Press Coverage

Hey, I'm Cameron Herald, if you are following me. You probably already knew that though. Have you ever landed press coverage for your company and gotten nothing from it? I remember years ago. This is back in 2003, we got our company 1-800-got junk on Oprah and not much happened. I mean, we had a five or six minute piece on the Oprah Winfrey show and our phones rang like crazy for two days. But it didn't really move the needle on the company. And I was thinking about it this morning. I was in a room on Clubhouse with a bunch of PR experts from around the world and four or five hundred people listening. And I decided to chime in a little bit and share some of the secrets of what I wrote in my book Free Prints. All the secrets on how we landed press coverage at 1-800-got junk. We landed 5,200 stories about our company in six years. The problem with landing press is that it really doesn't move the needle on your company unless you know what to do with the press coverage that you're landing. So I just want to demystify that a little bit. I'll try to answer those as well. I'm doing a podcast interview in about eight minutes for my second in command podcast. So I thought I would just share this quickly before I hop onto the second in command podcast to interview someone today. So think of every story that you land about your company, whether it's Forbes magazine or Fortune magazine or the Oprah Winfrey show or a podcaster who interviews you, or a blog or online ezine, etc. All of the press coverage that you generate, let's say you've generated five stories about your company. I want you to visualize each of those stories as being a log. It's a log. Like you have a bunch of logs and you can start a fire. Well, if you have five stories about your company, you've really got five logs. And they're all just sitting there. They don't do anything. You have to light some logs on fire for the them to do something. Stick with me because I'm going to talk about what you do after you get the fire going as well. So every story that you get about your company is just a log. Now what you want to do is light it on fire. So every story has to be linked to your media page or your press page of your website. If you go as an example to the CameronHarrow.com website or the CooAlliance.com website, go to the press or media pages. There and you'll see how I'm linking those to my websites gives me massive SEO link authority. So that's number one. You also send out all of the press that you get three to five times a year on Twitter, three times on Facebook, three times on LinkedIn, share it on your Facebook pages, your LinkedIn pages, etc. I also get all of my employees to share my press coverage with their social media feeds as well. So all of my employees share our key press on their Facebook and their LinkedIn. Once a quarter, I email my customers all of the press hits that I've been getting so my customers can see that press coverage as well. And by the way, when they go to my website, they're now pixeled so they get all the retargeting ads using Google and Adrolls. Retargeting. Once a quarter I send out my press links to my speakers bureaus so they can see what's happening. And that's kind of how you're lighting the logs on fire. So when I was a kid we would make fires and the cool thing was you could pour gas on the fire to really make it light up. So now how do you light gas or pour gas on these five logs that are now on fire? Well, you buy traffic to those stories, so you push more and more of your potential customers to see those stories on your website. And again, they're getting pixeled for retargeting as well. So that's the power of how to generate free press coverage. And what to do with that press coverage is to think of it all. In my book, Free pr, we talk about the digital trifecta and that's really where we get in even deeper about not only how to land stories, how to build your own in house PR team. Why PR firms mostly suck and they don't really do what they say they're going to do unless you're big enough and can really truly afford them. It's just easier to do PR in house. And then it's really how to what to do with the prostitute generating. So take a look at the book Free pr. There's some good tools in there. And also secondly, keep your eye open for a course that I'm finally launching after 12, 13 years called Invest in youn Leaders. It is launching on Monday. The URL is live. So if you're, if you're kind of on this and listening, do a quick sneak peek on it as well. The Invest in youn Leaders course is all of the soft skills that every manager and leader needs. To excel in their job. So it's stuff on situational leadership, coaching, time management, problem solving, interviewing, hiring, effective meetings, etc. I'm really giving away all the key secrets of how I've built all the companies that I've built and and it's kind of the second best thing to pay the 50 grand view that hasn't told you, but it's a great way to grow all of your managers and leaders internally. So keep your eye open for invest in your leaders. But hopefully those tools or the tips I gave you on free press coverage and how to generate sales from it are helpful. Because the story won't generate sales. It's what you do with the press coverage that you get that will really make a huge difference in your business. Hope that's helpful.