It’s Influence Tuesday! Today we’re covering how to get free media attention for your business. In the last decade that I’ve been in business I’ve been on live television, live radio, hundreds of podcasts and countless articles all of which I secured for myself for free.

My media mentions include Forbes, The Huffington Post, Business Insider, USA Today, a column at Inc and more. I’ve also been on top rated podcasts like Entrepreneur on Fire. I promise you you don’t have to spend a fortune if you learn how to get free media attention for your business.

Setting Expectations on How to Get Free Media Attention

This is a long game. Don’t expect to send one pitch (or even 100 pitches) and get featured in Forbes tomorrow. Granted, I do have coaching clients who get featured in Forbes rather quickly and are asked to come on nationally syndicated radio shows within a week of implementing some of these strategies.

Let’s Define Media

Media is anything that puts some eyeballs on you. It could be podcasts, online magazines, blogs and YouTube videos. It could also be more traditional media like print magazines (I’ve been in Seventeen and Success Magazine) or television. I once did about 25 media interviews for one corporate client in about four hours. It was wild!

What’s the point of getting media?

Ideally, it’s to get leads you can sell your products and services to. Otherwise, you basically have a bunch of eyeballs on you for no reason – and that sucks. Just last week I spoke to a blogger who was getting more traffic than ever in his life and he had no funnel, no opt-in and no way of monetizing his audience.

What. A. Bummer.

If you haven’t figured out what you’re selling and to who, then I invite you to a complimentary call with my team where they can help you figure it out. This is also exactly what we cover in Persuade to Profit.

How to Get Free Media

Okay, now let’s dive into how to get free media for your business. Again, this is a multi-pronged approach. I’m also just covering the basics here.

Do your market research.

Aside from helping you craft products and services that sell themselves, market research gives you a gold mine of topics to pitch to the media. The problem is most business owners like to skip this very important step – and it shows. 

You cannot skip this part of the process and expect to get media or make any money. It’s literally the crux of everything. We walk clients through a step by step process on how to do this in Persuade to Profit.

Create your own content consistently

You want to know the easiest way to get media to come to you? Create content consistently. A few weeks ago when this whole crisis broke out, my inbox was full of media requests from everything from home and garden magazines to websites for local businesses. It’s because I’ve spent years pumping out content about finances. So obviously, I’m a credible source.

Again, this is a long game but it works. And here’s the deal, you need to create your own content anyway for your marketing pieces.

Learn how to pitch!

The amount of horrible pitches that come across my inbox on a weekly basis dumbfounds me. Here’s a doozy from the last few weeks:

Let’s start with the basics. This is TOTALLY out of touch. I mean can someone say asshole? There’s a fine line between seeing an opportunity with what’s going on right now (there are plenty) and profiteering. This would be the latter. There is so much wrong with this that I can’t even type it. I refer you to the video at the top of this post which breaks it all down.

If you haven’t already swiped it, I highly recommend signing up to receive my Free Pitch Formula template. This is the exact email pitch formula I used to get a column at Inc.