Heather from Publicity for Good talks with TJ Walker about modern PR strategy. She explains how to create repurposable content from interviews and why independent platforms matter more than legacy gatekeepers. Prospector Popcorn saw measurable spikes in traffic and sales after working with her.
Chapters
I'm going to pull up your website in a minute, but before I do that, I want to get your sense of where this is all going. Because again, I grew up in a time period where a little ahead of my time, but someone like a Wayne Dyer can write a book. Your erroneous zones. He's completely unknown.
Yeah.
No newsletter, no list, no name id, no fame, no nothing. A book that maybe it wasn't a self published, but a small publisher. He somehow got on the Tonight show with Johnny Carson at a time when tens of millions of people watch the Tonight Show. Boom. His book took off bestseller and that made his entire career. He published 50 books. He was rich and famous the rest of his life. And I like him. I'm not saying that as anything negative. Those days are gone. Yeah, those days are absolutely gone. In a sense, it's never been easier to get publicity and get in front of someone because there's no gatekeepers, because anyone can host a YouTube show and have an Instagram account and blog and Facebook. But in a sense it's never been harder because it's harder to actually build enough of an audience to get to the point where it's very meaningful. What are you seeing as the biggest trends that you're trying to stay ahead of right now in this whole attention game?
So it's everything as there are so many independent websites that are privately owned that you can write for. Right. Like legacy media will always be here. But there's been a lot of consolidation. So there is way more independent websites. There's rumble, there's people starting their own media companies. So there is such an opportunity for you as an entrepreneur to get in the media. There's platforms that you can write on and become a contributor. Right. So we're definitely trying to stay ahead of those trends. When I think of public relations, it's also looking at, you know, doing an Instagram live, it's Also looking at YouTube, it's also looking at micro influencers, getting influencers to talk about your brand. And then where I'm extremely passionate about is, well, how do you integrate it into your marketing? What does that look like? And what is the next steps to really build, you know, a brand that is seen as an industry leader? Because to me it just starts in this moment of doing the interview from when I get the, when I get this interview and it's done. I have a promotion plan in place. I'm going to promote it, I'm going to utilize this content. That's where I'm really passionate and Part of the reason, kind of going back to what you said about doing interviews is I like to do a lot of these interviews to be in the shoes of my clients, to feel their stress. Like I have two kids under two, I have one on the way, you know, like all those things that come with it, the mess, like I want to understand it so I can better coach them through it. Right. I always want to get better too. But the reason why this is so valuable is on this podcast with you today, I should get 30 pieces of content so you have to post on social media.
And you are, and I mean, this is a compliment, but your, your life story, how you started, what you just said. You're sounding more and more to me like Gary Vaynerchuk, who is someone I follow a lot. And I'm just guessing he may be someone that you have some respect for. Love him, because he's certainly a bit. I mean, he suggests you should have 245 pieces of content every single day. But he's got 27 full time people working for him, so I don't do that much. But I. But I am a big believer in putting out a lot of content. There's no doubt about that. What. And I'm interested in knowing how you would do that. I think that would be a very interesting case study for our audience. But I do want to put a spotlight on your website because again, when I went to it earlier today, I thought, okay, there's nothing special about this as far as what people say in books you should do. But if I actually go to people's website, it's very special because most people just don't do it. They just don't do it. And I'm always shocked when I see companies, entire companies that are based on like communication and video communication, and they don't even have video on their website talking about what they do. Now, again, this is the website publicityforgood.com and there's a role for both.
Yeah.
My only qualm with showing the fancy, highly produced ones people like, well, I can't do that, so I don't bother. And sometimes just a simple cell phone in front of someone saying how you benefited them and helped their business a lot can be the most meaningful thing. You know what I forgot? I want to just make sure I hit the settings correctly. So I'm going to start over. I'm going to share my screen. I've got my audio system on with Streamyard. Sometimes there's two buttons you have to push to get the audio so it's sometimes forgotten. So let's just take a look at this a minute and see what we think.
The Prospector is a nonprofit dedicated to providing meaningful, competitive and inclusive employment for people with disabilities. So through the mission of competitive and inclusive employment, we have a first run movie theater here in Ridgefield, Connecticut where we show all new movies. And there's so many kinds of jobs, but even the movie theater. We also have a popcorn business, Prospector Popcorn. It's an online e commerce business and just like a movie theater, there's so many jobs within one bag of popcorn.
Prospector has the commercial kitchen where we make everything. The baking and cooking process to the packaging, everything is done in house. Certain prospects have different strengths or sparkle. We really like to accommodate anyone who would love to be in the kitchen that it can only make our team stronger.
Since opening in 2014, we've had so many people reach out to us asking, how do we have your sparkle here in my city, how do we share what you're doing? What's the secret recipe? We believe we have the most delicious, tastiest popcorn on the planet. And we believe that there's so much sparkle that can be shared within one bag and we need help to share that reach across the country. So we were able to find a firm called Publicity for Good. And Heather and her team has been instrumental in helping get our brand and mission out into the public eye.
When I started here about six months ago, I would describe gourmet popcorn as a well kept secret. We made a lot of changes to the site and the way we operate, but we decided it was time to bring an outside help. When you're in the gourmet popcorn business. National Popcorn Day, January 19th. It's like your Super Bowl. And on that day, we had two live television appearances and traffic spiked. In terms of sales, we had 3,000% growth over national Popcorn Day last year. We've reached out to 80 media outlets, we've generated 50 new backlinks, and our search spike is actually sustained at about 20% growth since we started working with them.
And we make about minimum four batches a day, which the yield, average yield would be about 350 bags a day.
