MBA1278 Guest Teacher: Heather Saffer- PR Hacking: How To Score Free PR Without Hiring An Expensive Publicist

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Hey oh welcome to the $RMBA Show. Honest Business lessons you need every single day with their daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a guest teacher episode. Today's guest teacher is Heather Safer and she's going to be teaching you PR hacking how to get free PR without hiring an expensive publicist. Heather Safer is the founder of Dollop Gourme, a Better for you Frosting and it's sold in thousands of major retail stores. She's the winner of the Food Network's Cupcake wars and the author of two bestselling cookbooks. Heather's been featured on Shark Tank, QVC, Forbes, Oprah.com, the Huffington Post, and People Magazine. And today she's going to show you how to get PR for your business for free. And today she's going to show you how to get PR for your business, how to differentiate yourself, how to craft your story, how to craft your pitch and what not to do and what not to say. This is someone who knows how to get her brand out there and she's going to teach you how to do it as well. Can't wait for today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business again. Heather is the creator of Dollop Gourmet, a better for you frosting. You know that frosting you put on cupcakes and has gained publicity and success by not only having a great product, but knowing how to sell and promote it. And one of her superpowers is pr. But you might be thinking, hey, I don't have a budget to hire somebody to do this for me. No worries. She's got you covered in today's lesson. So I'm going to pass it on to Heather, and I'll be back to wrap up today's lesson. So take it away, Heather.

Hey, guys, I'm Heather Safer. Thank you for joining me today. Today I'll be teaching you PR hacking, how to score free publicity without hiring an expensive publicist. So let's get down to business. First of all, what you need to learn for PR hacking is how to differentiate yourself, how to differentiate yourself from the competition, and how to differentiate yourself in your niche. So people come to me and they ask me, how do I get on my local news? And they say that they want to talk about their business. Well, the first thing you need to know is to not talk about your business. You cannot make your TV pitch like a business advertising. No one wants to hear an advertisement. If you go to a TV station and you try to pitch your business as an advertisement, they're going to try to sell you advertising, which is not what you want to do. You have to remember this is all about storytelling and you have to learn how to craft your story. So take your business and make it a side note. Say that you're a nutritionist and your business is selling people your nutrition coaching services. Well, you're not going to go on TV and talk about your nutrition coaching services. No, what you're going to do is talk about what you can teach the viewers or the listeners about nutrition. So if we're using this example, what I would do as the nutritionist is I would look in the news for what is the hot topic these days. So keto. Keto is a hot topic these days. So maybe you make your pitch about keto and teaching people tips and tricks they need to know if they want to do a keto diet. Now, you want to make sure you're offering something unique and different. So what do you know about keto that maybe people haven't heard about before? And that is the focus of your pitch? Let's do another example. Say, for an example, you have a business making dog collars. Okay. So you're not going to go on TV or approach a newspaper and talk about your dog collars. No, you're going to talk about maybe dog fashion in general and why people these days are dressing their dogs up and what is the newest dog style. So you really want to craft a story around your niche that offers the audience some valuable information. And that is how you're going to differentiate yourself and appeal to to the media and how you're going to score some free pr. So once you've done that, and this may take a little bit of work for you, you need to come up with a few different kind of topics that maybe you can discuss on the air and maybe you can discuss in an article. And once you have those topics, you're going to need to craft your email pitch. This is very important. You have to make sure that it's short and to the point and it's appealing. And how do you do that? You're wondering, how are you going to make this story that you need to share short and to the point and appealing. What you're going to do is I recommend writing out the whole thing. It might be really long. Now you're going to have to go back through and dig out all of those unnecessary extra words. Try to get it down to under 2,500 characters because then you will have a really short, to the point pitch. Just imagine someone is not going to a magazine editor, a newspaper editor, writer, TV producer, they don't have time to sift through all of these pitches. It has to be short. It has to be to the point. Using bulleted lists is great. Offering the topics that you could talk about. You want to take all the hard work away from them and you want to do the work for them. And that is going to make it easier to get on the media. Now, when people ask what media outlets they should target first, I recommend starting with your local news. Everyone loves a good local news story. Look into your local morning shows. A lot of them do human interest stories, stories. They're always looking for news stories that they can share with their viewers. You can also go to your local newspaper and try to get in the paper. That's where I would start if you're a new business. But even if you're an established business and you have not exhausted your local media, that's where you need to start. Because that's going to help build your credibility. It's going to build you as an expert, and it's going to build your resume, and you're going to be able to use those outlets, those logos of those media to leverage to get the next hit of media. Maybe you'll go up something a little bit bigger, and eventually you're going to climb that ladder of media outlets to get those bigger hits, like, say, Forbes or Shark Tank or some of these bigger hits you're going to get. But you need to start off with the smaller ones. I also recommend that if you are not doing videos on Facebook or Instagram, that you need to start doing videos. Because if you're going to pitch your story to even your local news outlet, they need to see you on camera first. They need to know that you're able to speak without tripping over your words. And you're not going to get embarrassed and you're not going to stand there like a deer in the headlights. They need to know that you're okay and comfortable on camera or they're not going to want to have you on. And the more a video reel you can have, the better. So start doing regular Facebook lives, regular igtv, regular videos, and you can reuse that content and repurpose it along different channels. But that's really going to help you build that reel so that you have something to show the media outlets when you're trying to get on them, so that you can prove that, yeah, I can do this. I can be on camera. I can do this. People ask me all the time how to get on a big show like Shark Tank. So let's discuss that for a moment. How to get on Shark Tank. That is a difficult show to get on, right? There's about 4,000 people that apply every year, and they only pick about a hundred people. So you have a very slim chance of getting on, but you do have a chance of getting on. So what you want to do is go back to the beginning of what we discussed and talk about your story. You really have to craft your story. What makes you unique? What makes you an individual? Why did you start this business? What? Why is your business so much different than every other business that's similar to yours? What are you doing that is different? What are you doing that is interesting and unique? And what has happened in your background that got you to this place? It's all about story, talking about television. It's entertainment. You have to have an entertaining and appealing story. That's how you are going to get on a show like Shark Tank. It's not so much about the business or how well your business is doing and the numbers, that's what they show on the air. Because at that point, you're talking to the sharks who are, quote, unquote, investors. But to get on the show, you're talking with TV producers. And TV producers care about the TV production and the entertainment value. So you need to appeal to the TV producers and you really need to focus in and hone your story, which is going to help you for every other media pitch that you do is honing your story. And once you do that, you are going to send in an application or maybe you'll go for a live audition. If you're going for a live audition, you definitely want to practice because you're going to be standing up in front of the producers who are going to make the decision. And you need to come across like you're going to be good on tv. You're going to be comfortable on tv. So if you're not comfortable on TV and you want to be on a show like Shark Tank, you have to practice. Practice in front of people, practice in front of the mirror. Whatever you need to do to show that you are comfortable. So that's the beginning of how you get on Shark Tank. And again, all of these local media appearances that you do, when you're just starting off, it's going to get you more and more comfortable for these bigger hits of publicity. So if you're just starting off, focus on the local. Even if you're an established business, there's so many great things you can do. You can keep going back to your local news, become a local news regular. You can be on every month, be the expert in your field, the expert in your city, and it's going to skyrocket your business. It's going to do amazing things for your business. Once you get out there, you get this publicity that costs you nothing. No need to hire an expensive publicist. And you can really take your business to the next level. And once you have that under your belt, no one can ever take that away from you. Once you were on abc, once you were in USA Today, no one can ever take that away from you. That will always exist. It doesn't matter if it happened yesterday or 10 years ago. You can always utilize that publicity and share it. And it gives you this huge amount of credibility. So that is the lesson for today. And this has been great. All right, guys, if you want to continue learning about PR hacking, learn more about how to score free publicity without hiring expensive publicist. You can visit freeprhacker.com and I have a step by step video tutorial that I'm giving you today for free. Total freebie. You're going to love it. It's going to help you reach out to any TV producer, magazine editor, influencer. You're going to be able to find their email addresses, which is so difficult to do unless you have this video tutorial. So go there, check that out and you'll be off to the races. Thank you for joining me today. Back to Omar.

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Great lesson by Heather Safer. Check out more of her tips@freeprhacker.com in fact, she's got a special gift for you. If you go to freeprhacker.com free tutorial, she's got a little goodie for you. Absolutely free. What I love about Heather's advice is that it's all about value. You got to give these media outlets value something that they need, something that they want, a story. It's got to serve them or they're just not going to be interested. So think of a way you can serve them while getting a chance to show your expertise. And by showing your expertise, you're not only leveraging your personal brand, but your actual business as well. Value first. I love that. Well, that wraps up today's lesson. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now on whatever you use to listen to. Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or on them all. By hitting subscribe, you make sure that the when the next episode is available, it downloads to your device automatically so it's ready for you to listen to when you're ready to listen. Also, if you want to support the show, support our sponsors. Check them out. Excelsior College and the Alternative Board. Thank you so much for listening Before I go, I want to leave you with this. You don't have to do everything that Heather has mentioned today in one day. You can break this down over months, over years, and over time. This is going to build momentum for your brand and you're going to build relationships along the way and become that expert for that local news outlet or for that blog. And people talk. People know when you give value, they're going to want to share it. They're going to want to talk about you in a way that's different from other people that are not giving value. They're only out there to try to, you know, promote their business overtly instead of just really trying to help people out, including the media outlet. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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