Evan Carmichael walks through PRLeads, a $99-per-month service that sends daily alerts when journalists need expert sources. He landed a Forbes feature by pitching a specific story about his outsourcing operations, and recommends starting with niche publications before targeting bigger outlets.
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Hi everyone, it's Evan Carmichael. I wanted to make a quick video today to answer a question from one of my readers, David, about a service I use called PRLeads. PRLeads is a media service that's gotten me into the New York Times and Forbes magazine and a whole bunch of other media outlets. And I wanted to make this quick video today to talk about how I use it and how you can use it too. So first, to David's question, he wrote on one of my blog posts, the PRLeads service looks interesting. So perhaps you can make a video using your own experience of the service to show us how it works or how we can use it. Best wishes, David. Now David is a loyal reader and also an active member in our forum, so I wanted to answer the question. What he's talking about is on the favorite tools section, these are all the tools that I use to grow my business. Under the growing your business section, I've created a link to PRLeads, and it's a service again that I use. And how it works, if you click on that link, basically what's going to happen is reporters sign up for this service and they're looking for experts to talk about the different stories that they're they're working on. So reporters will post all the different stories they're working on and say, "We need an expert who can talk about XYZ." And as entrepreneurs, we should be experts on our different subject matters. So you want to be able to open yourself up as the expert to talk about, you know, and help them with whatever story they're working on. So it's a service. It's $99 a month here. And what's going to happen is you'll get emails every day from reporters who are looking to potentially talk to you. So what it looks like, if I load up my email program, you'll get emails from a service called Profnet, and that's PR Leads. And you can see it'll come a couple times a day. So, you know, if you look, 3 from June 7th as an example. And you can sign up for different categories. For me, I signed up for the business category because that's most related to what I talk about. And if you click on the email, what it will show you is all the different stories that reporters are working on and they're looking for experts. There's different categories. So in this one, it's business, human resources, public relations, and it's all still related to entrepreneurship and business, which is what I'm interested in. And some of them will be from niche magazines. So this one here is, is human resources, culturally fit employees. The magazine is Benefit Selling. So if I was an HR consultant and I worked about, you know, getting the culture fit right at companies, this could be a really cool article for me to sign up for and talk to the reporter. The next one here is public relations. How do preachers rebound after public scandals? That's from CNN.com. So if I was in the PR business, this is a great opportunity to be able to get into CNN. So you wanna take a look at those different opportunities. If you scroll down on that email, what you'll see is more details about every story that that's currently available. So the benefit selling one, here's a little bit more information. It tells you who the reporter is, the magazine, when their due date is. You want to pay attention to that and make sure you get it in on time. And how to contact them, the email address. Same thing for the next one for CNN.com. It's by John Blake from CNN. He has a due date. And here's his email address to get in touch with him. So one of the things that I found to be really effective is you wanna make sure you're pitching them not just how great you are. You don't wanna write to John and say, "Hey John, I'm a PR consultant and I can help you." You wanna be able to pitch him a story. So I've had pretty good success with PRLeads and there are other experts too that you're going up against because you won't be the only one on this service. But what I found being really useful is you wanna provide them as much of a story as you can. So a good example, when Forbes posted on PRLeads It was about outsourcing. And I've done a lot of outsourcing with my business and I didn't post and say, "Hey, you know, I've done a lot of outsourcing. Please email me." I told him about exactly what I've done. I told him who I have working for me. I told him how I found them, what type of roles they have, where they're living currently, and how I run my business with all these outsourced people. And that turned out to be an interesting story for him and he had a few follow-up questions and He posted it on Forbes magazine, which is great. You know, I can say I've been in Forbes. Now you don't have to necessarily always go for the top. You can pick niche ones that are really targeted towards your industry. But you want to try to provide as much detail and give them a story that they can use as much as possible. So that's one example of an email that came through. We can go back. Again, you can just quickly browse through each one. That's what I'll do every morning is look at each one and see Is it interesting to me or not? Again, you'll see them all over the map in terms of different business backgrounds. So HR Magazine here, Albany Times Union, AOL Small Business, and you can get into all sorts of different media again depending on the story that people are looking for. The other thing I found really useful is you want to create a media page to talk about all the experience that you've had. So what I've done, if you— go to any page on my site, you'll notice that the first page in the navigation is About. So if you click on that, it'll lead you to my About page. And on here, the first thing I show is all the different media that I've been involved in, or at least the bigger ones, the more recognizable names. So I've been in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and Forbes magazine, and it goes on, and some of the more respected and well-known brands. I've also included some of the TV stuff that I've done and just taken screenshots to show that I've been on TV and been interviewed. And then I put below, to arrange interview time, you know, please contact me. Here's my email address. So on top of having a good story, what the reporters are looking for is that you really are an expert. So you want to have a page that you can send them to, to say, "Hey, you know, I really know what I'm talking about and I've been featured before." Nobody wants to be the first one to feature you, so it's great if you've been featured already. If you haven't been featured yet by anybody, then start with the smaller publications and use those as stepping stones to get to the bigger ones. So if I'm trying to go after a story, what I'll do is obviously give them all the information I have. And then I'll also include this link and say, "You can also check out some of the work that I've done. I've been featured in all these different publications and on TV." And that helps provide them a little bit of a safety net to show that, "Hey, you know, this guy really knows what he's talking about and he is an established expert." So as entrepreneurs, again, we should all be experts in our industry and we should know what we're talking about. And media coverage is great. It's almost free in this case. You know, it's $99 a month. It's a lot cheaper than hiring a media consultant to help you. And it can get you a lot of business, a lot of recognition, a lot more than advertising can. And again, it's all off of here, PR Leads. Just click Learn More and you can hopefully get on. If you have any success with it, let me know. So David, I hope that answers your question. I hope that helps. If anybody else has a question or wants to see another video from one of my other tools, let me know. If you enjoyed the video, please give it a thumbs up below and leave a comment, and I'd love to hear from you. And stay tuned for the next video. Cheers.
