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Video Transcript: Being the content. This is the other side of the coin. Let me give you a bit of context. Being the content means you are going to be the interviewee. So rather than providing the content and soliciting the magazines and providing them content, they’re coming to you, saying, I want to interview you on this space. We’re writing an article about how cars are causing all the back pain for Australians and I want to speak to someone about a physio’s opinion on back pain. I’m writing a report for a trade journal about management and the issue that they’re having with compliance these days and the new government laws and so on, and I need an expert to comment on that sort of thing.
So it’s about them coming to you and positioning you as an expert. So rather than being an author, you are the industry commentator. The best thing is it’s free advertising. You’re not paying to get in the space. They’re coming to you and you’re being spoken about in free advertising. It’s not interruptive.
Again, one of the things I was saying earlier about AdWords and how it’s so successful and why it’s so successful, is because it’s non-interruptive. People are actively there looking for that information. The same goes for the media. Someone buys a magazine. They’re buying it for the articles, not the advertisements. If they’re watching ‘Today Tonight,’ they’re watching it for the segments. I don’t know why they’re watching it for the segments, but they do and they’re there not for the ads. So it’s non-interruptive. You’re being positioned right in front of them where they want you to be. They are where the eyeballs are.It’s that halo effect that keeps coming up because you’re not an advertiser. Traditionally, when someone sees an advertisement in a magazine, they turn off or they put their filter on. They’ll read the advertisement with their filter saying, they’re saying this sort of thing. I don’t know whether it is true. They’re trying to pitch to me. They’re trying to sell. They’re trying to make me open my wallet.
If you’re featured in an article about that sort of thing, it’s a lot different because they’re a lot more relaxed in that state. Their mind, their mentality is different when they’re reading an article from reading advertising.
Press release. The way to get this exposure as being the content is by doing press releases, getting
your name out there and saying, I’m available for interviews. I’m available for comment. And
this is what I want to comment on and doing press releases. What I want to go through is how press releases work and what is the purpose of a press release, and give you a press release template. You can go home tomorrow and start writing up some templates and some press releases, and give this a shot and try and get some exposure in your niches.
What is a press release? Basically what a press release is it’s a sales letter pitching you as the interview. Most people, when they think of a press release, they think of, I want to write a press release and get that published word for word. All it is, is a sales letter. You’re trying to sell the journalist. You’re trying to sell the media exec, whoever it might be, to consider you as a story. That’s all you’re trying to do, it is a sales letter.
What you have to do is see the end of the story first. I speak to a lot of people who want to do some press releases and just help them out and chat about different things, and the release they write is about them. I’ve just been awarded this or we do this and we do that. They expect the ‘Women’s Weekly’ to write an article about how you sell macramé products, I don’t know what it might be. Readers of ‘Women’s Weekly’ don’t really care about that. Where’s the story in it?
When you write a press release to promote your business, what you have to do is, as Dave was saying before, take yourself out of your head and into the reader’s mind and say, what do they want to read? Why would readers of ‘Women’s Weekly,‘ of ‘Small Business,‘ want to read about you? It’s not about you, it’s about what you can offer them. What’s the story? What you’ve got to do when you write that press release, is pitch the story. You’re pitching the story. How is it going to relate to the readers? What are the readers going to get. Why is it going to be interesting for their readers?
You’ve got to have that story in mind first. You’ve got to almost write the article yourself. Look at it, yes, that’s the article I want to have written by the journalist. Ok, how do I pitch that? What’s in it for their audience?
Press release purpose. Again, it comes down to the press release’s purpose. You don’t want it printed word for word. So many people write a press release hoping it gets printed word for word in the
magazine. It’s just pointless. A press release should only be one page long. It’s preferably double-spaced, so it’s easy to read. So you only have half a page of text. When it’s printed in a magazine, that’s all the exposure you’re going to get. You want to get a full-page article. That’s what you want to do here is get decent content about you in the media. So you don’t want it printed word for word. It’s to get you interviews. It’s to sell you as an interviewee.
Press release hooks. It all comes down to hooks. What we have to work out is what the hook is going to be. What you have to do is work out what the hook is going to be for your small business press release. This is the story angle. This is the article. This is what’s going to make people go juicy and say, oh,
this is going to be interesting. There are a number of different ways you can find the hooks. I want to talk about some of these and give you some ideas of how you come up with ideas for stories that are going to work for press releases.
The first thing is surveying your customers. If you have a database, survey the list. Ask them questions and find out what they want to know. Something Tim mentioned before, which is a perfect example, is go onto LinkedIn and do polls. Talk about and ask people how many don’t like their logo. Seventy-six percent of people don’t like their logos. There’s a story for ‘Small Business.‘ There’s a press release. Talk about why they don’t like it, what they can do to fix it.
The hook is, 76% of people don’t like their logos. Then the press release goes on to talk about these are the reasons they don’t. I’ve got seven tips for things they should ask to start with so they don’t get in this position in six months’ time of hating their logo that they paid $800 for. That’s the story. It’s talking about the seven things to think about.
Popular blog posts: look around not only your own blog but blogs in your particular space that have a lot of comments on them. If there’s a lot of conversation going on in your space about a particular topic, that’s the story idea. That’s the angle. Work out what your position is on that story and write a press release about that angle, about that story that is being spoken about.
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