3 EASY Steps To Get FREE PR

Imagine you get on a plane heading back home, you pick up the In Flight magazine and you see a positive story about yourself and your company. As you start to read it, your seatmate who's reading the Wall Street Journal turns to you and points to the article he was just reading and says, isn't this you? You look over and see a picture of yourself in another positive article about you and your business. When you get off the plane, you get a call from a friend who says, hey, you're all over social media. What's going on? What is going on is you've learned how to get free positive PR for yourself and your company. Now, how would you feel if over a six year period you were able to have over 5200 stories in the media about you and your company and they were all positive? That's exactly what Cameron Herrel did and what he's going to teach you to do in this 10 minute talk. Cameron is a longtime member of Genius Network and is known worldwide as a business growth guru, speaking at events, writing books and heading up his own mastermind group called COO alliance, which helps chief operating officers grow their businesses. He's also helped build $200 million plus companies before he was 42 years old. What he did was so impressive, it's become a case study at the Harvard Business School. When Cameron talks, people listen. And when they listen, they get results. Cameron's message is titled three Easy Steps to Free pr. Please help me welcome my dear friend and Cameron Hill.

All right, so how does the media make money? Selling advertising. Selling advertising, right. They do not make money by selling their magazines or selling their newspapers or selling you readership or listening to their blogs. They sell money by advertising. And the only way they get advertising is by having really good content. You need to reframe. You're not asking them to write about you, you're doing them a favor by giving them a story. Because every day every single writer in the world wakes up first thing in the morning and thinks, what the hell am I going to write about today? So today you're going to learn about the three easy steps to free pr. You're going to get a little bit more than that as well. Number one is know your angle. The angle is the story, headline in the newspaper or magazine. Okay? It's what it's about. That's your angle. Every business has about five core angles. We can talk about those later. They're also in the book free PR that you've got. That is all the trade secrets, the trade secrets by the way, started as the PR Bible internally that I was asked to write for grasshopper.com they were one of my clients 10 years ago. I wrote the initial version of Free PR was their manual on how to train in house PR people. So the catchy headlines is what you're starting with. Every angle has a maximum of five bullet points. You don't hit the media with 30 things, you hit them with five core things. So each story has a story headline with five core points. That's step one. Step two is to know your target audience. Every outlet is different. The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Business Magazine, Forbes Magazine, Fortune Magazine, Inc. Success, Entrepreneur, USA Today, Money Section, Entrepreneur on Fire. Those are all different business outlets. They all have very different audiences. You need to think about how to position your story for that audience. And it's very different. When we landed 5,200 stories about our company in the media that was prior to any social media even existing. I left as the chief operating officer at 1-800-GOT junk. 12 years ago we went from 14 employees to 3100 employees in six years. We had no marketing budget for the first four. We did it all with PR. Step number three is pick up the phone. Everyone else in the world is sending news wires and press releases and emails. Think about this today. How many emails did you get today? Alex? How many roughly? Maybe 30. Maybe 30. Barbara? Couple hundred. Ryan, how many phone calls did you get today, Alex? None. None. How many phone calls did you get today? I don't know. Don't know. How many phone calls did you get? 3. Right? 100 emails, 3 phone calls. So what's your average on getting through to somebody if you phone them? Very, very high. What's your average on getting through to them on email? Very, very low. Be careful when you phone people though. Don't pitch them too hard because every writer and every journalist is a very quiet, analytical, more amiable person. And we come at them with too much high energy, we scare the shit out of them. So you actually come at them a lot quieter, a lot softer. And here's how my pitch goes. Do you have two minutes? I think I have a great story for you. They're all going to say yes. Match their tone and energy and bring them up a little bit. When a salesperson approaches the media, no means yes. And I want you to think about this for a second. PR is not a marketing function. It's a sales function. So if you know the three core angles, how do you build an in house PR team? First part is to remember that. Again, marketing is not a subs. Sorry. PR is not a subset of marketing. Because if a marketing person phones a journalist and is told no, they're going to run away and hide. If a salesperson calls a journalist and hears no, we think, I know, that's their desk. I know how to get ahold of them. They just haven't really understood me. I'll call them in three weeks, right? Salespeople don't take no for an answer. When you're hiring a salesperson, you don't hire the sleazy salesperson, okay? You don't hire the Johnny salesperson. You hire somebody who's keen and who's eager. You hire somebody who likes to pick up the phone because again, this is a phone call role. You like to hire someone who can handle rejection because they will get rejected. They're going to make on average 30 to 35 phone calls a day. I'll do all my calls in the morning, people by day, paper by night. So you phone the journalist between 9 o' clock and 11 o'. Clock. They're probably thinking about what they're going to write about in the afternoon. They're on a deadline, they're not going to be able to take your call. They're going to be. They're busy. Phone them in the morning, say, hey, do you have two minutes? I think I have a good story for you. And they're probably going to say, yes. Hire someone who asks questions and listen. Because a salesperson has to understand their prospects. So you give them the angle, you give them the five bullet points and then you say, what do you think? And you let them lead the discussion. If they say, I hate it, you can either say, what do you hate about it? Or you say, how about angle number two? And you walk them through that story idea. Hire people that have the glass half full kind of mentality. They have to have positive energy, positive attitude. They have to actually remember like I did when I got 16 no's from the Canadian bureau chief, no, I'm busy. Hung up the phone. No, I'm busy. Hung up the phone. No, I'm busy. Hung up the phone. Canadian bureau chief from Associated press, finally, after 16 attempts, phoned me one morning and said, okay, what's the story idea? I felt like saying I'm really busy, to hang up, right? But you have to have that positive attitude. Hire somebody who's got good phone voice. Hire sign. I do all my first round interviews for PR people over the phone without seeing them, so I can actually know what they sound like over the phone to know whether they can engage. I only hire women to work for me in pr. I've had men, they're good. I hire women because they're great. Women get along better on the phone. They actually are going to get through the gatekeepers, if they still exist, better. Their phone voice will be better than a male. It's just better. You don't have to hire someone who is a writer. You're not looking to hire someone to write stories that's insulting to a journalist. The journalist writes stories. You give them the five bullet points. Even if you send a follow up email. Here's the angle, here's the five rough bullet points. What do you think? Let's talk. Let's get you on the phone with the CEO. Let them craft the story around that. It's insulting if you send them a whole story. That's their job. But you want somebody who can at least spell. Hire someone who can multitask because they're going to be busy. They're going to be pitching, they're going to be looking up story ideas, they're going to be finding out contact information. They're going to be doing follow ups, right? They're going to be working with marketing to leverage it and hire someone who understands the sales funnel so you can actually work the leads through the funnel. Make sure that your business is really camera ready. You want your offices to be camera ready. You want your vehicles to be camera ready. You want your team to be camera ready. The media is not going to say, hey, come. These are all clients that I've coached over the years or companies that I've built. But you need them to actually know where to stand, what their uniforms need to look like. The media is not going to say, hey, stand here or hey, have a big logo on your back. We had shirts made up for college pro painters 30 years ago that were obnoxious for one reason only. So the media could take our photos. And we showed franchisees where to stand with the sign in the background. Because the media's not going to say, let's get the sign in. We'd say, how about this as a photo? We trained people on that, right? We would shine the outsides of trucks, Armor all, the tires, Windex, the insides and outside of windows. And we create checklists to be completely camera ready. These systems work, but it's like a shovel. A shovel doesn't dig a hole. You actually have to pick up the phone and use this stuff. So I told you at the beginning, I was going to teach you the three easy steps to free PR and some more. And I have. You actually already know how to land a story. You just don't believe it yet. But I promise you, if you pick a media outlet, pick up the phone and call them, they're either going to say, yes, tell me the story, or no, I'm really busy. If they say, no, I'm really busy, say, well, how about I call you tomorrow or Tuesday? They're probably going to say yes to that. Practice with the small outlets first. Don't go after the New York Times or Forbes. Right. Practice with your local business journal. But I've been in the physical print edition of Forbes, the physical print edition of Fortune, the physical print edition of Ink Entrepreneur, American Airlines magazine. Every major newspaper has had me covered. Dallas Morning News, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, Wall Street Journal in the print editions. This shit works. We've been on Oprah, Dr. Phil 17 times, and it's all by picking up the phone. I did save a minute and 20 seconds for some Q and A because I don't like doing it before. And I agree with Joel. But I also want to honor and give some questions. So a couple quick ones. Great question. How do you get the list? It's actually in the book on how to get the list. It was also in my presentation, but I cut the slide. There's two major outlets you can buy from two or three. One is Cision, another is Media Atlas, and then also Muckrock. I like Cision. That's now owned, I believe, by PR Newswire Cision. They actually have the entire database of all the contact information. They have the emails, phone numbers, and if you're looking and they say, oh, you're not supposed to call the journalist, phone them. No one else is calling them anyway. By the way, here's a real pro tip for you. When you look at a magazine or a newspaper and they have a photo beside the photo, usually on the side is the photographer's name. Phone the photographer and say, hey, do you have two minutes? I think I have a good photo app. Because no one phones them except their mom. You will always get through to the photographer. They'll always say yes, because then they want to go to the editor and say, I got a good photo op. And the editor says, great, go do it. I'm too busy saying no to the 400 press releases I have to look at. Last question. Yep. So one of the things that really worked for us is we keep a list of favorite journalists that love the stories. Do you do that?

Yeah.

Keep a list of the journalists that like it and you can amplify it later. The other thing to remember is when you get the story, regardless of where it is, that's not going to make your doors Bing. What's going to happen is sharing it on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and everywhere else as well. So you have to amplify it.

Come on, back up. This is our ninth or tenth critique. No. Can you get an apple?

Nice.

I talked to Cameron before he started. I said, is there anything you want me to specifically focus in on? He said, no, give me everything you got. You want the bad first? I got one word longer. That's it. Let me tell you what he did right. This was. This was your best presentation.

Thank you.

Clearest. Did everybody understand what he was talking about? What did he tell us we can do? Hire only on the phone. Five bullet points. Be ready with the photos. Did you hear that? And say, well, I can do that. That's a great call to action. Those are all doable things. So specific, so clear. The opening question, how does the media make its money? Pretty much everybody can answer that through advertising. Great opening. The five bullet points slide. As soon as I saw those five bullets, we knew the visuals were going to be represented and we didn't need words. Your selection of visuals this time was the best I've ever seen. The pictures said it all. Can you do the same thing? Absolutely. Five bullets. Much better than writing five bullets in type. And then you gave us the three key angles. Is that correct?

Yeah. Know your angle, know the audience. Pick up the phone.

Pick up the phone. Do you know when he did that? 2:27. Did we know exactly what was going to happen from the get go. And you had all that time at the end to build. Thank you. I need that sticker.

You didn't need to. Michael Bernoff channeled me. He just came through.

Oh, he did. The Last slide was 7. 25. And I wrote then, longer, longer. Don't stop, give us more. And then he added a few more. Came back with the camera. Q and A. Do you want more? Pnr.

Pr.

You got a book? Give another hand. This was amazing.

Thank you.