Episode 110 - 5 Tools to Hack Your Visibility and Boost Your Sales this Holiday Season
Free PR Resources that do the Work for you
PR doesn’t need to cost thousands of dollars or take hundreds of hours in order to see results. You yourself, the solopreneur, the mompreneur, the mom and pop shop, can obtain national press, local coverage, and even global if you’re intentional with your time. I always say work smarter not harder, so let’s discuss some of the best PR resources that will put in work for you.
1. Google News Alerts: Stay Relevant
One of the first steps in crafting a compelling media pitch is staying informed about current trends in your industry. Google News Alerts is a free tool that sends you daily email updates based on your chosen keywords. Whether it's once a day or three times a day, you can customize the frequency to suit your preferences. By digesting trending news stories, you gain valuable insights into crafting attention-grabbing headlines and understanding what journalists want to write about. Relevance is key in every pitch and this is a great way to make sure your topic is always hot!
2. Help a Reporter Out (HARO): Provide Current Media Opportunities
HARO, short for Help a Reporter Out, is a goldmine for businesses looking to connect with journalists and land organic media coverage. By signing up as a source, you'll receive daily emails with inquiries from journalists and bloggers seeking experts to interview for specific topics. This way you know exactly what a journalist is looking for since they add specific preferences and guidelines, reducing overthinking and fear of reaching out to the wrong person. To optimize your time, listen to episode 12 of the Small Business PR Podcast for effective strategies to navigate and hack HARO in under 10 minutes a day.
3. Medium: Increase SEO and Writing Abilities
Medium, a leading writing and networking platform, provides a powerful avenue to showcase your expertise. With strong SEO capabilities and the potential for your content to go viral, Medium is a must-use resource if you are comfortable writing and self publishing. Again you don’t need to be a pro to see benefits, but you never know who will be reading your story and want to connect. It could be a future client, a future partner or investor, so why not give it a shot, especially if you already have a blog on your website! You’ll be able to expand your reach and audience, a win win! Best of all, it's entirely free to sign up.
4. Twitter Hashtags: Find Opportunities and Relevant Journalists
Twitter, or now X (this is a hard adjustment for me to make) is also a powerful tool for connecting with journalists through hashtags like #JournoRequest, #BloggerRequest, and #PRRequest. By following these hashtags, you can quickly identify opportunities to be featured in stories or interviews. The real-time nature of Twitter makes it a dynamic platform for building connections and getting noticed by journalists seeking experts in your field.
5. Join a Community: Amplify Your Reach and Network
Beyond individual tools, joining a supportive community provides essential support and accountability. My Small Business PR Facebook group, is a thriving space for small business owners looking to navigate the world of PR. Engaging with like-minded individuals, accessing regular trainings, and connecting with potential collaborators and clients will significantly enhance your PR journey. No PR agency would ever offer something like this, and it’s tough to find even in the PR coaching space. But with almost 7,000 members, I’m proud to say it’s the number one PR community for small businesses!
Are you already using some of these? The great part about this is many of these things can be set up in under 5 min! Following twitter hashtags, creating a google alert, clicking “join” on a FB group page, so why not take 5 minutes and set yourself up for success when you do start diving into pitching!
The CPR Pitching Method™ helped small business-owning entrepreneurs from PR Starter Pack members see themselves as a go-to expert with a point of view, instead of JUST a founder, seller, or consultant – a standout mindset that takes you far in the world of PR.
I hope you take notes throughout this episode and maybe even listen to it again so you can really nail down the three parts of the CPR Pitching Method™ and use it to your advantage!
So get ready to press send and get your message. And I can’t wait to see you featured in the headlines.
P.S. If you want your small business to go from invisible to visible, seen, and valued, register for my FREE PR Secrets Masterclass. Soon enough, your credibility and visibility will skyrocket. Register now at www.gloriachou.com/masterclass.
Resources Mentioned:
Join Gloria Chou's PR Community: Small Biz Pros: By Gloria Chou
Additional Resources:
Join the Small Biz PR Pros FB group
Listen On Your Favorite Podcast Platform
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”.
Here’s a glance at this episode…
-
[00:00:00] Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of the small business PR podcast. Now I'm all about sharing the best tools so that you can use it this year to land media, right? Whether it's to connect with journalists, to monitor your PR efforts, to do research on what's trending and so much more. There are so many tools out there to help you do this.
So without further ado, I'm going to just dive right in and share with you the tools that you must have to land media features. this year. If you don't have any industry connections or any kind of contacts, that's totally okay. So the first one is I want you to install a Google news alerts, simply type in Google news alert into Google, and you're going to be able to set up an alert that comes to your email every day during the frequency that you like.
So whether it's one time a day or three times a day, where you're going to be able to know all of the trending news stories based on a keyword or a set of keywords. So for example, if you're in clean beauty, you can simply type in clean beauty articles and Google news alerts will share with you all of the articles and anything that's published online about your keyword clean beauty.[00:01:00]
Now, this is a great way for you to start to think in terms of what is a good headline? What do journalists want to write about? How can you make your subject line super punchy? Because again, we're all about making sure that your message gets across to the person who is receiving it, right? And what better way to know how to write stories and give it to them in that format, then digesting every day, what are the new stories that are being published?
So this is a key part of what I teach in my PR masterclass, as well as in terms of subject line is when we actually pitched to the editor, we want to give them a subject line that tells them exactly what the story will be. So instead of putting in my name, my product, please feature me, you want to put in a headline that's similar to what's already being published.
So it might be three clean beauty ingredients that are actually toxic for you, or three best ways to level up your clean beauty routine this year, right? Whatever it is, but install a Google news alert and that way you can start digesting and absorbing what is already being published. So that's number one is install a Google news alerts and it's by the way, 100 percent free.
Second one I want you to do is sign up for [00:02:00] HARO, which stands for help a reporter out. And I've talked about this on episode 12 of the small business PR podcast. And again, I've talked about it in my Facebook group. So many PR starter pack members and members of my community have successfully used HARO to land top tier media and as well as get into blogs and podcasts and so much more.
So again, help a reporter out. is what Haro stands for. And you can register by going to helpareporter. com. Now, what it is, is a place to connect with journalists. And you can sign up as either a journalist or a source, in which case, if you're listening to this, you're most likely going to be a source because you want to be a source for the subject of the interview, right?
So you're going to sign up as a source on helpareporter. com. And every day, it's going to send you emails of the hundreds of inquiries from journalists and bloggers all around the world who are looking for sources to interview. Now, there's a way to hack this because it can get very time consuming and I don't want you to be spending hours sifting through it.
So do go to episode 12 of the small business PR [00:03:00] podcast, and then you can figure out how you can hack this with just under five to 10 minutes a day. Now, usually what I like to do is I want you to not only sign up for it, but know exactly when it sends you emails. So you can help a reporter out to send you inquiries either once a day or three times a day.
And it's as simple as doing a control F and type in your keyword. So for example, if you are in fitness, then you might do control F after the reporter sends you that email and type in fitness. And you'll be able to see all of the different inquiries. For journalists looking to interview fitness experts, right?
That's going to save you time. So you don't have to read this very, very lengthy email. That's going to be asking for people to be interviewed throughout 10 different industries, because they're not all going to be related to your industry. So that's one way to hack it. I go into more again about this in episode 12.
So you can definitely go to Gloria chow, pr. com slash 12. So listen to that. So that's number two, sign up for Haro at www dot help a reporter. com. Now the third tool is medium. I know a lot of you have heard about this, but [00:04:00] medium has really taken off in the last few years. It's really a place where serious bloggers, influencers.
thought leaders. That's where they go to read the news, to connect with each other and share their writing as an individual, right? It's a leading writing and networking platform. It has really strong SEO capabilities. And there was a chance that if you write on there, that it could go viral, that it could get picked up and also build your SEO credibility.
So the thing about medium is that it's entirely free. To sign up and if you are someone who loves to write and if you feel like writing content is in your wheelhouse, you definitely will want to publish on medium. Now, a lot of people say, well, what about publishing on my own blog? Um, and that's okay too, but why not also share it on medium, a platform that has already been a leading writing and networking platform.
If you are sharing on your blog, what I would recommend you do is actually write on medium first and then share that link on your blog. right? So that way you are leveraging the audience ship of medium for your content so that you're not just spending hours writing content for your blog that is not going to get that many visitors, right?
So [00:05:00] leverage medium. Another thing about medium is that it has a far stronger and more powerful organic reach than probably your own blog. That's another reason why you want to publish on medium as well as your blog, right? The power of medium is that it's already being used by so many experts and there's.
different groups that you can join, for example, AI or fitness or mompreneurs. And so you can publish your article relating to your industry in that niche. And as well as connect with other influential thought leaders. A lot of people also go onto medium to look for experts to interview. So it's a great place to leverage medium and to showcase your expertise through writing.
Obviously for medium, it's free. You can produce your own engaging content, but it's also another hack is you can use medium to become more knowledgeable on PR. That's right. If you put in the word. PR into mediums search engine. You're going to see so many articles and get a crash course on the subject.
You're going to see a case studies. You're going to see strategy pieces and a lot of different PR people sharing what they've learned about PR. So that's also another reason why you should use [00:06:00] medium, even if you're not a great writer, if you don't feel comfortable writing on medium, that's totally fine.
So the next tool that you must, must, must use is following the hashtags, journal request, blogger request. NPR request on Twitter. So Twitter is a very powerful tool for a lot of journalists to connect with everyday people like you and me so that they can interview new people, right? And how do they do this?
They usually send out a tweet saying, I am looking to write a story about X, Y, and Z hashtag journal request. Blogger requests or PR requests, right? So if you follow on Twitter, these three hashtags, you're going to be able to very quickly discern who's looking to interview someone who is looking to get in touch with a blogger.
If that's you, right? Who is a blogger that's looking to interview a subject, which is you. So that's how you do it on Twitter. So you don't need to have a Twitter presence to do this as long as you have a Twitter account. So you can literally set up Twitter account and start following these three hashtags.
I'll repeat it again. Hashtag journal request. That's [00:07:00] J O U R N O request. Second one is blogger request. So that is someone who is a blogger and looking for people to interview. And if you follow that, you might very well get to be on that blog. If you fit the bill, right? The third one is PR requests, which is pretty self explanatory.
Now, if you follow those three, you're going to be able to see. the people who are looking to connect with experts like you for an interview. That's on Twitter. And I realized that you can also do this on Instagram. For example, on Instagram, if you follow the hashtag journal request, it has over 20. 5 thousand posts.
But I will say that a lot of the people on Instagram who are. Using this hashtags are also people that are like me and you who are looking to land media. Whereas on Twitter, it's a little bit more targeted. It's a lot of the actual legitimate journalists who are looking for people to interview. So if I had to pick one or the other, I probably would pick Twitter.
You just have to follow one of them, right? And again, you don't need to have a big Twitter presence. You can literally get into Twitter right now, get a free account. You don't have to post anything and simply follow those three hashtags. [00:08:00] Okay. The good thing about Twitter and Instagram and everything is that you're already on social media, right?
It doesn't take so much legwork for you to be doing this. And the time that you're spending on social media anyways, just use it smarter. Use that five, 10, whether you're on it for hours to look at the requests that people are asking for. So again, I'm all about working smarter, not harder. And if you're already on Instagram and Twitter, why not follow those hashtags, right?
It works. And it's probably one of the top tools for. getting organic media by connecting with journalists through these hashtags. Now, the last one is I would have to tell you, obviously you're in the right place by listening to this podcast, but I also have a free Facebook group. It's the number one Facebook group for small business owners looking to get from unknown to legendary.
I go live in every Friday. I have tons of trainings and it's a place to connect with people like yourself who are trying to get into the media without any connections. Maybe without even being launched or totally bootstrapping without a website, you're going to find support and accountability. And I might surprise you with [00:09:00] some additional trainings that are really going to help you.
And you'll be able to get FaceTime with me when I go live. So that is another tool on top of obviously listening to this podcast. By the way, thank you so much for being here is please join my free Facebook group. You can go there at get featured now. com say, hi, tell me how you found me. Drop a link to your business so that we can support you.
And as a Facebook group grows, we have nearly 3. 5 to 4, 000 people in there. You never know if you're going to be able to connect with a business best see a podcast host. Even sell to your ideal customers and connect with me. So there you have it, my friends, my top PR tools, you must, must, must leverage this year.
And I would encourage you to do it sooner than later. That way you can know exactly how to connect with journalists, how to get support and accountability, and how to know exactly if you are the right interview subject for a journalist. And again, you do not need to be a fancy, super well known company to do this.
There are people every day who are just starting out, who have expertise to share, who have ideas and stories to tell that the journalist is looking for. So why have it not be you? All right. Until next time, my friends, thank you so much for [00:10:00] listening to the show. 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 incredible. And sought after industry experts. 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 chow, pr. com slash masterclass. That's Gloria Chow, C H O U P R dot com slash 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.[00:11:00]