Inspiring entrepreneur Jill Chivers will share with you how to get free media exposure. This interview is full of gold nuggets, make sure you don’t miss it! Jill has been featured in over 45 media stories in the last 2 years!
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Franziska: Hi and welcome back to the Basic Bananas small business marketing show. Today we have another fantastic guest for you. Jill Chivers. Jill is a very inspiring entrepreneur who has appeared in over 45 media stories in the last two years, including Today Tonight, Sunrise, The Circle, The Today Show, Network 10 news, The Morning Show, ABC radio national, Triple J, Prevention magazine, and the Sunday Mail. Jill has also been featured in shows, magazines and newspapers in New Zealand and the United States. Thank you so much Jill for being on the call today. I‘m very excited to have you with us.
Jill: Franziska, thank you so much for having me.
Franziska: You‘re welcome. We had you, that was about, was that a week ago? We had you for our inner circle members and they loved your webinar and we thought we have to get you back for our podcast listeners, for our radio listeners.
Jill: Fantastic. That‘s exciting. I‘m very thrilled to be sharing what I can, about how to make the media work for you.
Franziska: No. You got a lot to share. So for the people that don‘t know you yet, would you just like to introduce yourself a little bit and also share your media journey because you‘ve had a really interesting and fun journey?
Jill: I‘d be happy to. Well two years ago I didn‘t know anything about the media and I certainly hadn‘t appeared on any media stories and if you told me then that within two years I would have appeared on nearly 15 media stories, television, radio, and in print, I probably would have laughed. My own business is called My Year Without Clothes Shopping and that‘s the story that captured the attention of the media. In December 2009, I started an extreme personal challenge to have a year without clothes shopping and I just started a little amateur blog spot, blog just to keep myself honest and have place to write every week and about five months into that challenge, which was prompted by my own lack of understanding about my consumption patterns, and my husband and I went to New Zealand. We were going to go to New York and we couldn‘t make that trip happen, so as you do, we went to New Zealand instead…
Franziska: Very similar.
Jill: Well it has the word “New” in the title. We thought how different can it be? So, I knocked out a press release and sent it off to some media in New Zealand which I discovered through a very sophisticated process called get onto Google and type in NZ television stations and lo and behold within 12 hours of doing that, I had received a phone call from the producer of NZ TV Breakfast Show… The only breakfast show that they had in New Zealand and they were very interested in my story and very keen to have to me on and that was my first clue as to how to make the media work for you. But I‘d obviously done something right even though I didn‘t know what it was in how I put my press release together. And obviously I was able to respond positively to them by being available for an interview. And the first television interview I did was on May 7, 2010 and breakfast television shows, their segments are normally two to four minutes, which is about how long it takes to make toast and coffee and pack the school lunches. And that segment went for nearly seven minutes which was a very, very long segment for breakfast television and was my second clue that there was something going on about my particular story and the way the media were responding to it.
And so I started to tune in from that moment on a little bit more to the approaches I was making to the media and things that did work and things that didn‘t work. I certainly made a lot of mistakes. But I also was very fortunate to have enough successes to be able to start thinking about how was I doing this and by the end of 2011, I‘d appeared in something like 42, 43 stories. Either as the focus of that story or as a component of that story and started to receive requests from other entrepreneurs, how did I do this, because if I could do it, surely they could do it, too. And that‘s exactly right. There are so many people in business for themselves who have a wonderful message. They‘re passionate about their businesses. They believe in what they‘re doing. They have a solution to offer to the people and they just don‘t have a big enough platform. Just not enough people know about them and what they can do and that‘s the wonderful thing that the mainstream media can do for you. It‘s one of the benefits. There‘s a few of them but that‘s certainly one of the benefits of getting your story into the mainstream media is that you stand on a larger stage and you have more people have access to what you do and your message and that is a wonderful thing for people who have built their businesses with passion and who truly care about the work that they do.
Franziska: It‘s very inspiring because as you say, everybody can do it. It‘s not magic. It‘s not rocket science and you obviously used a very high tech, very expensive tool, Google, and…
Jill: Yeah. It is available. Other people can get a hold of Google. You just have to know where to look.
Franziska: And then obviously you Googled TV stations, New Zealand. Now when you contact people, do you contact the producers? The reporters? Who do you usually get in touch with?
Jill: That‘s a great question. A lot of people want to know this and it really depends on the medium, which part of the media you are contacting. When it comes to television, and that‘s where I have had most of my media appears on television, you really want to be contacting the producer, not the on-air talent. In general, anything that‘s directed towards on-air talent will be diverted to a producer or will be deleted or thrown out. And so it‘s really the producer and depending on the show that you are approaching, you want to be aware if there are multiple producers. So there might be geographical producers for your state, for example. Or there might be producers for a particular segment. Like executive producer for example. So it‘s the producer on television.
Likewise for radio. It‘s the producer that you‘re looking for. In print it‘s a little bit different. I have had great success in contacting reporters directly. Although depending on the section or the publication, you might want to approach the editor because they often make the decisions about what stories are going to be published and be focused on. But I have approached reporters directly in print media and had great success with that.
Franziska: Yeah, no, I agree. Especially in print media what I‘ve done a lot too, is building relationships with reporters and journalists and now because they know that I don‘t send them stuff that is boring, I just… I‘ve asked them for permission to send them press releases when they come to and they love it. They absolutely love receiving stuff.
Jill: Well, that‘s an excellent point because one of the things that the mainstream media will only be after, they are starving for fresh, relevant, interesting content and they have… If not a daily, then a weekly or sometimes it‘s an hourly need for interesting content that‘s going to capture the attention of their readers, their listeners, their viewers and if you can help them achieve that goal of creating compelling content that keeps their viewers, listeners and readers tuned in, then they‘re going to love you. And like you just said, asking permission is a wonderful way of ensuring that you can stay in regular contact with the media contacts that you make.
Franziska: And talking about interesting content, you‘ve obviously got a really good story. And a really good story angle talking about shopping your wardrobe. Not shopping for a whole year. For the listeners that think, well, I don‘t have anything exciting like that. I‘m just a chiropractor or I‘m just a landscaper or I‘m just a doctor or I‘m just a massage therapist, or I‘m just a coach, so what do you say to the people that say, “Well, you know, good. Only you‘ve got a really good story, I don‘t.”
Jill: What I say to those people is everybody can be media interesting. Everybody. And I believe that without exception. You just need to know how to package it up in a way that‘s going to capture the attention of the media. Because what‘s interesting to you or to your friends and family or to people at a dinner party, is quite different and it‘s not so much the content as it is how you position that content. How you frame it and how you make it available to the media. There are two things that I suggest to people and I cover these in enormous detail in the workbook for people who want to read about it some more. There is a place where you can get more data.
But the two things you want to think about is how to make your story interesting and there are multiple ways you can approach your story so that it‘s interesting and quite possibly, the interesting aspect of your story is not the thing you think is going to make it interesting at all. It might be more to do with an interesting aspect of the impact of the work that you do. Or maybe you want to tell one of your client stories. How they started at X and then they ended up at Y. I mean, this is a classic formula that weight loss professionals use. They very rarely tell their own story. Unless, of course, it‘s incredibly interesting. They often tell the story of their clients who had enormous success with whatever it is, the process that they took them through. So there is a way to construct an interesting story in a way that‘s going to capture the attention of the media. You just need to know how to package it in a way that‘s going to have the media go, “Ah. I want to know more about this.”
The second thing that you want to think about is how to claim your expertise. How to position yourself as being an authority in your subject matter. And a lot of times we think we know what our subject matter is because it‘s the work that we do day in and day out and we‘re very familiar with it. When it comes to the media, that may or may not translate exactly. You might want to think of different ways that you can position yourself as an authority or an expert in that particular topic. One of the ways you can do that is, start attuning to the stories that the media are already doing and ways in which your approach can hook in to the stories that they are already interested in. And there are many ways that you can do that depending on what your level of expertise is and how much attention you‘re paying to what‘s going on in the media.
Franziska: Very interesting. And first point that you say “Making your story interesting”. Often a lot of people think about, well how can I come up with an interesting story angle. Do you have any tips about that? How to brainstorm interesting story angles?
Jill: Yeah. There‘s a few different things that you can do. One is you want to understand the basic construct of every single story that has ever been told and there are five parts to every single story and so you want to make sure that you cover off what those five parts are about every interesting story and that‘s: Who, What, Why, When and How. And how to position your material so that you have something interesting in each one of those elements. And you want to maybe think about stories that you have paid attention to in the media that were interesting to you. What were the things that made it interesting? Because sometimes it‘s not even so much the content, it‘s the way in which the story is delivered. It‘s something about the approach that that person takes. So you want to be tuning into the things that you find interesting and seeing what things that you can draw from that.
I mentioned before about looking at how you were changing your client‘s life. That‘s another way to look at it. You might even want to think about the genesis of your business. I mean I heard an interesting story about a guy who got a lot of media attention. He sold socks. Which you wouldn‘t think would be that media interesting, but, it came about because he‘d been a mountaineer and he hadn‘t been able to find a particular sock with XYZ qualities and on a trip to Patagonia, he‘d come up with this idea and he would fold that story into his corporate story, his company story. Put out a press release around that and that the part that the media found so interesting was the fact that he‘d had this extreme sports kind of background. It wasn‘t so much what he was doing, yeah, it was the things that led up to him creating that business.
Franziska: I like that example. That‘s a really valuable example because everybody has an interesting story. And one thing that you said earlier is that sometimes when you go and have dinner or drinks with your friends or family, they might find stuff interesting that you don‘t and so probably even listening to what they say. And if they say, “Wow. Really.” And for you it‘s nothing but for them it‘s something, that could be maybe something that could be interesting to the media. If it‘s interesting to the mainstream, it‘s probably interesting for the media as well.
Jill: Absolutely. Another way to get at what makes your story interesting is. What are your big, bold beliefs around your subject matter? What are the things that wake you up in the middle of the night? What are the things that agitate you? What are the things that worry you? What are the statistics that really burn at you when it comes to your industry? And an example from mine, is this statistic which was in 2010, collectively the western world spent $4.2 trillion on impulse purchases. Unplanned spending amounted to $4.2 trillion. And that, for me, is a headline statistic. And I have used that very successfully in headlines of media pitches. And so you can fold those kinds of things into your story.
And another component of a really good media release is a quotation either from an expert or from yourself. Just quoting yourself. What you believe in or why this is important or why we should be paying attention. Or things we don‘t know. Myth-busting. That‘s another really interesting thing to do. What myths do we all believe about your subject area that you have busted or that you want to bring to attention that somebody else has busted. Those kinds of things. Sit up and pay attention kinds of content.
Franziska: And also the other thing that they often love is bad news, don‘t they? If you have bad news, write a press release and send it through to the media.
Jill: Yes. Well, that’s what they say in television news room. Things that look on the negative side or the hero‘s journey, the media is genuinely interested in. How somebody overcame some enormous adversity against all of the odds. Those kinds of stories. We just can‘t get enough of them.
Franziska: Now, that‘s so much good content there for our listeners. I hope they‘re taking a lot of notes. I am definitely taking notes here. What‘s the very first step that they can take?
Jill: I suggest to people that they think about what they want this media attention to do for them. I see a number of entrepreneurs and soloists who whack out a press release. They hit gold. They end up being in a story whether it‘s in recognizable national media or something more local, and then after the initial flurry of adrenalin has passed, they say, “Oh, what did that really do for me?” And they don‘t have an overarching strategy in mind or a purpose in mind for what they want the media to do for them and so that‘s a really important thing to think about. If I want to get the media attention that I wanted, what purpose would it serve? What would I use it for? How is it going to help my business? How is it going to help me? You want to be thinking about those kinds of things.
And then you want to be starting to put together your ingredients, your raw ingredients for your press release. And those things include your interesting story and your expertise. So you‘re going to be thinking about that and then you want to be drawing up a media plan of who you‘re going to contact and when. The other mistake I see a lot of soloists make, entrepreneurs make, is they think too short term. They think they just want to get into one media story or two media stories. I normally suggest you think at least about the next 12 months and the kind of sustained media attention that you would like to create in your story, in your business and yourself as authority or an expert voice in your field. So that would be three things. Think about your strategy, think about start pulling together your raw ingredients for your media pitch, and then start creating a media plan that you can use for at least a 12-month period. That‘d be three things that anybody listening could start doing today.
Franziska: And I guess when you do your strategy and you think about your goals. That‘s probably also where you find out a little bit about where do you actually want to appear. Which magazines and which newspapers. Which TV stations. Which radio programs you want to appear on. Is that how you would do it as well?
Jill: That‘s certainly one way that you do it. Another way is to almost slice it in the other direction which is what topics do I want to be included in the conversation on. So to me, it‘s shopping. So I‘m not particularly discriminating when it comes to the media that I appear in. I‘ll appear anywhere. But the topic really that I want to talk about, I want to be a voice in the conversation about is around shopping and over-shopping and mindless consumption and irresponsible consumption. That‘s the topic. So whenever I see someone in the media writing about that, I jot the information down in my media plan, which is a template that I use. It‘s a living, dynamic template, and I make a plan to contact that person on that newspapers or job websites down when I‘m watching television. Those kinds of things. So, when you start your media journey, you‘re possibly not going to have as much choice and power as you would like in the media that you appear in. You‘re really probably going to be more initiating contact and just taking whatever comes your way. But as you become more experienced, then you can start to be a little bit more targeted and have a little bit more control over where you want to appear.
Franziska: And then in terms of finding the contact details of those people that you want to approach, you mainly use Google or do you have another secret weapon that you want to share with our listeners?
Jill: There are two ways that you can get the details of people in media. One is you can buy media lists and those exist on websites like handleyourownpr.com.au. And you can purchase media lists and the people who run websites like that, normally they are… Make quite a show of the fact that they keep their media lists up to date. Those lists can cost you anywhere from $150-$500 per list. Normally, the website will guarantee that they‘re accurate at the time of sale, but because of the way that people move in the media, those details can often change fairly quickly. So somebody who was a reporter on one show can end up being a producer on another show or they can move from a newspaper to a magazine, etc., etc. So, people move around a lot. So you can certainly purchase media lists.
I didn‘t do it that way and the reason was because I just couldn‘t afford the funds. And $150 here or there is nothing to worry about. But I wanted to contact a lot of media. And it was going to add up to be thousands of dollars for me to purchase these individual media lists which often also segmented by geography as well. So I did the elbow grease way which is to do some research on the particular media that I wanted to contact and then I would Google that particular media outlet.
So the United States is a good example. I was going to be in California. I was going to be based around Los Angeles and so I wanted to contact media in the San Francisco Bay area, the Los Angeles area, the San Jose, Silicon Valley area, and the San Diego area. And so I just allocated an afternoon where I did some research and found out what shows were on and you pretty much know what to look for. You‘re looking for breakfast shows, you‘re looking for morning shows, you‘re looking for evening magazine shows. This is television. Radio is quite different. There‘s so much radio in the United States. And I just did a whole stack of research on those media outlet websites and sometimes it was as simple as they would have the producer‘s name, email and phone number on the website. And other times all they had is contact form. So it was very laborious but I ended up getting the contact details of quite a lot of media people. And I just duplicated that in New Zealand and in Australia.
Franziska: And then when you find those guys in… Say, let‘s go to America, what‘s the sequence? Do you first email them your press release and then follow-up with a phone call? Or what‘s your sequence? How did you manage to get onto some TV shows in America and New Zealand and Australia?
Jill: Yeah. The process varied. So I didn‘t follow an invariable formula all of the time. Certainly one of the things you mentioned is worth mentioning here now and that‘s the need to follow-up. It was fairly rare for me to make one contact with the media outlet and to receive a positive response immediately without follow-up, you have to fold that into your process. But certainly some sequence of phone call and email and following-up with one or the other or both. So, there was some approaches that I made were a phone call which would be something… So our contact is the NBC affiliate, for example, in Los Angeles. And so I rehearsed what I was going to say which is incredibly important because these people are very time poor. You‘re almost, in a way, rehearsing for the show, even when you‘re just ringing the switchboard. Because you have to be able to perform under pressure when you‘re feeling a little bit nervous. You have to have a hook with your facts and what makes it interesting. You have to be able to those really quickly but clearly. All those kinds of things. So I rang, I told them that I was interested in the NBC affiliate shows that I was interested in appearing on, which was something like Mornings on KABC or whatever it was.
I was asked then for a little bit of information about my story. Which again, I‘d rehearsed and they had that information. And then I was asked if I would email my details through. Which I had pre-prepared so everything single email that I sent as a result of a phone call, I already had ready to go just needed to tweak a few details and get a specific email address. Because generally speaking, well I found this in the United States, that if you just use a contact form or send to a generic like [email protected] email address it goes to an intern and it doesn‘t end up being actioned. That‘s what I found, anyway. So you want a specific email address. And sometimes it was as easy as ringing and saying, “Good morning. I‘m interested in submitting a story idea for Mornings on San Diego. Who‘s the producer that I should send that to? Can you please provide me with their email details.” Yes, things like that.
Franziska: That‘s fantastic. So much gold in there and it really also shows you‘re persistent and commitment. Do you remember how many outlets you‘ve approached in America and how many you got through to? It‘s probably quite a small percentage, isn‘t it?
Jill: Yes. Yes, it is. I would say in the states, I probably…10 in the states, I would say I approached about 100 people. So that 10% was with my success rate. I was extremely pleased to get on one show. So another little tip that your listeners might be interested in. This happened to me in the United States but also here in Australia. It’s you want to think about the family of shows that appear on one network and likewise, the family of segments that appear in one printed publication. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn‘t. But if you, for example a morning show that follows a breakfast show, if you ask politely and with genuine curiosity about what the process is for appearing on the second show, sometimes they‘ll have you on both. They‘re often quite different audiences and it just doubles your media exposure and also just gives you another chance to practice with different interviewers and different questions and sometimes a different set. And so that can be something that you can do fairly easily to double or even triple your media exposure is to ask that question.
Franziska: Wow. That‘s real gold. That is so helpful for our listeners. And probably one of the last questions so we can wrap it up, but, following on from that. You obviously had a lot of continued exposure and you said, look, the first time or the second time might be a little bit easier, but to actually get continued attention from the media is a little bit more difficult. How do you stay top of mind of the media? How do you make that happen?
Jill: Well, the first thing is I make it my responsibility to do that. It‘s part of my overall approach to marketing and promotion within my business. And so that‘s the first thing. The second thing is I pay a lot of attention to the media in here, of what I‘m seeing and I‘m not just a passive consumer but where I allow the media to wash over me. Unless it‘s Friday afternoon and I‘m in a dazed and confused state, then I do just let the media wash over me. But most of the time I pay attention. I‘m looking for the way the segments are put together and the kinds of stories that they‘re including and is there anything that I could hook into or link to? Because that can be a really effective way of approaching the media. I love the story that even explains it and it made me think you might be interested in my story because… And then you tell me why. And I‘ve had great success with that approach because it proves that I‘m paying attention to their media. I haven‘t just done a blanket press release out to a whole bunch of people which is not a successful strategy. And so paying attention to the media and making those kinds of approaches and tailoring the approaches so that every person I contact is specific to them. And that‘s been really helpful for me. And so, and like you said before, asking permission if I can stay in contact with people and only contacting them when I‘ve got something interesting and worthwhile to say. So that keeps me on my toes when it comes to my message in terms of what are some of the ways that I can continue to keep it interesting and fresh and relevant and watchable or listenable to or readable. And that really does work.
Franziska: Awesome. I love it. Thank you so much Jill. Where can people find out more about you and your program, too?
Jill: The business that generated all the media attention is www.shopyourwardrobe.com. And I‘m guessing most of your listeners are going to be interested in the media website that we‘ve set up where they can read some profiles of other successful entrepreneurs that made the media work for them and they could also get a copy of our workbook, “The Media Mastery Workbook for Entrepreneurs” is also available on that site. And that is yourmediamastery.com.
Franziska: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Jill. It‘s been great to have you on the show as always.
Jill: My pleasure Franziska. Thank you so much for having me.
Franziska: Thank you Jill. Speak to you soon.
Jill: Okay.
Franziska: Bye, thank you.