Episode 213: Why Being a Podcast Guest Should Be Your #1 Marketing Goal in 2025
In this episode of the Gloria Chou PR Podcast, Gloria dives deep into one of the biggest traps small business owners face today — PR scams and pay-to-play “features.” You know the ones: “Get featured in *40 Under 40 Innovative Entrepreneurs—fees apply.” Gloria pulls back the curtain on how to spot these fake “PR opportunities” and why they don’t give you the long-term authority, SEO, or credibility that earned media does.
After years of helping thousands of founders get featured in Forbes, Fast Company, Allure, and The New York Times — without paying a dime for placement — Gloria reveals the red flags to watch for and what real PR looks like.
What PR Isn’t — And Why It Matters
PR is not:
🚫 Paying to get featured in an “exclusive” list or award you’ve never heard of
🚫 Sending dozens of free samples just to get a mention
🚫 Paying contributors or influencers to write about you
That’s not earned media — that’s advertising. Real PR is when a journalist or editor chooses to feature you because your story, expertise, or brand serves their audience.
What PR Actually Is
✅ Earned editorial content — the kind that builds SEO, authority, and trust
✅ Relationship-driven, not transactional
✅ Long-term visibility, not one-and-done posts
Gloria breaks down why journalists want to hear from founders directly (not agencies), and how to craft your pitch using her CPR Method — Credibility, Point of View, Relevance — to stand out in their inbox.
Key Takeaways from This Episode
How to tell the difference between earned media and pay-to-play “PR” scams
Why paying for “exclusive” features can hurt your brand credibility
The exact mindset shift that turns your marketing message into a newsworthy story
How earned PR compounds over time, bringing more features, backlinks, and authority
Final Thoughts
If you’re tired of wasting money on ads or “guaranteed” features that don’t move the needle, this episode will teach you how to take control of your PR — and do it the right way.
Resources Mentioned:
Join the PR Secrets Masterclass
Join the Small Biz PR Pros Facebook Group
DM the word “PITCH” to us on Instagram to get a pitching freebie https://www.instagram.com/gloriachoupr
Connect with Gloria Chou on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/gloriaychou
Join Gloria Chou's PR Community https://www.facebook.com/groups/42863325495194
Additional Resources:
Listen On Your Favorite Podcast Platform
Join the PR Secret Masterclass
Follow & Review on Apple Podcasts
Are you following my podcast? If you’re not, I want to encourage you to do that today so you don’t miss any future episodes!
I would also appreciate it if you would leave me a review! Reviews help me make sure I am providing the content that you need! Plus, you will be entered to WIN a 1:1 pitch writing session with me where I will help you find your press-worthy angle! Click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review”.
TRANsCRIPT
00:00:00 Gloria: If you've ever been targeted with those "Get featured in 40 Under 40 Most Innovative Entrepreneurs, Fees Apply," or if you're confused at whether or not that PR opportunity is actually powerful earned media or just a scam, this episode is for you. What's up, small business heroes? I'm Gloria Chou award-winning small business PR expert, and your unofficial hype woman. Now, I live and breathe to help diverse founders elevate their presence so that they can be seen in the media. This is absolutely sacred work for me because if we can be represented in media, all of us with all of our diverse lived experiences, then we are rewriting the narrative of what an entrepreneur looks like.
00:00:39 Gloria: Now, growing up, I never saw anyone who looked like me in the media. So this work and pitching ourselves is absolutely sacred. But here's the thing that I come to realize being a small business PR coach is that there are so many PR scams out there and the waters are so muddy in terms of what is PR, what is just an ad, what is marketing. And that is why it is so hard for a lot of our listeners to make a decision on exactly what step to take when it comes to PR.
00:01:05 Gloria: Now, all of the small business owners who are in our PR Starter Pack program, who have gotten resounding success, they know that they hold the key. They know that they are the ones who are in the best position to tell their story and pitch and get featured. But I want to take a moment to walk through what PR is not and define what PR is to me, someone who has never worked in a traditional old school traditional agency. I've never worked in a PR or marketing agency. I used to be a government official. I used to be a diplomat and I started picking up the phone - yes, literally cold calling, literally Googling the number of New York Times newsroom and cold pitching thousands of times until I came up with my proprietary CPR pitching framework.
00:01:50 Gloria: So this episode is about all the things that I've learned of what constitutes powerful earned PR, yes, PR that can absolutely change your life, your business, your visibility, your traffic, your SEO and your audience and what PR isn't.
00:02:04 Gloria: So let's walk through a couple of things that you might be familiar with that PR absolutely is not. So for me, PR is not anything that is paid to play. Meaning if you have to pay to get featured, it is not PR, my friend. It is advertising. You are basically paying someone to run an ad that maybe looks like an article, but it's not editorial content.
00:02:25 Gloria: What does that mean? It means that it will say on the top, it's advertising content, or it's not going to have the reach and authority of an editorial content. Here's the thing. If you look at the top most prestigious and most credible news outlets, like New York Times or Fast Company or BuzzFeed or all the things that you might read, right, that you actually trust. And it's not just selling a bunch of products to you. Things that are actually quote unquote "news," where you go to for information, for truth, for unbiased things. That is editorial PR. So those outlets that have the most reach, whether it's 30 million audiences or more, they have earned their audience's trust, which means that they can monetize their audience. And if they don't have an audience, they probably will monetize you by forcing you into a pay to play scam.
00:03:14 Gloria: Here's the thing. I interviewed the editor in chief of Entrepreneur Magazine and he says that if a real credible outlet, if they do have that trust and authority, they're not going to do any pay to play features because they can monetize their audience. So if you look at the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, there is a subscription. The readers pay to gain access to information that they trust and value.
00:03:36 Gloria: Now, if you are being targeted by a magazine that maybe you've never heard of and they're asking you to pay for a feature, chances are it probably doesn't have the reach or authority of a top earned media outlet, a magazine or a podcast. Right. So of course, a lot of people will push back on this because a lot of people actually, a lot of top podcasts, do make their money on selling their spots.
00:04:01 Gloria: Now, that's okay. That's part of their business model. But for me, the most purest form of PR is not pay to play, it's earned. And that's why it has that credibility and reach. And if you look at all of the outlets that you can just pay to get into, chances are you probably don't really think they're credible. You are taking recommendations in your news and your product reviews from places that probably aren't so easy to pay and get featured. And so that is why I love about PR. It's that earned media. So it is not pay to play. It is not one of those get into a 30 under 30 or get an award for X, Y, and Z that you've never heard of.
00:04:37 Gloria: PR for me is also not paying an influencer of the week to talk about your product. That is paid marketing. That falls under paid marketing and not PR for me. Again, it's pay to play and anyone can do it so it doesn't have the trust or the authority. And when I think about the difference between marketing and PR, they both reach people, but PR has that authority, that credibility that marketing doesn't always have.
00:05:03 Gloria: Now, if you look at an Instagram ad or if you're on Instagram, when you see something, it's probably not going to be as convincing as if you read about it in the New York Times. I know for me it's not because anyone can make a TikTok reel and anyone can pour money into Facebook ads. It doesn't mean that I feel that it's actually legitimate or vetted. So there you go. My case in point.
00:05:24 Gloria: PR is also not giving away tons of free merchandise and product and free services or free work to get featured. Now, this is one thing that I always say, which is a lot of the PR agencies that you might find who charge you tons of money with no guarantees, they will get you features, but at the cost of you sending tons and tons of free samples to maybe get in one little article. And I feel like if you have to give so much away to get featured, then it's not earned PR.
00:05:53 Gloria: So PR to me is establishing your credibility through knowing how to write a good pitch. Through the process of doing that, you become a such a clear communicator. This is a skill that I think all founders need to hone in on and that you cannot just delegate and throw money at the problem. You need to know how to turn your marketing and sales pitch into a newsworthy pitch, into one that it's truly relevant to a journalist so that they are capable and willing to share it, not in terms of an ad because they have a full ads department happy to take your money, but as an actual news story.
00:06:27 Gloria: So what does that mean? It means doing the work to position yourself as an expert, someone with an opinion. And when I say expert, I don't mean someone with lots of letters after their name. In our PR program, we have people who are as young as 20 years old, as old as 80 years old, people making candles in their garage, and people who have had lots of different career transitions. And when I say positioning themselves as someone to pitch for PR, it does not mean that they have different certificates or any kind of accolades or that they've won an award. It's simply that they've known how to turn their sales pitch into something that is newsworthy.
00:07:03 Gloria: And that's what I teach on my PR masterclass. If you haven't seen it yet, go to gloriachoupr.com/masterclass to learn, step-by-step, my proprietary method that has helped thousands of founders get featured in the world's top outlets, magazines, TV, radio, and podcasts without any PR experience. But let's get back into it.
00:07:21 Gloria: So here is what PR is not. PR is also not paying someone to write an article for you. Now this gets very muddy and blurry because as you know, on Forbes and a lot of the Inked magazine, there's a lot of contributors, right? And there's a lot of contributors who actually go against the policy of their agreement and they accept payment to write about someone. Forbes is cracking down on this, but they have so many contributors that it's really hard to crack down on it.
00:07:49 Gloria: And I think that's why their credibility has gotten less and less is because there's a lot of these pay to play things where you can just know someone, pay them and get featured in Forbes. That is going to ruin the reputation of Forbes slowly. It is absolutely diluting their editorial power. So all this to say is that if someone is coming up to you and saying, "Yeah, you can pay me to write an article about you," it's probably not going to have that reach. It's probably not going to be that earned editorial content that's sitting on the front page of that outlet. It's probably going to be in a section that nobody sees.
00:08:21 Gloria: So I know that this episode might be contentious and a lot of people might disagree with me because there are a lot of PR agencies who are charging tons of money just so that you can pay someone else to write an article for you. But all I'm here to say is that the way that I do PR, the way that me and my PR Starter Pack members are taking control of their own story, it's never going to be pay to play. And no, there's no need to send tons of samples to get featured. You can offer samples if it's low cost to you. Maybe [stumbles] it's a little bit in piece of something you have, but it's not a requirement.
00:08:53 Gloria: In fact, on this podcast, if you skip back a few episodes, I interviewed one of the editors at Allure magazine. And she says that she has so many samples that she's never even opened that she actually doesn't want founders to shove samples down her throat. What she wants is to know what is it about your product that's unique? Why is it relevant for this season? So even she said it herself, my friends. Sending tons of samples and giving away tons of free stuff is never a requirement for credible PR in the most biggest, most credible outlets.
00:09:24 Gloria: So now that we've covered all of this, what PR isn't, and you're kind of digesting this, hopefully it'll help you navigate in terms of how to spend your time and resources. And listen, I am guilty of it too. Sometimes we just want a silver bullet. We are trying to build our business and we just want to throw money at the problem whether it's a pay to play feature, whether it's paying for followers, which never works, or paying a ton for ads, which UH with the targeting has very little ROI now. We have heard that ads targeting is getting less and less targeted. That cost per lead is going way up. And that's just the nature of the billion dollar ad industry. They don't want you to actually target your audience right away because then you wouldn't keep feeding the machine with you. Right?
00:10:06 Gloria: Here is what PR is to me from the way that I've been able to do it and the way that our founders in the PR Starter Pack have reclaimed their power to do it. PR is earned prestigious media, which means that you cannot pay a journalist to write about you. It means that you have convinced that journalist or podcast host that you have something valuable to say to share with their audience. Like I said, the number one thing you need to do as a small business owner is you're so good at your marketing pitch. You know how to sell to customers. Now it's time to take off that hat and put on the hat of how to translate your marketing pitch into a newsworthy pitch.
00:10:45 Gloria: You might think about relevant angles or might bring in some third party data. I had someone who was an introvert coach on helping introverts speak up more. And she used a third party data about research done on introverts and how they're actually more suited for C-level positions and she was able to get on tons of outlets, right? So it doesn't have to be your proprietary data. It could be from a think tank or it could be from a journal or a research institute. So those are all the different angles.
00:11:14 Gloria: And if you DM me at Gloria Chow PR, I have a whole list of all the different angles. There's really 10 main different types of angles, whether it's seasonal, whether it's sharing an unpopular belief, whether it's sharing a data point or something that's seasonal or relevant. But what I'm trying to tell you is you have no shortage of angles. It's just a matter of learning how to package it up in a pitch, which is something that, let's be honest, we are never taught as business owners, as students.
00:11:38 Gloria: And so that's why I and my program and my community exists to help you turn all of the brilliance and nuggets of gold that you have into something that the journalists can say, "Okay, this is relevant. This is newsworthy. I'm going to cover you without you paying me." That my friend is a power of PR.
00:11:55 Gloria: So here's another thing about PR is that unlike a pay to play transactional thing, this is not transactional. PR that's earned expands your network and it only catapults you into more and more and more connections. Here's the thing, journalists, if they know that you are a vetted, credible person and you have already been featured, they will probably go back to you again and again for a quote because they are always looking to cover new and fresh voices. That is what makes journalism credible.
00:12:26 Gloria: If they're only covering the same Fortune 500 companies all the time, people would lose interest very quickly in the news media and think they're just, basically, the spokespeople of these companies. So no. They want to actually interview people from all walks of life. So why have it not be you?
00:12:41 Gloria: We have Vincent Phamvan, who is a founder and a member of our PR Starter Pack program. And he is a career coach and he was able to leverage PR. And now he has these journalists on speed dial in his back pocket. And when one of them came to his hometown of Nashville, he actually invited them for coffee. And so he has been featured over and over. And again, don't let your scarcity mindset trick you into thinking that once you've been featured, you can't be featured again. In fact, it's the opposite.
00:13:07 Gloria: So unlike ads and pay to play where you have to keep feeding the beast, and if you stop paying, the faucet runs dry, with PR, it only compounds. It's an absolute snowball effect. For example, if you get onto one podcast, you can easily ask a podcast host, "Hey, I love their conversation so much. I think you did, too. Can you recommend two to three other podcasts that you think I'd be a great guest on?" Right?
00:13:30 Gloria: And you can also use that podcast recording to create other pieces of social media content. And that is in another episode. But I am really, really... this is the hill that I will stand and die on because I really do think that having that earned PR, which gets you SEO, which gets you backlinks, which gives you a non-transactional relationship, because remember, your net worth is your network. That is the power of PR. You are expanding not only your connections, but your influence, your authority while reaching more people. And that is not something that paid ads can do. So that is that.
00:14:06 Gloria: Another thing is, of course, you know, with PR, get SEO, you get long-term traffic, sustained traffic to your website, which I absolutely love because I'm all about doing things for the long term. And as founders, we always need to think, [swallows] am I just throwing money at a problem or am I actually gaining the skills and tools and strategies to build long-term assets in my business?
00:14:28 Gloria: So getting PR, getting featured, whether it's on a podcast or a credible news outlet or radio or TV, that's not only repurposable content you can use for social media, but it gives you that SEO. It gives you that credibility. So for me, that is absolutely something that you should be focused on because it is absolutely building long-term assets in your business. So you're not doing busy work and you're not doing some pay to play transactional one and done thing, you are building the runway for the future of your audience to get more people back into your world. And that is why PR is so powerful.
00:15:02 Gloria: And I encourage you next time when you think about the marketing and PR activities that you're doing, if you're deciding over making 10 social media reels that maybe a couple of people will watch, that has no SEO, or really rolling up your sleeves, perfecting your pitch, maybe watching your masterclass, maybe joining my program and learning how to actually position yourself to the journalists so that they will write about you for free, that my friend could make 10 extra results.
00:15:28 Gloria: And that's what we're all about here is how do we leverage our time as CEOs so that every hour I spend, I am getting that ROI. And again, it's a shiny new object. It's so much easier to get that dopamine hit of, yes, I got two or five likes, but they're not necessarily equate to more sales or more traffic. But if you get one piece of earned media, the next time you are on a discovery call with a client, you can not only charge higher prices because now you're perceived as an industry authority, but you have that backlink, you have SEO.
00:15:58 Gloria: And guess what? It makes you out-compete the competitor, right? So I don't care if you make products or services. It is a powerful tool that I think trumps anything else because it has that reach and credibility. So again, eared PR gives you authority because it's not advertising content. It's editorial content with SEO and backlinks. It's credible and you cannot pay a journalist to write about you. That is why it is so coveted.
00:16:23 Gloria: And my whole mission is to teach you the tools and strategies to actually get there. So you can watch my PR masterclass on demand to learn exactly how to pitch the framework of a pitch, what to write, exactly how to put it in a cold email pitch, because, yes, journalists all rely on cold pitching. You don't need to have a PR agency represent you. They actually have interviewed so many journalists who say that they actually want to hear from the founder themselves. I give you exactly the framework on how to write that email. You can go to gloriachoupr.com/masterclass. And I hope you enjoyed this episode.
00:16:57 Gloria: I know that as we speed up in the technology and the fact that there's so much information and offers, we are constantly being bombarded with these pay to play scams. And this is what makes my job so hard is because so many times people think it's such an easy solution of, I'll just pay to get into this article. But how much money are you paying? And is it really going to get that reach? Is it cultivating a skill for you? Is it building a long-term asset?
00:17:23 Gloria: So I just urge you to take a beat and think about the time that you're spending on all of your activities and which one is really going to move the needle for you. And I believe that earned credible media is the number one way to grow your business, your brand, and your authority.
00:17:38 Gloria: If you enjoyed this episode, please give me five stars. Please give me a review. Please let me know what you think about it. And don't forget to recommend this to your other business besties. I am always looking to hear feedback from you. You can connect with me on all the social medias @gloriachoupr. That's Gloria, C-H-O-U, PR. And thank you so much for listening.
00:18:00 Gloria: 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 connections? That's right. That's why I 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.
00:18:28 Gloria: 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 gloriachoupr.com/masterclass. That's gloriachou, 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.