day? Hundreds. Right, hundreds. Or the news desk or the city desk or the editor. They're getting thousands. Why would you ever send something to a person who has to say no 900 times out of 1000 or 950 times out of 1000? Your chance of getting through to them is terrible. Your chance of getting a yes is horrible. It'd literally be like going to a bar and trying to hit on the pretty girl. And you're in a lineup of 1,000 guys to hit on the one pretty girl. Your odds just suck. Right? But if you've got like a three to one odd, then you got a reasonable odd. Except if you're me, right? So when you. How many times does your phone ring in a day? 50. Brian, how about you? 75 times in a day. How many times does your phone ring? Two maybe. Thomas, are you kidding? That's really funny. My phone might ring like once or twice a day, but I'll get 150 emails a day. So if my phone rings, there's a very, very high likelihood that I'm actually going to pick up your phone. Journalists are the same thing, by the way. If you ever phone a photographer and say, hey, do you have two minutes? I think I have a good photo op for you. They're always going to say yes, what is it? And every photographer's name is in all the pictures of every magazine and every newspaper they publish their name either on the vertical or on the horizontal right beside the picture. So just call and say, hey, is Bob Smith there, please? Sure, who is it? It's Kelly calling. I think I have a good photo op for them. Great. They put them right through. They have no idea how to stop it because no one's ever phoning the journalists or the photographers anymore. Twenty years ago we used to have to teach people to get like how to get past the gatekeeper. There aren't even gatekeepers at most of these companies anymore. Hire somebody who when they said no the first time, they take that as maybe. I called the Canadian bureau chief from Associated Press one day and I said, hey Tom, it's Cameron. Herald calling at 100 got junk. I think I have a good story for you. Do you have two minutes? He said, no, I'm busy. Hung up the phone. Now what would a marketer think? I shouldn't call, right? I don't want to call back. I might offend them. So I called the second day. Hey Tom, it's Cameron. I'M still busy. Click. A marketer would never phone that guy again. Sales guy's like, he picks up his phone all the time. This is awesome. Yesterday I called him at 9. Today I called him at 10. I'll try him at 3 in the afternoon on Tuesday. I call back, he goes, you're bothering me. I'm busy. Slam. Sales guy in me is like, this guy picks up the phone every single time. I'm so close to a yes. Seventeen phone calls over the period of six weeks, eight weeks, a couple of emails, a couple of letters that I sent in the mail. Nothing. Getting shut down. Getting shut down. Getting shut down. A marketing person by this point has completely stopped contacting Tom Cohen. Tuesday morning, the phone rings. I pick up the phone. Cameron Herald. Hey, Cameron, it's Tom Cohen calling Associated Press. What's this pitch you've got for me? I felt like saying I'm really busy, so I gave him the story. He goes, I'm going to be in Vancouver on Thursday. Have you got time for an interview? And I said, yeah, we'll clear our schedule. I get off the phone, I'm like, holy. The Canadian bureau chief from Associated Press is coming out to talk to us. So he's coming in, his flight's getting in at like 10 o' clock in the morning from Toronto to Vancouver. Who should pick up from our company from 100 garage, who should we send to go pick up Tom at the airport? Me, the coo, maybe Brian the CEO. That's who Tom would expect. We sent Tyler, but we sent Tyler in a full truck uniform, blue shirt, blue pants, brown belt, brown boots, 1, 800, got junk. Blue wig on, carrying a 1, 800, got junk Welcomes Tom Cohen sign. It's big, bad and obnoxious. Tom walks off the plane and starts laughing. Seeing Tyler with the blue clown we got. And Tyler's six' four as well. Now, what should we pick up Tom Cohen at the airport in what kind of vehicle? Yeah, not the limo, right? You pick him up in the junk truck. So we pick up Tom Cohen and we say to Tom, before you get in the truck, I need you to go change into these clothes. He's like, what are these? He goes, a junk uniform. We're going to haul junk. He's like, this is awesome. The Canadian bureau chief changes into his junk clothes in the bathroom. They go and do two quick junk removal jobs. Then he comes into the office, spends an entire day with us. We ended up in 170 newspapers on a single day the following week. That's Powerful stuff. And that was when we only had about 30 franchises. Now imagine if we could have taken all of those newspapers that were offline, by the way, not online newspapers, 170 physical print editions. We could have got PDFs, online links, shared them, put them on our press page, all the SEO link backs. Really, really powerful stuff. And that's because someone was used to saying no. So if you're building an in house PR team, you have to remember that public relations is not a subset of marketing, it is a subset of sales. You do not want to hire the Johnny Sleazy sales guy. You want to hire somebody who's keen, someone who can ask questions, someone who likes picking up the phone, someone who's okay with rejection, someone who's really good at asking enough questions and getting the journalist to tell you what they think of the story. You need somebody who sees the world as half full, somebody who's optimistic, somebody who has a great phone voice. I do all of my first interviews with PR people over the phone. I don't want to see them on Zoom, I want to hear them over the phone because that's how they're going to be pitching. And I want someone who can spell. But I'm not looking for a writer. Remember, you're not looking to hire a journalist. You're looking for someone who can phone a journalist, convey the energy in the story so the journalist can write the story. I want somebody who can spell and send out five bullet points in an email, not somebody who's writing stories. And you need someone who can multitask and someone who can understand the sales funnel. You also have to create branding and imaging. These are brands that I've helped build as well. You need to create branding and imaging behind you that that become photo friendly and press friendly. Now, there's an old saying that a shovel doesn't dig a hole. These systems I gave you work, but you have to pick up the shovel and use the shovel to dig a hole. You actually have to pick up these systems and use them to generate pr, but they absolutely work.