Evan Carmichael and a PR expert explain how to get media coverage on a small budget. Build a personal media list of journalists, podcasters, and influencers who cover your space, then pitch them weekly with a clear headline and fresh angle. No single tactic works; consistency and good storytelling do.
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Dennis Wagner, if you had to use only one thing, think small budget, small budget, to generate massive media attention, what would it be and why? This is the million-dollar question here.
Yeah, but here's the thing. It's a million-dollar question because there is no one thing. Like, I cannot stress that enough. So Dennis, unless you are best friends with Oprah Winfrey, there is not this one thing that is going to, you know, just catapult you into mass success. It's a combination of all of these things working together. But you, I mean, you have to have good stories. So, you know, what is the one thing that I can't live without? Sure, I still use press releases, and that tends to, you know, get me a lot of exposure for things that I do here at AWeber. If anybody tells you the press release is dead, they're lying because it is still very much alive, and it is still, you know, very profitable, very successful. So there's things like that. But at the end of the day, it comes back to what is the story that you're telling? And so if the story is there, trust me, you're not going to have any problems getting the mass coverage and things like that. So it's always going to come back to the story that you're telling.
An entrepreneur is so busy running their company, right? Like, we're not slackers. We're working 80 hours a week already just running our business. And now we're telling people, hey, you got to— this is important. You got to do this too. Well, like, add it to the list of the other 100 things I need to do. Right. What's the starting point? Like where do you, where would you say someone like Dennis starts, like what's the first thing they should do to start building a little bit of momentum around this?
Just kind of surveying the land to see, you know, in terms of what I want to be known for and others who are, whether similar to me or what I aspire to be for my business, what kind of media coverage are they getting? But then add on to that, okay, what do I bring to the table that's fresh, that's new, that's different, and then, you know, plan your attack and go from there. But it's always gonna come back to the story. Media coverage is not about, hey, this is what I do, here's what I'm selling. It's about, here's the story, here's the value that it brings to your audience. And then once that story is published, the bang for the buck that you get out of it is that your name is in there. They will start to familiarize themselves with who you are and what your business is. But you gotta have a story, you have to have something that's of interest.
One of the things that helped me when I was first getting started was I made my own media list. You know, I didn't have money to go hire somebody to work for me or an agency. I just wanted to do it myself. And I just made a list of all of the reporters who were covering my industry and then also my local area. So I'm from Toronto. So any Toronto publication I would, I would cover. If I was starting over now, I'd probably expand it to also include the online media. YouTubers, popular Twitter people. And every week I would reach out to them with a new story idea. And it wasn't just like a promotional, like, hey, I've launched a new product. It was a story that I could imagine them publishing on their website, in their magazine, in their newspaper. Always had a catchy headline, always had a catchy second headline.
Yeah, Evan, I'm so glad you said that. That was one thing I wanted to make sure I mentioned. Like, when you're thinking about media coverage, think in terms of headlines, right? So, you know, what are the headlines that you typically see? And whatever your story idea is, could you picture that as a headline? Is that something that you yourself would be interested in reading if you opened up the newspaper or a magazine? So that's a really good point. Think in terms of headlines.
Yeah. So, like, if you're pitching somebody on a YouTube channel, think about what would the name of the video be called, right? If you're pitching somebody for an article in the newspaper, what would the name of that article be called, right? If you can wow them and get their attention, then they're more likely to read, right? The goal of the headline is to get them to read the subheadline, to get them to read the next paragraph, to get them to continue reading the story. So I would do that every week. I would send that out to my list of a couple hundred people that I made a list of. And every time I got picked up by somebody, whether it was a radio show, whether it was a newspaper, sometimes they would even just copy and paste and just print it exactly as is because they loved the story and didn't even tell me about it. Some of them. So really important to write like a story that you can imagine appearing on their channel or in their magazine or newspaper, more than just a pitch of what you do and some new product promo.
