PR Agencies Hate This Framework (Because It Actually Works)

Hi everyone, welcome to the Jeff Bullis Show and I'm Jeff from jeffbullis.com. In March 2009, I started a passion project website with a $10 investment. I started creating content, building community and conversations about social media and about business in a digital world.

It was about growth, impact and inner secrets. A year later, creation escaped the lab and I started travelling the world speaking about how to use social networks to grow your business and change your life. Now we have millions of businesses a year to our site and a tribe of over 1 million followers and subscribers and we make data ripples. This podcast is an evolution of that passion project and we'll be interviewing successful entrepreneurs and founders of startups that are changing the world.

Each week, we deliver the top insights into their secrets, stories, and tips on how they started and grew their businesses. Hi, everyone, and welcome to The Jeff Bullis Show. Today, I have with me Gloria Chow. Gloria is an award-winning PR strategist and the host of the top-rated small business PR podcast.

Known for her untraditional yet proven approach to PR, which makes visibility and access to media accessible for anyone, Gloria helps BIPOC and female founders get featured organically in top tier media without needing PR connections or a large following. And I'm going to come back to get Gloria to tell me what BIPOC means. So her strategies have earned small businesses in nearly every industry niche over a billion organic views and features in outlets like New York Times, Oprah's favorite things, Vogue and Forbes without pay to play.

And I'm sure people are going to like that story and tips about that. A former US diplomat turned small business advocate, Gloria has been on 100 podcasts and was named pitch writing expert of the year in 2021 as part of the influential Business Women Awards and a Forbes Next 1000 honoree. Gloria, welcome to the show. It's great to have you dialing in from New York and I'm dialing in from Sydney, Australia.

So Gloria, I'd like to know how did you get to become a diplomat and then what happened for you to become a PR superstar? I'm really curious about that story. So provide a quick overview of where it all started. Yeah, if anyone's looking for a career change, this episode is for you.

So I always grew up, you know, bilingually, biculturally. And I was always interested in international relations. That's what I studied in college. I studied abroad in South Africa.

So I wanted to be in the foreign affairs realm. And I actually got my grad degree from Columbia University in political science, but I couldn't pay for it. So I applied for a lot of scholarships and I actually got a scholarship from the state department. And in return, I was pre-selected to be a U.

S. diplomat. And so I was committed for at least three years of service, which I did. And after my first tour, I decided that it was not for me.

I was not made to be a bureaucrat. And I love being an entrepreneur instead. I love creative problem solving and coloring outside of the line, which the government doesn't really allow you to do. So I kind of had a midlife crisis and went home, gave up my pension and that kind of prestigious career and started over.

And one thing I love to do is I love to see people win. And I always joke that I'm everyone's unofficial hype woman. I would be connecting people and just loving to elevate people. And so I actually applied for over a thousand jobs in PR and communications while I was in the government.

And I couldn't get a single one because they wanted very specific PR agency experience. And soon I realized, wow, this PR industry is very gatecapped and traditional. And so my whole mission, my whole ethos, kind of cold calling and cracking the code as a PR outsider, mind you. I never worked a day in my life in any PR agency.

Now I'm able to make PR accessible for the everyday small business owner. So hopefully, you know, today after listening to this, your people will be able to know how to take their PR in-house without paying $10,000 a month or six months. Crazy agency fees that are just really not accessible for a lot of small business owners. So just quickly back to the diplomat thing.

You started doing that and you discovered that it wasn't for you. It wasn't what you imagined as a young person. Is that correct? Yeah.

Yeah, it just wasn't a personality fit. Great benefits. And I really try to make it work. But kind of like when you paint the stripes on an animal, I just felt like I wasn't aligned with my personality.

And I think I was just always born to be an entrepreneur. I think I just noticed it or realized it later on in real life, later on in life. And so now I've created a PR program. And I'm hosting a podcast.

And I get to elevate everyday small business underdogs from all walks of life, mainly female founders and entrepreneurs. And it just really lights me up. Yeah. It's interesting, isn't it?

The stages of life can lead to doing something you never had on the plan, right? Never tick that box again. Obviously, when you're younger, you're saying, I want to be a PR superstar, as in help connect people and everything else. It wasn't on your list.

That's what I love about life. Essentially, it's almost unplannable. You've got to listen to your own fascination, what you're curious about, and then what your innate abilities are. And obviously you sound like you're almost a super connector as well, in that you bring people together and not everyone's got that.

And so you maybe stumbled and discovered that. Now, tell us a little bit about how you are a non-traditional PR person. And also we're in the middle of a huge change from a social media centric world to more AI centric world. We're not leaving social media behind, but AI is making a big impact.

So I'd be interested in hearing about how are you non-traditional in terms of PR and because it's not pay to play, it's more about organic. And that's a really difficult thing to do because the big platforms use the algorithms to make sure they drive you to get any visibility now is to try to remove organic and actually get you to pay to play. In other words, to get that visibility because you're all about giving people visibility, which then creates credibility and gives them attention to sell their products, whether it's digital or physical.

So why are you non-traditional and how does it work? Yeah. So, you know, traditional peer agencies are very gatecapped. The whole thing is well you have to pay us so that we can lead you to our friends right Call up our buddies And I realized that you know as someone who doesn know a journalist and study media I didn know anyone in media And so I had to start from the bottom by physically actually typing in the search bar, New York Times newsroom and cold calling the operator.

And so thousands of cold calls, thousands of rejections, which, you know, wasn't pleasant, but after overcoming that, I started to pick up on patterns on when the journalist who doesn't know me or my client would say, okay, well, tell me more. I ended up getting my startup client featured in everything under the sun, New York Times, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, AP, CNBC. And I put it into a framework of pitching so that anyone, even if you don't know the person on the other side of the send button, will say, tell me more.

And this anatomy of the pitch, I call my CPR method. And it's really the method that allows you to not have a sales pitch, but really turn that into something that's relevant for the journalist. This is the thing we need to know is that journalists are not your customers. You're not selling to the journalist.

They're never going to buy from you. But founders don't know that. We're so used to marketing our benefits and features. And that's ultimately not what a journalist wants.

A journalist wants to know what is the relevance? What are the trends? How does it speak to the here and now? Do you have any data points?

Is there any contextual policy relevance? Those are all the ways and angles that makes your pitch stand out. And so we definitely go into that. But I think a lot of founders just don't know that.

And they just end up pitching to the journalist, like, you know, sending a newsletter to their audience. And ultimately, that's not how you get on a journalist attention. Because if you don't want to pay for that, right, because if you don't want to pay for an ad, then you can't sell your benefits and features. And so we're going to talk about all the ways that you can turn your marketing speak, if you will, into something that is actually relevant and specific for the journalist.

Yeah. So journalists are always looking for a story, aren't they, that will actually get attention? Is that correct? Yeah.

So there's so much seasonality with the news. And that's a great thing, right? It's a great thing because 24 hours a day, there's an opportunity for you to get featured. There are stories being churned out.

So I always say to my PR students, why not you? And there's local media, there is national media, there's broadcasting, there's radio, there's podcasts. And the great thing about this earned media that you're not paying for, by the way, and I'm not talking about those gammy, oh, like, you know, get featured in blah, blah, blah, pay $300. I'm talking about SEO-friendly backlinks.

And we know in the age of AI that Google is actually prioritizing iDomain authority websites. If you have a backlink on a Forbes or a New York Times or a Marie Claire, that's going to signal to Google that you are a reputable brand, much higher than you using ChatGPT to turn out 60 blogs a day. And so in the age of AI, I think there's no better marketing activity. They're learning how to get those organic backlinks because it's simultaneously, is they not only deliver traffic to you, but it gives you the SEO backlinks.

And it also builds that credibility by positioning you as an authority in your niche. Yeah, exactly. So building up these relationships with journalists, how long did that take you to do that? I actually didn't build any relationship with journalists.

Everything that I do is from cold pitching. And I teach this cold pitching method in my PR program. So it's not about me knowing someone and having the gates and say, you have to pay me to know. I teach founders from around the world who have never known a single journalist how to get on a journalist's radar and has never heard of them.

And this is how news works. Like journalists know that people pitch them. So why have a PR rep in the middle? Let's just remove the middleman and let's have the founders actually pitch.

And journalists actually want to talk to the founders. Just like a podcast host like you and me, we want to be picked by the person that's going to be on the podcast, not a podcast agency, right? Raise your hand if you've been targeted by someone pitching you and it just doesn't stand well. And so I think for a founder, we need to own our story.

We need to confidently know how to pitch. And it's just, it's such a good deal to have is knowing how to pitch yourself that you're always invited to the table. Yeah. So you'll essentially want to get their attention, but essentially you want to help the founder create the best story possible.

Is that correct? Yeah. So whether you're doing a product launch, or if you have a new iteration, or if you're sold out, or you just want to get more customers, PR is the best way to go because there's so many buckets of PR. And I think the buying intent is much higher.

So what do I mean by this? So let's say if you make a SaaS software, right? And you're in a small business, 5 top accounting tools article. If I'm going to click on that article, my buying intent is probably 20 times higher than a random person scrolling on Instagram or LinkedIn.

You know what I mean? So you're getting to the customer, you're simultaneously positioning yourself authoritatively because you're in that article. And so to me, there's no better marketing activity. I always say PR is not one more thing to add to your plate.

It really should serve as a foundation because I don't really get featured in an article and then turn that into 20 pieces of content or be on a podcast like I am now and then turn that into 20 pieces of content and start the other way. We don't own our social media and it can be hack banned or restricted at any time. And also with ads, there's no SEO. So the moment you stop feeding the machine, the faucet runs dry.

Yeah. So how do you use AI to help you with this? Because I suppose AI can help a lot of things, creativity, productivity. So obviously you're looking for a creative angle, for example, or using a way to find information, for example.

So finding information, I typically go to ChatGPT now instead of going to Google because I get the answer rather than have to search for it amongst 50 links. So how are you using AI to help you with getting those hundreds of millions of organic views? How do you use AI to help you with that? Yeah, I always want to work smarter and harder.

And I just gave a presentation about this in my PR program. So the first tool I use is called perplexity.ai. It's a better Google search engine.

And it's really for web search, whereas ChatGPT is kind of like a jack of all trades. And so when you think about PR, like what is PR? It's when you boil it down, it's really simple. It's writing a relevant pitch and sending it to the right journalist.

And so let's talk about who to send it to. It's not gonna be info at newyorktimes.com. It's going to be the writer covering your beat, whether that's health or fitness or economy or whatever that is, right?

So you can go into perplexity and you can basically say, hey, I make this product and I wanna know for the people at the top, 20 different magazine outlets that are covering this, right? So if you make a physical product, that's probably the shopping or the commerce editor. If you make something that it's like a tax software, maybe it's the economics reporter. So there's so many different things, health and fitness writers, sustainability writers, duty fashion.

The perplexity will tell you that And obviously in our program we have a database of over 125 keywords with all the contacts that you can start to make your own media list with perplexity Another tool that I love to use which is not AI but you can also find journalists is you can sign up for source of sources.com and haro.com. And so these are looking for people to interview every single day.

And if you happen to fit the bill, then you can respond. I just had someone, I sent a PR opportunity to got featured in Forbes. So she makes these sustainable leather bags, right? So it kind of runs the gamut.

It's really about getting it and then sending it at the right time, like early before their inbox gets flooded. So that's not really that hard. The third trick about how to find journalists is install a Google News Alert, which is free. So you type in your search box, Google News Alert.

And if you make sporting equipment, or if you make FinTech, then you would put that in there and it will ping you with all the articles, digital articles being published on your industry. And it's good for two reasons. One is you get to see what's being written about in your industry and you become great at knowing headlines. You become knowing at like what journalists are writing.

So that resource is Google Newsletter. Is that what you said? Google News Alert. News Alert.

Yes, I've used that in the past. Yeah, and it's free. And so what you can do is click on the article and you can literally just copy and paste the journalist name into an ever-expanding Excel spreadsheet and get their email. and then boom, you start to populate your own spreadsheet.

So that's the third one. The fourth one, which is absolutely a goldmine, especially if you make physical products, is Substack. So Substack is a blogging platform that journalists are using and they are writing to their subscribers about, here's what I'm covering this week. Here's what I'm writing.

And so many people get featured that way by just responding to what journalists are writing about. So it's really about finding the journalists. And now that you have those tools, it just kind of makes it so much easier. Yeah.

We've got access to so much information now. It's almost like everyone's become a, well, if you use it and become a polymath, you've actually got skills right across if you know how to ask the right questions and use the right tools. Give us some examples of how you've helped people and almost given them great visibility and almost went viral. Has any, got any stories about that?

Yeah. So I helped, I used to work mainly in fintech and startups. I used to be a Y Combinator and Techstars mentor and helping these really early stage bootstrapping founders position themselves so that they can either get investor credibility or get inquired, right? It's like so important in the beginning as you're searching for funding.

So one of the people that I worked with is probably my first PR client, and they made a fintech AI tool. And I had, I just started, I didn't know any journalism finance. And I had to just like look at what were the trends happening. And so I sat with their engineers, looked at the data, and I came up with a relevant story about banking risk and how it's actually safer for money to be banked in Middle East than in Latin America, right?

For like, know your customers, like third party stuff. So I pitched that story to CNBC, to Reuters, to Financial Times, and actually got picked up and actually had the CEO on CNBC and Fox Business Speaking. Now that company went on to raise tens of millions of dollars. I've also raised, I've also went on to help a FinTech company raise up to $500 million after getting them speaking at South by Southwest and all these different places.

So I always say, you know, like, especially if you're a startup and if you have something in a very saturated marketplace, PR is the one thing that's going to give your investor confidence. It's going to stand out from everything else. And it's not going to be ads. It's not going to be social media.

So I really think that if you have a startup, PR is really important, especially in the early stages. And it's never too early because you want to start to connect with who is writing about your industry, connect with a journalist so that when you actually launch, then you can follow up. What you don't want to do is basically say, hey, we're here, we're announced, and then it's crickets, right? You want to build a relationship.

It's like you are with your customers. That's really what it is. A journalist is a person. You want to know what they're covering, what they're writing, and just be a good steward of the news.

A compliment really goes a long way. And so many people just compliment a journalist writing, and then all of a sudden, they're on their radar. Yeah. I'm curious about your business model, because you talk about PR agents that charge you big retaining fees every month.

How does your business model work? Because you're non-traditional. Yeah. So I don't work on a retainer.

I don't think that's accessible for most companies and they get very low ROI. So what I do is PR, like I said, it's really simple. It's knowing how to write a relevant pitch and sending it to the right person. And I have both in my program.

So I have over 50 different templates of winning pitches for every industry that got people featured using my CPR framework. And then I have a database of all the journalists across 125 categories with their name, their email, their LinkedIn. And I teach you how to follow up and send emails and connect with them and create a system and your business around it. And we've had people getting into Forbes and Oprah's Favorite Things and BuzzFeed and New York Times at a fraction of the cost of a PR agency.

And they can delegate this to like an intern or an overseas virtual assistant, again, saving them so much money. Because here's the thing, if you hire an agency, right? And I'm not saying that you don't, you shouldn't, but a lot of times it's not feasible for early stage companies. So unless you have like really deep pockets, go for an agency, but otherwise you just, you can't, right?

Because they're like, what, $10,000 a month to start. for six months. So I teach them how to take it in a house. And here's the thing.

If you hire an agency, they own the relationships. And the moment you stop paying them, they take those relationships away. And so you're kind of left with nothing. And it's really important for the company to know who's covering them and really to create those relationships so that they can own those relationships.

Again, we always know that your network is your net worth, right? So it's so important to spend some time to connect with the journalists who are actually the people who are responsible for sharing your story for millions of people in your industry. Yeah. So really what you, sounds like you almost work directly a bit, but mostly your main focus is on actually helping people take their PR in-house and use your- Yeah, it's a coaching program.

That's called the PR Secrets Masterclass. Is that correct? Oh, that's a free masterclass that anyone can watch and you can see exactly the anatomy of pitching. Go to GloriaChau, chou.

com slash masterclass. That's GloriaChau, OUPR.com. My PR program is really an accelerator to help you get featured.

And once you learn how to write in a way that the journalist is looking for, how to pitch according to the relevant news trends and seasons, then you're off to the races. You kind of have this skill for life, you know? So we had people who just keep going after it and they just keep planting season, get featured over and over. Yeah.

So how much is the course, your masterclass? One free obviously but the other one is For the virtual life free my PR program is super accessible because I mainly help female founders especially women of color a lot of immigrants And so they don have generational wealth And so who looking out for them So my PR program is so accessible. It's six months of full support database and actually bring top 1% journalists to come in and meet you to tell you here's what I'm looking for and give you their address so that you can actually connect with them.

And it's all for under $2,000. Right. Okay, cool. So it's almost a little bit of hand-holding masterclass group work as well as one-on-one.

Is that what you're saying? Yeah. So I teach you how to write the pitch. We have feedback.

I give you daily PR opportunities because I'm following 35 different journal of sub-stacks as well. So I'm creating that. I'm curating it. And so it's just creating assets for the founder where they basically don't have to do much.

They can just look at the daily PR threads and then press send and then get featured. Right. Very awesome. Yeah.

Because like you said, most of them can't afford a PR agency, especially small to medium business and startups and so on. Yeah. So essentially creating organic. And for me, you know, when I started my digital media business back in 2009, I wrote and I started to rank on Google.

I actually wrote an article for the New York Times opinion. So I got picked up by Forbes and mentioned on lists when lists were the big thing. So for me, I did it through content and I didn't pay for it because it was organic. So for me, I totally get trying to create organic attention instead of paying for it because you know what excited me about social media when i discovered it was that you could bypass the media moguls you didn't have to pay for attention you actually could earn attention yeah and i love what you're doing with that because you're actually teaching people to actually get organic attention and it's not for free because you've got to put the effort in so it's still time and it still will involve some money and some tools you might need so So just to sum it up, maybe, Gloria, you said I mentioned like a quick few-step program or steps that people should be doing.

So maybe is that the best way to finish off and then share the link to your class? Yeah. So obviously watch the PR masterclass. It'll show exactly how to write a pitch and who to send it to you.

So we talked a little bit about the tools, the four ways for free, by the way, that you can find journalists in your niche. Now let's talk about what to actually write, what to send them, right? So I learned from pitching thousands of times, the structure of the pitch usually goes like this. It's called my CPR method, which stands for credibility, point of view, and relevance.

So the subject line should not be your name, your company, or the word pitch. It's wasting real estate. What you want to do is have the pitch be very specific about what it is. It should almost read like the title of a news article.

For example, three best SaaS tools for accounting if you have a small business or something like that. You see how it's very specific. And then right off the bat, you want to give a journalist a compliment about something they wrote, or you want to go in with relevance, which is the R in CPR, because what is news if it's not relevant? So I usually start my pitch like this.

As people are looking for XYZ, or as we near tax season, or as back to school happens. You see that could be seasonal. It could be something happening in the trend. It could be something that's happening in the news.

It could be a policy change. It could be a stat or something like that. You want to have the relevance right away. And then you can talk about three tips or three things.

That's the P in CPR. It's usually three bullet points. So if you make a software, it can be like, here are three things that we found to work especially well for X, Y, and Z. One, two, three, right?

And then you want to conclude with the credibility, which is one or two sentences about your company, how you found it. Don't go crazy here. Just one or two sentences. You want to put a hyperlink on how they can find you anywhere that you've been featured that works as well.

But a lot of people tend to go crazy here. And this is really not that important. It's not about a popularity contest. It's about how the journalist can use what you have to help their audience.

If you have tips, if you have tricks, if you have guides, don't hide it. Don't say, I help people with language learning. But say like exactly what are the three tips to help people with language learning instead. Do you know what I mean?

And then you can put in, you can copy your press release. You can put a hyperlink and then kind of a phone number to contact you to make a physical product. You can offer to send a sample or if you have an affiliate link and how they can reach you. And that's pretty much it.

don't attach any attachments that will trigger their spam filter. So just keep it short. Exactly. Thank you.

That's awesome. So where can we find you, Gloria? So I'm on social media at Gloria Chow PR. That's Gloria's P-H-O-U-P-R.

And I'm watching free masterclass. It's the best way. I show you word for word, a screenshot of a CPR pitch that got someone featured 12 times. You go to Gloria Chow PR.

com slash masterclass. It's free. People have watched it and have DM'd me from all over the world saying that they got featured just by walking the training. Yeah, awesome.

Any last tips, two or three tips to add to that? Or is that it? Yeah, I will say everything you want is on the other side of the send button. We spend so much time anyways, doing these other tasks that don't really get our business anywhere.

But if we can learn how to pitch with relevance, how to connect with the media, really the sky is the limit. But I always say everything you want is on the other side of the send button. Get comfortable with pitching journalists. It's not something that we're taught.

So it can be scary. It can feel like a radical act. But trust me, journals are looking to cover stories and interview people all day, every day. So why have it not be you?

Yep. So become a great storyteller and give people a reason to actually want to share you because you're interesting. So I think essentially you're trying to help people be interesting in easy, small bites, aren't you? And the right approach and method, which of course, it's good to have a good three-step program, CPR, love the acronym, it's fantastic.

So, Gloria, thank you very much. It's been an absolute pleasure. I hope you enjoy your evening in New York. And our day is just starting here in Sydney.

We're actually, we live in the future in Sydney compared to America. So, yeah, we do. Yeah, well, what is it? It's Tuesday there.

I'm in Wednesday already. So there you go. Good to know that the world is still alive and that there is a tomorrow. That's good.

Gloria, thank you very much. It's been an absolute blast. Thank you. thanks for joining us this week on the jeff bullis show make sure to visit our website jeffbullis.