Episode 36: Most Commonly Asked Questions about Pitching, Finding Journalists, and PR (part 1)

 

As a business founder or entrepreneur, getting publicity should be one of your top priorities! 

Publicity drives customers to your business, and you can’t afford to be invisible in this digital age when competition is tight. That’s why connecting and pitching with the people who can feature you is critical.

If you’ve been closely following my PR podcast series, the chances are that you already have a clear understanding of what PR can do for your business. 

However, when it comes to taking action, crafting your pitch, or contacting journalists, you might find yourself in uncomfortable situations. Worse, you might be losing the confidence you need.

Well, if you feel that way, worry no more because we’ll take time to answer some of your most pressing questions in pitching, finding journalists, and PR like:

“Is it okay to do cold outreach to journalists even if they don’t know me?”

“Where can I connect with the right people?”

“How do I exactly pitch my story, Gloria?”

In this episode, I will provide you with more unconventional yet practical strategies proven to help you get all the publicity you want.  

Let’s keep your PR momentum going, for sometimes, all it takes is for you to keep on pitching, finding the right story angles, or making that follow-up call. All that and more will be thoroughly discussed in this special episode.

Hence, let’s give you the clarity you need so that you can kick off your pitches, have the journalists connect with you, and, finally, have the customers come to you.

“That's why I say PR is probably the most important exercise for a founder to do themselves. Knowing exactly how to get clear on your messaging, and being unafraid to develop that relationship.”

-Gloria Chou

This might be the next step you need to take your business to the next level!

If you are genuinely motivated to keep your business moving forward, you need to continue making these PR steps. That’s why you can’t afford to miss this episode!

 

Topics We Cover in This Episode: 

  • How to do cold outreach to journalists

  • Writing a concise and clear message to pitch

  • The best social media platforms for you to connect with journalists

  • How to find the best angles to pitch

  • Checking the boxes of news relevance

  • The practical ways to make journalists read your pitches 

 

If you want to land your first feature for free without any connections, I want to invite you to watch my PR Secrets Masterclass where I reveal the exact methods thousands of bootstrapping small businesses use to hack their own PR and go from unknown to being a credible and sought-after industry expert. Register now at www.gloriachou.com/masterclass.

Resources Mentioned:

Gloria Chou’s Masterclass: PR Masterclass

Gloria Chou PR Podcast: Episode # 1, How to Get into a Gift Guide

Gloria Chou PR Podcast: Episode # 12, How to Use HARO


Additional Resources:

Watch the PR masterclass

Get the PR Starter Pack

Join the Small Biz PR Pros FB group

Listen On Your Favorite Podcast Platform

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Here’s a glance at this episode…

[1:38] In a COVID era, where we're all at home and no one's going to fancy networking parties. It's totally okay to go into the editor's inbox and shoot your shot. 

[2:08] One of my most favorite quotes is it takes more skill and expertise to say something in a shorter amount of sentences. So as a founder, I really believe that rolling up your sleeves and getting super concise on your messaging, having that clarity is going to allow you to be able to get a response from the editor.

[10:30] Relevance is the most important part of my CPR method, which is the pitch method I teach to thousands of founders around the world. It stands for credibility, point of view, and relevance. That relevant piece is going to be aware of the seasonality, the regulatory angle, and whether or not there's a significance already in the news.

[11:38] There are different angles and approaches for different outlets. And the news cycle is always evolving. So, there is an opportunity to win all the time. It's just about finding the one that's most relevant and can check off those boxes. 

[17:56] Because we're all on social media anyways, hours and hours, why not work smarter and not harder and add the people who we want to build long-term relationships with? 


  • Gloria Chou 0:00

    When is the best time to follow up with a journalist? Or is it okay to send them samples, or when is the best way to connect with them on social media? Over the years of helping 1000s of small businesses and startups, I've compiled some of the most frequently asked questions to help you in your PR journey. So we're just gonna get right into it. And if you're multitasking, you might want to take notes on this one because we are going to cover all the things about pitching and growing your business organically via the media. Hey, friends, I'm Gloria Chao, small business PR expert, award winning pitch writer and your unofficial hype woman. Nothing makes me happier than seeing people get the recognition they deserve. And that starts with feeling more confident to go bigger with your message. So on this podcast, I will share with you the untraditional, yet proven strategies for PR marketing and creating more opportunity in your business. If you are ready to take control of your narrative and be your most unapologetic and competent self, you're in the right place. This is a small business PR podcast.

    Gloria Chou 1:01

    So first question is a lot of people ask me, Is it even okay to outreach to journalists cold not knowing who they are and not getting an intro? And the answer is absolutely yes. If you've watched any of my PR masterclasses, if you're in my Facebook group, you know that cold outreach is exactly how I've been able to gather over 1 billion organic views and teach the same method to 1000s of small businesses. And in a COVID era, where we're all at home and no one's going to fancy networking parties. It's totally okay to go into the editor's inbox and shoot your shot. And why have it not be you right? So yes, everything is acceptable when it comes to cold pitch. You just want to know what to write and what to say. Which leads me to my second most frequently asked question, which is, how do I even write the email? How long should it be? What does it look like help, I don't know where to start. And I encourage you to watch my PR masterclass, which you will actually see word for word, a pitch that got someone into Fast Company before they were launched. But basically, you want the email to be very concise. One of my most favorite quotes is it takes more skill and expertise to say something in a shorter amount of sentences. So as a founder, I really believe that rolling up your sleeves and getting super concise on your messaging, having that clarity is going to allow you to be able to get a response from the editor. Because if you're not clear with what you're asking, if you're doing a pitch that has your semi auto biography and an entire marketing deck rolled into one, it's not going to be clear to the editor or journalist or podcasts or what exactly are you pitching? So in terms of the way it looks, obviously follow my CPR method and you can watch my PR masterclass right now at Gloria Chao pr.com That's Cho UPS comm slash masterclass. But it usually goes like this, you say hello, first name of the journalist, and you set the stage on why it's relevant right now. So it could be something like hey, spring and summer season means that there are more you know, trending skincare routines on X y&z right for outdoor skin, whether it's you're working out, or there's more, you know, the temperatures are hotter. And so in order to help your audiences see where I'm going here, you want to be a part of the solution. In order to help your audiences adapt to spring summer weather. Here are three tips to you know, do X, Y, and Z, right, I'm happy to discuss these insights and trends further, as well as connecting with other people who have found that this method works. So let me know when is a good time to chat. And I'm happy to send you a sample. So that's kind of one that's like a skincare one. But you see how concise and to the point it is, it's usually about three paragraphs maximum. And obviously, if you're a startup, if you're an author, you can adapt it to your story, you might go a little bit longer, and the first few sentences about why your story is interesting, or it might be more targeted about the actual product. But either way, you want to break it up into easy to read sentences, I usually usually recommend no more than three paragraphs. So that's your opening paragraph about why it matters because you're competing with the journalists attention every second. So you want to make sure every sentence is valuable real estate that you are using intentionally right. So you want to capture them right away. And I like to use bullet points or numbers. So whether it's three bullets or three numbers, it tells him what the points that you want to talk about. Maybe it's insights, maybe it's trends, and then you just finish it up with one paragraph about how you can be contacted, what you're doing and you want to leave your phone number so that they can call or text you for a quicker response. So that's really kind of the structure of it. But again, that's just very macro you can actually see a pitch if you watch my masterclass at Gloria child piano comm slash masterclass, but do it after this episode. All right. So another question I guess I get asked all the time, is what is the best social media platform to use to connect with journalists? Right now we're all remote everyone is basically cold calling cold pit Jing, it's totally acceptable to reach out to that journalist on Twitter or LinkedIn. But again, it really depends on what industry you're in. And the journalist, I do find that people who are in fashion and beauty, and they're usually use Instagram because that's more of a visual medium, right. So if you are pitching to a fashion editor or a beauty blogger, you might want to use that. But I do find that journalists who specialize in let's say, venture capital, or finance, or law, or something that's more like a market angle that's a little bit more regulated. It's more macro, less visual, right, like healthcare there on LinkedIn. Now, again, every journalist has their preference, but these are the general trends. And you might ask, okay, how do I connect and find journalist? Well, you can do many different things. But the first thing I would do is go on Twitter and search for the hashtag, journal request. So if you follow journal request, J, o, u, r, n o request, you're going to be able to see all of the requests from journalists who are looking on Twitter for people to interview, right. So that's really powerful. If you don't use Twitter, you might use LinkedIn. And you can start to find journalists by following hashtags. So a lot of the journalists who write about the future of work or HR, they might hashtag on the articles that they publish. And so when you do a quick search about that industry keyword, you'll be able to figure out very quickly, who is a journalist and member of the media. Another way you can find journalists and connect with them is through HARO, which stands for Help a Reporter Out, and I have an entire training on this inside of my Facebook group, as well as on my podcast. So if you want to know more, about HARO, I have it on episode 12. You go to glory childcare.com/the Number 12. But Haro is kind of like an inquiry database, where they ping you everyday with hundreds of different inquiries, where journalists are looking to interview founders and people from every background. And be careful, it's a very lengthy email, it can be a time suck, so make sure you do it strategically. And in that episode, I talk about exactly how you can use Haro to kind of hack it and increase your chances of being matched with a journalist who's looking to interview someone of your background. Another thing you should do right away, and I say this all the time is install a Google news alert. Yeah. So Google news alerts will allow you to see all of the articles that are being published about your industry keyword. So if you Google Google News Alerts, you can set up an alert where Google pings you. And you can see all of the blogs, the articles, anything that's online, even podcast, and you're going to start to see the headlines. And that's going to allow you to figure out how to write in a way that's newsworthy, right? Because you're going to start to digest all the different headlines, and you're going to be able to start to train yourself to write in that way. So that's kind of a really quick one on one on how to use social media and tools to connect with journalists. Now, another question I get asked all the time is okay, Gloria, I watched your masterclass. I am ready to pitch. But I have three, four or five different things I want to say, How do I know what is the best angle to pitch? This is such a powerful question and one that we overcome in my one on one pitch writing sessions for PR, sir pack members. But the way I want to answer it is this is you want to find an angle that is going to check the most boxes. What I mean by that is, is it timely? Is it relevant? Is it seasonal to what's going on right now? Is there something in the policy world that you can give a comment on, for example, if you're in a highly regulated industry, like healthcare, or finance, or legal, then you might look at all the different policies and the laws. And it might be something around tax season like a new piece of legislature, or it might be a new health care bill. So that checks the box of regulatory relevance. Another way you can figure out if your pitch is the best one to pitch right now is, does it check the box of what is trending in the news right now. So remember, if you install a Google news alert, and if you read the news, you'll be able to see what the trends are. So for example, right now, we are recording this in 2022 in June, so right now, there's a lot of talk about NF Ts, about web three. And a lot is going on in the markets. And of course, we have the great resignation. These are kind of the big overarching themes. So you want to make sure that you are on trend with this, and that you are giving journalist a topic that people already care caring about. Remember, the point is not to reinvent the wheel. It's totally okay. And actually favourable to pitch something that people are talking about. It's just about you're giving a new angle or a new piece of insight. So that's what we want to do is we want to add to the conversation. It doesn't mean that we're changing the conversation, but we're adding to it so that's kind of what I mean by that. Another way you can figure out if your pitch is relevant is just do a simple survey, like you can literally text your friends and say, Hey, I have these three things I want to pitch. If you received an email about these three things, which one would you open up or which headline would resonate most to you. So that's what I mean is you want to find the angle that seasonal that's relevant, that maybe is piggybacking on something else in the news that has a relevance to what people are discussing right now. All of those things are going to make your pitch relevant. And again, relevance is the most important part of my CPR method, which is the pitch method I teach to 1000s of founders around the world. It stands for credibility point of view, and relevance. And that relevance piece is going to be aware of the seasonality, the regulatory angle, whether or not there's a significance already in the news, all of those things. So you want to find the one pitch that has the most checks the most boxes, and one that you can talk about, in detail, what you don't want to do is pitch something and kind of talk very fluffy about it, and not add anything new. Right? So you so a lot of times when I get on these one on one pitch reading sessions, we have 20 different angles. And I'm asking questions and kind of poking holes at your story. And you actually find out well, this is something that I would like to talk about. But I don't really have much to say in which case, you would probably want to move on to the next angle, it's totally fine to have 50 100 different ideas. There are different angles and approaches for different outlets. And the news cycle is always evolving. So there is an opportunity to win all the time. It's just about finding the one that's most relevant and can check off those boxes. So that is my answer to the question, How do I know which angle to pitch right now? So another question I get asked all the time is, do journalists even read their emails? Well, the answer is yes. Journalists are used to being cold pitched hundreds of times, they have an inbox flooded with pitches from founders, like me and you from PR reps and from random other people, right? So they are totally used to getting pitches. And that's a lot of times how they find new stories to write. So the answer is yes. However, they don't respond to every email, obviously, because journalists are getting hundreds of emails every day, from people who might be legitimate and from people who sound a little bit spammy. So they're not going to have the time to answer the key is to actually pitch and pitch often, because what journalists will do. And I've actually validated this by asking a journalist from Business Insider, who I interviewed on this podcast as well. She says that she reads all of her emails. And what she does is she categorizes them in different folders. So that way, when she has a story that she is assigned to write, or if she wants to write something about a certain topic, she goes back into her inbox and does a quick search. So that's what I mean by you want to keep pitching, because you want to have your name in the hat. I can't tell you how many times I've pitched on behalf of somebody, and maybe I don't hear back for months. And then something happens the news, and they go back and boom, I get an email. And they want to have an interview that day. So it's a mixture of shooting your shot often and then being quick quickly to respond when and if they want you to be interviewed that day to give your comments. So that's why you gotta pitch often. Another quick tip about emailing journalists is you don't want to email anyone until you install an email tracking software. This is 2022. We live in an age where there are apps and tracking software for everything. So why not add it to your email. I wish I had this when I started because I was just throwing spaghetti on the wall. And I had no idea if the journalist was actually reading the email. But now there are so many Chrome extensions, and low cost software that you can put on your email where you can track whether or not it's being opened. So that way you can make the proper assumptions about whether or not someone is following up it whether or not the journalist wants to hear from you, or your email is just not getting through their spam blocker, right. So this is just very easy, low hanging fruit that you must do is install an email tracking device before you send out any emails. I don't have a preference on which one there are different ones that you can use their streak. There's boring, there's mail track, there's all different ones and they all come at different costs. But again, it's simple and it's not a very complex thing. Pick one and stick with it. Alright, so another question I asked. I get asked all the time is how many emails do journalists actually get a day? And, you know, of course, it depends. I don't have a crystal ball and I'm not. I don't have insight to everyone's mailbox, but they can get anywhere from 100 to 500. Right. Just think about all of the emails that we get. So it's okay to keep pitching them. They actually are so used to people emailing them all the time, I think the trick is to follow up. Because when you email that journalist they might be running, they might be eating dinner. And it might be a great idea. But then life happens, right? How many times have you done, you've been wanting to do something, and then you get pulled into a meeting? And then you forget, same thing goes with that you want to keep following up in a nice, respectful way. Which leads me to my next question that I get asked all the time is, Gloria, I know that the beauty is in the follow up, and that you probably cannot get featured unless you follow up. But I don't know how often a follow up, I don't want to piss the journalist off what to do. So here's my answer from, you know, interviewing so many journalists, and also pitching myself, as well as now I have a podcast people pitching me is, I usually like to send an email first on a Monday through Thursday at around 9am their time, and you can also schedule send. So you can write all these emails on a Sunday, and then schedule it to send the reason why I like to send it on a weekday at around nine o'clock, it means that it's kind of at the top of their inbox. Whereas if you send it on the weekend, it kind of gets buried with everything else. I don't like to send emails on Fridays, because Fridays they might be off, or they're kind of unwrapping of stuff for the week. So that's kind of what I do is I pitch on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, around 9am. So that's, that's kind of just what I do. If you want to know more about the actual follow up cadence. You can join me in my Facebook group, I talk about it all the time, as well as Washington masterclass. But I say that in addition to email, it's just not enough to send an email, you need to follow up on social media as well. It's becoming more and more commonplace to reach out to journalists on social media. Now, obviously, not every journalist is going to love that. But a lot of journalists do. The journalist that I interviewed in on Episode One, the very first one of his podcasts, she writes for Forbes and refinery 29 Britain Co. And she says that she actually enjoys it when the founder reaches out on LinkedIn, she finds it so refreshing that founders are so confident in what they have to say that they're not going through a PR rep. So take that to heart. Now, obviously, everyone's preference is different. And if you do a quick Google search for the journalist, a lot of times in their bio, whether it's on Twitter, they will say I prefer this way of contacting or please don't DM me. So that way, you can kind of take a beat and understand what preferences they like. But for in terms of how I do it, general rule of thumb is email, and then follow up on social media within 36 to 48 hours and say, Hey, I sent you an email titled this, we'll put in the subject line what the subject line is. So that way, they actually go back and read their email. What I love about the social media follow up is that it does two things, it reminds them to go check their email. And then it also adds them to your network, right, because we're all on social media anyways, hours and hours, why not work smarter and not harder, and add the people who we want to build long term relationships with people who are in the position to spread your story to 1000s, if not millions of people. Now that to me is an effort worth trying, right? Because maybe I spend 510 30 minutes a day. But if I just get that one feature, whether it's in Forbes or entrepreneur, that's going to allow me to not only save 10s of 1000s of dollars on ads, it's going to allow me to get my story in front of my audience and build that credibility for life. And it's going to give me that confidence in knowing exactly how to pitch the media. That's why I say PR is probably the most important exercise for a founder to do themselves. Knowing exactly how to get clear on your messaging, and being unafraid to develop that relationship. Because let's be honest, the journalist wants to talk to you, not the PR rep. That is going to move your business in such a way forward. You're gonna be regretting that you didn't start this process earlier.

    Gloria Chou 19:00

    I promise you. Hey, small business hero. Did you know that you can get featured for free on outlets like Forbes, The New York Times, Marie Claire Popsugar, and so many more, even if you're not yet launched? Or if you don't have any connection? That's right. That's why I invite you to watch my PR Secrets masterclass, where I reveal the exact methods 1000s of bootstrapping small businesses use to hack their own PR and go from unknown to being a credible and sought after industry expert. Now if you want to land your first press feature, get on a podcast, secure a VIP speaking gig or just reach out to that very intimidating editor. This class will show you exactly how to do it. Register now at Gloria Chou pr.com/masterclass. That's Gloria Chou c-h-o-u  pr.com/masterclass. So you can get featured in 30 days without spending a penny on ads or agencies. Best of all, this is completely free. So get in there and let's get you featured.

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