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Video Transcript: What am I going to do to get it out? So for distribution, the best two ways are e-mail or fax. There are a lot of services that can do it for you which I’ll go through in a second. I still personally prefer fax. The reason why I like offline direct mail is the same reason I like fax. It’s because no one gets faxes anymore. How often do you get a fax in your office? Hardly ever. So the same with media releases, people are now going more and more along sending press releases via e-mail to journalists because it’s free. Yes, it’s free. But it gets hit in the e-mail box with 95,000 other e-mails the journalist gets, and they don’t give it the time.
If you’re sitting in an office and the fax machine rings and a fax comes through, everyone freaks out and says, what on earth is that? Especially because you’ve come out of uni three years ago and don’t know what a fax is. So it’s going to get their attention. So that’s what you’re trying to do.
So if you can send a fax to a media outlet, it’s going to get their attention. So e-mail is good as a cheap way of doing it and you can do this yourself. You can go onto Newsdotcom’s website, you can go to magazines, you can go to the trade journals, find out their contact information and build up your own database and e-mail it out yourself, fax it yourself. There are easy ways of doing this.
The other option, the more professional option is using distribution services. This is what I tend to do for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I use press release submission service just for the ease of it, because their job and their business is to keep their database up to date. So you can go to them, here’s my press release. I want you to send it out to, blah, go and do it for me. AAP Medianet is probably the most recognized one in Australia. It’s not the cheapest but it’s going to be recognized.
So they have account managers. You can say to them, I’ve got this press release, I want to target ISO Consultants and they will go and do their research and work out what magazines and newspapers they should target. They’ll do that and build up a unique list just for you, physios and that sort of thing as well. So that is one option, or you can just buy their list. I want to get it out to all the national newspapers, and bang, they’ll send it out for you.
Seekingmedia.com.au or Get2press.com.au are Australian-based services that will press release distribution for you anywhere from $50 to $200 depending on the amount of exposure and how you want that press release to go. You can go onto their website, go through a process of, I want to target all major metropolitan newspapers plus people in the sports niche and all the sports journalists. So you upload it once and they send it out.
One of the other reasons, besides just the ease of it, that I like is the fact that it gives you more professional credibility. If you’re the sort of person faxing out your own press releases and so on, it’s the same reason you want to get a 1800 number over a mobile phone. Size, authority, credibility. If you are a serious authority in a particular space and you have really expert opinions and thoughts, you’re not going to be doing your own PR because you are going to be too important. You’re going to be too busy.
So perception is reality in small business PR. So if you can imply that you are bigger than you are by doing those sorts of techniques, it’s going to get you a lot more credibility. When I did the MCG thing, I did a lot of the PR for myself for that because I didn’t have a lot of budget at 21 years old. I had a huge credit card bill from living in South Beach, Miami because of all the nightclub beer tabs and bar tabs I had. But the story was a 21-year-old sells the MCG. It kind of works that I’m sending out my own PR because it fits in with the story.
If I had a huge PR company behind that, doing the PR for me, it would look a little cheesy, going, hang on, if it’s really this young kid doing this really cool entrepreneurial cuttingedge thing, it looks a little bit more authentic doing your own PR. So for certain things, it can work well when you’re doing your own PR. But for corporate work, and for most of my work now, I use a third-party press release company to send it out because it just gives that look of expertise.
Rather the journos come to you. There is another way which I am starting to find fantastic and loving a great deal, which is making the journos come to you. So rather than writing the press release and PR content, how would you like journos coming to you saying, hey, I’ve got this story idea, do you want to talk about it? There are a couple of really good solutions for this. You can get two or three e-mails per day sent to your e-mail address from journos around the globe saying, here are some stories I’m trying to write. I want someone to interview. I need a sound bite. Can you give it to me?
Help A Reporter Out (Global)
There are three of them and they’re free. First one is Help A Reporter Out. Just Google Help a Reporter Out. And basically, what HARO is, is a link between the journos and yourself. So you can go in there and you put your e-mail address in. And three or four times a day, HARO sends an e-mail out with about 20 to 30 press release media requests from journos.
They say anything from, looking from someone who is an expert on Twitter and social media, to when Tiger Woods came out there was, I’m writing an article about women who have been cheated on. I need some people to comment on this as a woman. There were articles. I need people who have been to South Beach, Miami recently for a vacation who want to comment on their trip. There is a huge range and you are getting 20 of these a day.
Reporter Connection (Global)
Reporter Connection is another global one as well. When I talk about globally, you say, well I’m based in Australia. Why do I really care about getting exposure to American magazines and newspapers? The States love Australians. Absolutely love them. So if you’re an expert on ISO consulting, or Twitter from Australia and you’re getting featured in that magazine, it gives that magazine even more credibility.
Heavens, this journalist has gone and researched the world for this expert. They’ve gone around and found the very best expert on Twitter they could find. This article and this person must be an authority. So it gives this magazine more credibility which is why they respond to your requests because it helps them out and makes them look better. Everyone is in it for themselves and to make themselves look better.
From your perspective, yes, you’re not going to get any traffic from it because no one in the US is going to come and use your ISO management consulting services or your physiotherapy services. But on your website, “as featured in ‘USA Today,’ internationally recognized expert.” So even if you’re featured once in an overseas journal, magazine, journal, newspaper, you’re an internationally recognized expert in that space. So again, from a physio perspective, I’m an internationally recognized physio. It’s a pretty impressive thing to say to your clients.
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