She TRIPLED her mailing list and gained 1000 new followers in ONE DAY with these techniques

!the It can be disheartening sometimes when you’re trying to get publicity for your business, but you’re not seeing the results you’d hoped for.

You have dreams of being featured in a glossy magazine or of appearing on TV and radio, but it’s just not happening as quickly as you would like. Frustrating, huh?

I know that feeling. In the past, when I used to carry out PR campaigns for clients, I’d get frustrated when I didn’t get immediate results. But you know what? Things always came good in the end. Every single client I’ve worked with on a 1-2-1 basis has had media coverage, just sometimes we needed a little patience before it happened.

I’ve talked before about Why You’re Not Getting The Results You Want With PR. The solution basically comes down to being persistent, not giving up, and making sure you always follow-up.

At the other end of the scale, I have some clients who get results really quickly.

Like, within a couple of days they’re being featured in big name publications, and being asked to be interviewed internationally.

One of those people is my client Michelle, who I chatted to on my webinar last week.

As you may have seen, I worked with her to pitch her story to a number of national publications in the UK, and once they printed her story, it was picked up internationally.

Her #ScarredNotScared campaign story was initially shared several thousand times when a blog post she wrote appeared in The Metro, then it appeared in the Mail Online, before we pitched it to BuzzFeed, which is when things really took off.

It was picked up by publications in seven different countries, including The Today Show’s website and People magazine’s site in the US.

We then pitched it to online publications in the UK like Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and Stylist, who followed up on the story.

One of the results of this coverage is that she tripled her mailing list, and in just one day gained 1000 new followers on Instagram, wow!

So how exactly can you get results like this?

1. Don’t let fear of rejection hold you back

Sometimes people will send off a press release, not hear back, presume it’s because they’ve got a rubbish story, and give up. They’ll take that non-response as a personal rejection, and they’ll let that put them off from contacting a journalist again. In fact, many of my clients experience the dreaded non-response before they go on to get media coverage. Remember, it’s never personal. And it certainly never means you shouldn’t ever try again. It just means that this time you might want to try a different tactic

2. Get strategic

Which brings me on to my second point – it’s important to be strategic. When I started working with Michelle, she admitted that she’d been trying to get in touch with different journalists by randomly tweeting them on Twitter. This didn’t work for her. When we started working together we identified her target media outlets, and got in touch with individual journalists, via email, with a well thought out pitch.

3. Have faith in your story

If you want journalists to write about you, you need to be confident that you have a good story. Is what you’re telling them newsworthy? Before you fire off a pitch or press release, take a few moments to look at your story and really think about whether the journalist is going to be interested in it. Is it going to fit with the particular publication you’re getting in touch with? If you’re sure that it’s right, then have faith in it. Talk about it with full confidence when you speak to the journalist, and show them why it’s a great story

4. Make it easily shareable

Michelle wrote a couple of blog posts about her story, which were then widely shared online, with links back to her website, and to her social media channels. This was a big contributing factor in her picking up lots of new followers. If you’re sharing a story online, whether that’s a blog post or guest article, make it easily shareable. Use a catchy headline that makes people want to click on it, include your social media links, make sure there’s a link to your website, and include sharing buttons if you can. When you post on social media, you can even explicitly ask your followers to share your post.

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