September 3, 2020
Have you ever wondered how the HECK brands and businesses get featured in the media? Whether it’s news segments, TV airtime, magazine features, or how to be a guest on podcasts, the big question you probably have is HOW? Today we have the beautiful sassy spitfire Christina Nicholson on the show to talk ALL about how to pitch yourself or your business to the media in a way that ACTUALLY will stand out and not just be another email in an inbox of 20,000.
With her business, Media Maven, and her podcast, Become a Media Maven, Christina Nicholson is a TV host who helps bloggers and business owners grow by reaching thousands, even millions, of their ideal customers or clients in minutes instead of months through the power of traditional and new media without spending big bucks on advertising.
Christina started her PR agency after working as a TV anchor and reporter for more than 10 years with an infant and toddler at home. In four years, she grew Media Maven to a million-dollar business with a remote team… and another infant at home!
You can still see her in front of the camera as a host on Lifetime TV, in national commercials, on the TEDx stage, and read her work online in Huff Post, Thrive Global, Inc. Magazine, Business Insider, Fast Company, and Boss Babe. She was selected as an Oprah Magazine Insider and Ambassador out of thousands of applicants.
Christina also has a local lifestyle and family blog, Christina All Day and lives in South Florida with her husband and three young children.
You are going to freaking LOVE this woman! Christina talks ALL about how to go about pitching in a brilliant way to cut through the noise in the media. She gives tangible advice that’s backed from actually being on the other side when she used to work at a news station. In this episode, we cover what the media is specifically looking for in pitches, how to pitch yourself, how to stand out in an email, the marketing mistakes most business owners are making, and we even touched a little bit on money mindset too. PHEW. After this episode, you’ll be ready to pitch like a boss.
Christina’s background is in TV. She was a TV reporter and anchor for ten years and during that time had a couple of kids. The schedule is not entirely conducive to having children! She knew she needed to get out of the industry and began to search for jobs in PR.
When you are a journalist you are pitched all the time by business owners and by publicists who want to get in the news. Being on the other side of that, Christina saw a lot of things that people were doing wrong. The pitches 9/10 were terrible! She decided she would work at a PR agency since she knew how to pitch. A lot of agencies wouldn’t hire because she didn’t have “agency” experience. These were the exact same agencies that would send her emails all day trying to get their clients on TV. She may not have had the agency experience, but she deleted every single email they sent her. If she worked for them, she could fix that problem and actually get their clients on air.
She got a job at a different agency and worked there for six months. She took a pay cut and believed this guy who told her she would have a flexible schedule. He ended up being a total wack job and a terrible boss. During these six months, Christina started side hustling and figured she would just be a freelancer.
The plan was to replace her income and then quit, but on the 4th of July (when her boss was on a vacation and called every hour to see if they were still working), she had to go into the office to work and she ended up telling her boss he was a sociopath. She didn’t have a job after that! She gave her two weeks notice, and a week into that her boss cut off her email.
She was then forced into a freelance career. For two years, Christina worked like CRAZY! She was pulling 12 hour days, 7 days a week. Fast forward and she hired a business coach, changed her money mindset, and began to build a team.
Today, five years after leaving her crazy job, she has a public relations agency with a team of 11 who are all remote. Through the process of building an online PR agency, she launched a course called The Media Mentoring Program after so many people reached out saying they want to get on the news but can’t hire a PR agency. Christina has also launched a podcast called Become a Media Maven where she shares different stories about business and marketing. In addition, she has launched Podcast Clout which helps people find the right podcast to pitch to be a guest on. Pitching different podcasts to be a guest on can be such a time-consuming process. There are databases that exist to help find people in PR to find the contact information to people at TV stations, newspapers, and magazines, but this doesn’t exist for podcasts. She created this platform for podcasts.
People need to realize that it is not the media’s job to promote. It is not their job to give you a free commercial. Everybody thinks of themselves when they are pitching the media. They think they have the best product and service and that they are so different from the rest when really it’s not, they are just only seeing it from their perspective. When you are reaching out to a member of the media, you just have to help them do their job. It’s their job to tell the news, it’s not their job to promote you. Think about what is already happening in the news and how you can piggyback off of that. Figure out how it is relevant to you. If you can offer another angle that they haven’t covered yet for something that is newsworthy, that is going to be the low hanging fruit.
Take a look at the calendar and ask yourself why should this reporter do this story right now. If you don’t give them a reason to do it right now, then it’s not going to be very newsworthy and they will probably put it on the shelf and forget about it.
Podcasts are great for building a personal brand. There is something about a podcast listener. They are so much more likely to invest in both themselves and their business because they are taking the time to learn and to be educated. People who watch TV are not necessarily watching the news to be educated or entertained, they are watching it because it’s on in the background. People who listen to podcasts are so much more invested. With podcasts, it’s more about showing your expertise! There is a little less of a timeliness factor just because some people record three months in advance. When it comes to podcasts, it is a bigger focus on your expertise and you don’t have to be visual. You just have to think of who you are pitching, when you are pitching, and what you are going to pitch.
There are two big mistakes that Christina sees people make. The first is that they are sending the same email to all 2,000 people on their list at the exact same time. This is extremely common. It’s ineffective and obvious when this happens. The second mistake is when people pitch something that just isn’t newsworthy. If you aren’t going to be newsworthy you need to shell out the money and buy ads. As we all know, ads do not resonate the way earned media does because people know you are paying to be there and it doesn’t give you the authority and credibility. The hardest thing about pitching is finding a newsworthy element. It’s all about finding a way to be newsworthy and exciting and get people’s attention because there is a lot of competition. If you want to stand out from your competition and get the credibility and authority then it’s a long term marketing strategy and you have to pay attention to it every week in your business.
Christina has a few examples!
First, she has a client that sells bracelets and they did two things with this brand. They got the bracelet and the founder coverage in the media. On the bracelet side, you have to think of accessories round ups. For example, the 10 things to shop for your mother on Mother’s Day. A great way to find people to pitch, other than using databases, is to search “Mother’s Day gifts” and look at everyone who wrote these round-ups last year and connect with the writers on Twitter. All journalists are on Twitter, so reach out there. Ask the writer if they are doing a similar piece this year. If you do have a product, you need to be prepared to send the product.
The founder is 30 years old, female, Hispanic, and has a very successful business. They reached out to the people at Forbes who cover females and Hispanic entrepreneurs and told them about how her client started making these bracelets in her dorm room and now runs a multimillion-dollar business. This could sound promotional, but because they reached out to the female founder writer and the Hispanic entrepreneur writer it was more niche.
Second, she had a client who made an app. The two guys came to Christina after they had hired a PR company to pitch their running app. The person before Christina was just pitching the app, but this wasn’t newsworthy! There are a million fitness apps. One of the founders lost half his body weight running and had a great personal story to tell with images. The other founder was a personal trainer and had that expertise. Whenever they got the personal trainer quoted he was quoted as the founder of the app which as a side effect gave them a promotion. When they told the other founder’s story it also gave them promotion. Within three months and these two angles, they got coverage on TV in Washington DC, the Washington Post, the Today Show, the Chicago Tribune, and in Runner’s World. You always have to be not just pitching, but also following up and tweaking the angle and story. Just because it’s not a fit right now, doesn’t mean it won’t be a fit later.
So many people get focused on the big stuff because it sounds cool, which is true and it does add to your credibility and authority, but don’t ignore the little stuff because the little stuff makes a huge difference.
When you are in the news, people automatically think you are a big brand with lots of money and success. This is who people want to do business with, but this isn’t always the case. Being covered in the media can make people perceive you in a certain way. When people say they aren’t big enough or not ready, that is not an excuse.
People always say that they aren’t making any money so they can’t hire a business coach or PR person until they do make money. But it is the other way around. This is why you aren’t making money. You’re not making money because you don’t have a coach, no one knows about you, and you aren’t doing your own PR. People are thinking about it backward. You need to do the work first to get the money.
You do not need an agency at all, you just need to know what to do. You can pitch yourself and get just as good earned media as anyone else with a big PR agency. You just need to know what to do. You need to know how to reach out, follow up, and find the newsworthy element. There are people who are way worse than you in business, who are meaner than you, and have terrible customer service but because they are putting themselves out there and they may be good at pitching, they are blowing you away. It’s about putting yourself out there. You don’t need a PR agency to do it and you don’t need to wait to be successful to do it. It is what makes you successful.
Christina says she wishes she would have invested in her business sooner. She admits to having a bad money mindset. If you are someone who has ever said you can’t afford something, you have a bad money mindset. She didn’t know this at the time, but she knows it now.
Christina hired her first business coach (and she did her research!!) and her coach told her if she had not had four months of consistent income then you need help. Christina had to take the risk of hiring her at $15,000/year and decided to do everything that her coach told her to do. Because Christina showed up for every call, asked a ton of questions, and did what her coach said to do, she ended up paying it off in 6 months and moved up to the next level of coaching.
The thing about investing to move further is that everyone is so scared when it comes to their own business. But, you don’t hear anyone saying this about college. College is the exact same thing. It is so much more expensive and time-consuming.
There are people who invest in coaching programs but never show up for the calls and never ask questions. If you are going to invest in something, show up and do the work. Don’t throw your money away.
People are more focused on doing things that make them look cool online rather than things that will actually make them successful in life.
Christina has a real life example and you can actually see her exact pitch that she sent to Pat to land a spot on his podcast, Smart Passive Income.
You want to pitch people the way they want to be pitched. The last thing we all need is another email in our inbox.
She heard Pat say that he gets 400 pitches a day but nobody sends him a video pitch. Christina took him up on his challenge! She made a quick video pitch and emailed him the link to her Youtube video. She uses Boomerang ( a chrome extension that reminds you to follow up with someone) and had it set for a week. She went to follow back up and noticed that her Youtube video had one view on it (her view). She followed back up and said that she noticed he had not watched her video yet. He emailed her back and she ended up being on his podcast.
This took months from her first pitch to the podcast being released. If it wasn’t for her followup it wouldn’t have happened.
You want to know who you are pitching and make sure to say something personal to make it stand out because no one does that.
Sometimes Christina will tweet the person to let them know that she has sent them a pitch. They are more likely to see a tweet than the thousands of emails they get a day.
A lot of people are on Twitter and they are more likely to pay attention to a notification there from a stranger than you are a stranger in your email inbox. This is especially true if you have already shown up in their inbox on social media a time or two before you pitch them.
It’s not necessarily always about the email pitch. It is about what you do before the email. It’s about if you know the person, if you can say something specific, and figure out where that person is active.
Another thing that can help a lot is if you tell the person you are pitching that you are going to share it. Sharing pieces with your audience and tagging the source is so helpful! This is where you get the profit from the publicity. Everyone thinks that because they were on the podcast that everyone heard and is going to come follow. It doesn’t work like that.
When people are following you and you consistently post every day, you are going to be top of mind. They are seeing little reminders of who you are and what you do every day.
Everyone thinks this is a one and done thing. You are building your brand slowly over time. Make the email personal and be sure to follow up, but be sure to mention that you will share it with your audience repeatedly.
It’s not rocket science. It’s being strategic and being strategic takes time.
Think about the people that you follow online and admire. You see them a lot over time. That is exactly what you need to do for yourself to build a brand. You didn’t just see someone one time and were sold on them and never saw them again. You see them repeatedly and when you see them on their own platforms, they are sharing about what they are doing and other interviews. People are very focused on their perspective and they are not thinking about their own behavior when they think of other products, brands, or services. It’s not about the quick ROI. It’s a slow brand build and people need to be patient. It’s hard to measure and track, but it builds over time. If you do a little bit every day it’s like climbing a mountain. Every day you are getting higher and higher.
Money mindset. After Christina spent $15,000 on her coach and made it back she shifted her mindset. There was a shift when she realized that she was in charge of how much money she made and it wasn’t a boss telling her what she would make. With money, you can always make more. Even if you lose it, you can make more.
Christina follows the Profit First model but pays herself less than it suggests and saves more. She is able to invest money back into her business.
Christina was side hustling while she was working full time. Everybody who works a full-time job should have a side hustle. Often people think that entrepreneurship is risky, but having a full-time job can also be risky if your boss doesn’t truly care about you or your family.
Invest money back into yourself and your business to get further faster. Invest in yourself and invest wisely.
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