Unleash Your Startup: Establish Yourself As a Thought Leader in Your Industry!

Rishi Cup TV, another loyal viewer. Uh, where's the best place to start for startup, small business, and/or new YouTubers? Thanks, Andrea and Evan.

So the first place to start, you know, assuming that you've done all your due diligence, like you've identified who your target audience is, you know, where they are, where they want to be, and things like that, um, there's a couple things that you could do. I would start by, um, taking a look at your space that you're in and looking at, um, the media coverage that other people have gotten in your space. So So you can see the types of articles, the types of media that they've gotten. And then that way you can also see which reporters are writing about these things. So it's kind of starting to survey the land, if you will, to figure out, okay, who's talking about these things that I want to be known for? And then going after those types of reporters. Another thing that I would recommend is I'm a big proponent of establishing a platform for yourself as a thought leader within your industry, within, you know, your expertise and things like that. And so, you know, once you identify what your target media publications, media outlets are, you know, offer to contribute an article that showcases your expertise. Now, an article like this is not going to be able to say, hey, I do this and come purchase my service or hire me. But what it's going to do is when someone is looking for a service like yours or is looking for a product like yours, when they go to Google and those articles start coming up, best believe they're going to see your name. And oh, by the way, you're going to be established as a thought leader for it. Another final thing that I would recommend, just kind of quick, easy things that you can do is utilize some of these free services. So Help a Reporter Out. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but I've been using it since I've been in PR. It's a free service you sign up for, and it's basically 3 daily emails that reporters— it's basically media queries. And so it's a whole list of various reporters who are writing articles and they're looking for sources. So all I do is comb through and see, hey, what can AWeber comment on here? What are, you know, what's something that's related to what we do that we can help this, literally help this reporter out and get an article ran. So those are just some things that I would recommend just starting out.

I love it. HARO is a great source, Help a Reporter Out. I think for anybody who's trying to do that, one, understand that you are an expert. You should be, right? As an entrepreneur, you should be an expert in your industry, what you do. And for every article that a reporter is writing, they're looking for experts, right? You read any article, they're shooting stats and an opinion, and then there's always some expert quoted, right? That should be you for your industry. And HARO is a great free resource to use. One I use as well is called prleads.com. Similar, I find a little bit higher quality publications, but there's also a cost. It's $99 a month, but I've gotten into, New York Times and Forbes because of it. So a good investment, at least from my point of view. A tip for that would be when you're writing to the reporter, you wanna write a story. You don't wanna say, hey, I'm an expert on that, happy to talk to you. 'Cause they're getting so many people writing to them, right? If they have 20 to 100 people writing into them to say, hey, I can help you out, they're gonna go to the ones that provide some value. So in that email where you reach out, you wanna make sure you're giving them value and explaining your thoughts on whatever piece that they're writing so that makes them want to call you.

Yeah, I would agree with that. And then another one in addition to HARO and the one that you mentioned, there's ProfNet. I don't know if you're familiar with ProfNet as well. That's also a paid service, but one little trick that I found though is if you follow the ProfNet account, same for HARO, even though HARO is free, but if you follow the ProfNet account, a lot of times they'll post a lot of the queries in Twitter, so you can get, you know, some free queries right there and see if there's anything that you can add in.

I'm writing this down, hold on. PropNet Twitter. I'm learning too. Angie is dropping some knowledge. I like it.

Just follow PropNet on Twitter, and I noticed that they do post some of their queries of reporters who are looking for things, and it's free, like it's Twitter, so.

That's cool. I like it. I like it. I like it. What I would say is I think you should be really active in the community that you want to be known in. So, you know, if you're trying to be a successful YouTuber and you're trying to get attention, I would try to gravitate more towards collaboration with other YouTubers, people who already have a YouTube audience. I think you could get more leverage out of that than being featured in your local newspaper, as an example, because how many people reading the newspaper are kind of daily YouTube viewers, to the point of knowing who your target audience is that Andrea brought up at the start of the show? I think if you promote well within that platform and connect with people within your platform, you'll grow much faster than if you go off platform. None of the off platform stuff doesn't help. I think you just get more success and results from being in platform.

Yeah. And I think so it goes back to what we're saying. It's about, you know, what your goals are. So you have to identify those. That's one of the main things, um, in order to be successful with these things, you have to identify what your goals are at the start. It's not enough just to say, hey, I want people to know who I am, or I want, you know, more business. You have to identify specifically what your goals are, your messages, so that you can always stay true to those and refer back to them so that everything that you do aligns with those goals.