Hello, thank you so much for joining us today on exvo home, we could not be more excited to have Entire Productions here today to talk about the process of getting published. Exvo home is near and dear to our hearts. What we want this to be a place where we can give back to the community where we can have educational content, where we can have networking sessions, and where we create a safe space for people to gather and to come to connect and to learn.

And to do this, we have brought in some of the most amazing people in the industry starting with the amazing team at Entire Productions who has been dear friends of ours at all seated for a long time. They need no introduction. I'm going to allow them to introduce themselves. So in just one moment, I will bring up Natasha and Madeline and I see some of you are doing it right now.

If you hear something you love, please feel free to use emojis. There is a thumbs-up emoji, a heart emotion, and a laughing emoji. That's how our speakers know that the content that they're delivering is exceptional and that you are identifying with it. Thanks so much.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Exvo home. This is so exciting. This is one of the first of many rooms that we'll be able to do. My dear friends, Sandy, and her team created all seated. And if you're in the event industry, you know that name, what the technology can do. And then through COVID, they came up with this incredible platform that I hope you guys are enjoying.

It's so exciting for me. We've been using it since they started it. We had our 20th anniversary on the platform Exvo. We had three whole different venues completely designed, so many interactive elements a lot of music and caricatures, and photo booths. And so it's very dynamic. I can't think of a more amazing platform.

So I'm. Giddy with excitement to be doing this today. And hopefully, the topic will be interesting to you. It's about how to get published and both national media, local media, and also Jamie thought it would be interesting for me to talk about how to get published in writing a book because I have written a book that will be released on March 22nd of next year.

It's called relentless. It's a story about my life. It's a business memoir. I couldn't write a memoir without it having to do with my whole life story which is business-oriented. And you'll find out why. Joining me today is a good friend and an amazing teammate, Madeline Raithel. She is our communications specialist.

And what does that mean? That means this girl has studied, learned, executed, and has been really. The key to keeping our message and our business alive through COVID specifically. So she has been working on our SEO or social media graphic design. She's good at everything pitching to the media managing my speaking engagements, writing blogs, writing content, writing articles.

It's so much so Madeline says hello to everyone. Hello everyone. It's great to be here. Thank you for the introduction. You didn't leave anything out. Yeah, that's pretty much. Pretty much it, but yeah, I've been spending the last year and a half, almost two years. Just really diving deep into how to get free press for your brand, why it is so important, how you get so many amazing qualified leads from the press that you get, and then what to do with it afterward, what to do once you get the press.

It's all something that we've seen is hugely influential for your business. And I'm really happy to share my knowledge with you guys here today. So thanks for being here. Yeah. Madeline and I are both going to be presenting to you. So if you have any questions you're able to ask them immediately, how do you do that?

I'm not sure. If Jamie can come back on she can let us know. But we want it to be interactive. I want to answer the questions that you have of us. Jamie, do people ask questions? I am getting ready to turn on the Q and a. So right down at the bottom where you saw the thumbs up the heart and the laughter emoji, which I love that people are already using.

There's going to be a button that comes up that says, raise a hand. I'm going to turn that on. And when that button comes up, you can raise your hand, and then I can pull you up onto camera and you can interact right here on stage. The other option that we have is if you look at the top left-hand of your screen, there is a participants button.

It tells you who is here right now. And if you click everybody, you can send a message to everybody. And we can ask questions that way and we'll be monitoring that chat as well. Awesome. Thank you for answering that burning question. I just want to give a special shout-out to my dad, Marty Miller, who supports me in every way possible he's in the audience.

I have no idea if he's going to ask a question, but let's all give him some hearts. I am here because of him. Thank you, Martin. Okay, so we're going to start off talking about, Ooh, my God. Look at that. Dad. Everybody loves you. So the first thing we're going to talk about is the entry into the media. That was really important and really amazing.

Like a lot, I am a singer-songwriter, a jazz vocalist, a classical violinist. That's how I started entire productions by complete accident. But in 2016, it was the first time I entered. The Inc magazine, Inc 5,000 list to be a contender for one of the fastest-growing businesses in America.

It was a dream of mine, like when I was a musician, I dreamt of winning a Grammy. I ended up going to a lot of the Grammy’s events. I ended up being on the ballot a couple of times. There's still time. There's an audio, an audible book coming out so I can be in there for that. But anyway I think the first thing I want to tell you all is to get media or get press, you have to be active.

You can't just be reactive. So for me, entering the Inc 5,000, it's not a contest. They just weigh you against. Other applicants to see how much you've grown. And I won't go into great detail. That was the first step of having great national media for entire productions. But the second step, which I think so many people miss and miss out on is this.

I was a contender, but I wasn't definitely in yet. And I received an email and it was a survey they're surveying the people that applied to be on the Inc 5,000 list. Now, most of you, most of us when we get a survey, especially if it looks complicated, we just hit delete. My first tip would be don't hit delete.

And so the survey, because what you're doing is you're giving information to that helpless publisher for them to write. Perhaps an article and that's exactly what happened. So we were able to be featured in an editorial article because I responded to a survey about strengths. They were looking for what kind of strengths do various entrepreneurs make the list?

Have I filled out the form? And it turns out that my highest strength was delegation, which by the way, it wasn't always the case. It was something that I had to learn and learn the hard way. But because I tested so high as a high delegator, I was called by Lee Buchanan, who was one of the top writers on Inc magazine.

And she interviewed me and she said to me it's not definite that you're going to be in the article, but we don't because we don't know yet if you've made the list. I think she knew that I had, but she couldn't say that in advance. So that was the kickstart. To entire productions being in national media.

And I'm going to tell you right now, being on that list, which takes hard work and business growth on revenue is a lot of strategies. It's a lot of pain and suffering and making great mistakes and learning from them. But that was part of the snowball effect. So now that I'm on the Inc 5,000 entire productions is, and I've been featured in that editorial, it's easier now for us to get the attention of the press and I'm going to have Madeline chime in here.

I just want to make sure. Yes. So one is you have to engage. You have to actively seek out media attention, and I'm going to let Madeline teach you how you can send out pitches, what to do and what not to do. But second, you have to be responsive and quick. So one of the things that make entire productions as successful as we are, I think is that we immediately respond to our clients and we don't just respond to them with, Hey, I got your message.

We'll be right back with you. We send them something meaningful, which usually means information, and let them know that we'll give them more. Once we've gotten some information from them, but we try to give our bids out to our clients. The same day, the same thing with the press you are going to get lost in the dust.

If you don't answer right away. So Madeline are you first of all, are there questions?

I'm just going to assume that. And Jamie, if there are just interrupt us. So, Madeline, I would love for you to talk to everyone about pitching to the media. I'm just going to let you take it from here. Yeah, of course. So I'm, I'll start where you should start. So for me, when I'm looking through different for various opportunities to get in the press, you can start to get lost in all the minutia and trends and all there's so much always going on and you always want to stay relevant.

But you have to always have your core values in mind so that you're not ending up doing press for stuff that isn't with your brand. So I would say getting a set of core values for your brand and your company is the very first thing that you should do before you start getting pressed. Everyone always says there's no such thing as bad press, which there technically isn't unless, you're doing something, whatever, but this is ultimate, what's going to be your company messaging and you're going to ultimately want to take those media placements and repurpose them.

So you want to make sure that you're doing media that makes sense. That's what I would say first. And so if you want it to just start going for it, you don't have any media contacts. You don't know where to go. The first thing that you should do is you should start getting on, help a reporter out, and they abbreviate that by HARO H A R O.

That is a service that you can sign up for where you will get daily emails with hundreds of source requests from journalists, from all sorts of publications. This is the one way that I, that we've gotten in. I think CNBC USA today, I think we've gotten a wall street journal placement through there, and I think that's actually, you know what that is where I started hearing from Claire Hoffman from BizBash.

And eventually was able to get her private email and develop a relationship with her. She attended our 20th-anniversary event. We now have a great relationship with BizBash and that has been one of the online publications where as soon as we're featured or anything like in their newsletter on their website, published an article through them.

We see an immediate uptick in leads that are qualified leads because it's going directly to the types of people that we want to work with. So I would say okay, cool. I defined to see what the message was. I would say getting off, I'm just giving everyone your email address. I'm just jumping on real quick because I got a direct message to me.

Hey, I just want to remind people, if you send it to everybody, then Natasha and Madeline can read it themselves, but it popped up as soon as you said, there's no bad press. And they said what the cancel culture is that still true? And I was like, that is an excellent question. So I'm going to jump up here and ask and then remind everybody if you want to put something in chat and you want these lovely ladies to be able to read it and make sure you use everybody and then they can read it themselves.

I'm going to answer that, but. I want you to continue about how to do media pitches because I think it's really important. I do think that with the cancel culture, there is such thing as bad press. I think eventually you're going to get a lot of eyeballs on you for the wrong thing. And if you learn from what you did, that was negatively impacted full to other people or hurtful, and then you come out on the other side, it can be beneficial.

But to do that on purpose, I think is just horrific a strategy. Some people decide, there, some people say to be polarizing, take a stance on one side or the other don't ever be in the middle, really make you, but if you're on a controversial side or a hurtful side, it is my opinion and it is our brand.

Not to go there, right? We don't want to upset people. We don't want to, we're not in the business. We're in the business of making people happy. Thank you for that question. And Madeline I'd love for you to talk about researching the people you're pitching to and the idea that you are not going to get press.

If you're saying, Hey, look at me, will you cover me? You're looking for, what can I serve the audience of the publication? And that's where you're going to start to get traction and then how to do the pitch and our press releases meaningful. These. Take it away. Yes. I would also like my final point on that, which also brings me into the, how to pitch journalists is that you're coming to them, like Natasha said not, Hey, look at me, you're coming to them with valuable information.

So if you're staying on the side of the truth and the side of the facts, then why are you getting canceled? You shouldn't be, that's what I'm saying. As long as you have your guiding core principles and your core values to guide your way and the types of content that you want to put out there and the drive to educate people, you will get good press.

The first thing that you're going to want to do before you start pitching to the press and finding contacts is to figure out what your message is and what, something that you know a lot about that you think other people should know more about that you want to share with them.

So for us, that's events and specifically virtual events. And so you will have to start researching the different types of publications that you want to be included in. For us, of course, something like BizBash is a great publication to be featured in people who plan events, read it, we plan events.

So that's, I would go to a place like BizBash I would go on their website and I would start to read and I would start to just simply search, and if I, it was like, I want to share. Entrepreneurial tips with event planners, because Natasha is a great entrepreneur. She has a lot of great skills and tips.

I think that a lot of other event planners are in the same boat where they want entrepreneurial tips. So we're going to work together. I'm going to create three to three to seven tips with Natasha that we're going to go over. And I will say that the press and the media love their odd numbers. So if you're doing anything, having to do with like how to use this many tips, always do an odd number.

I don't know what it is. They don't know what it is either. Like we've had this conversation, it just works better. So odd numbers do well. And then you also have to be thinking about what do they want? They want views. So think about SEO, think about, what sort of things they want to be coming up for on the internet.

Think about the types of information that their readers are coming to them for. And. This is going to take time. It's going to take work. It's going to take research. They want numbers. They want stats. They want information. They want photos. They want, they want their lives to be easier. They want to be able to be publishing content 24 7.

And if you can help them do that and help provide value to their readers, then they will accept your pitch. And so why pitch these people. So first you find the publication you want to pitch to. Then you start researching different writers within that organization. And you start to look at their profiles.

A lot of the time they will have their email on their profile and they're open to pitch. Which is great. And that makes your job easy. If they don't, they'll likely have their Twitter linked and you can go to their Twitter. And sometimes they have their email on their bio. If they don't, then you go to LinkedIn or muck rack or any one of the other ones.

And if they're just really unlisted, then they probably aren't wanting to be pitched. So maybe you should focus your attention on somebody else for now, but now you are, you went to their page, their home page, their Twitter, and their LinkedIn, and likely you've followed them. You've looked through their posts, you've engaged with some of them.

And that's another great way you're going to have to be up on Twitter because writers are up on Twitter. So you're gonna have to get Twitter. You're going to have to get on there. You're going to have to follow these journalists and not just follow them, but engage with them. They want you to get on there and have conversations with them.

Eventually, if you hit their email inbox, you're not a stranger, they know you from Twitter because they're like, oh, that's not a cool person that is always engaging with my posts. Okay, let me take the time to read this. Yeah. Okay. Just looking at your notes. Once you have a message and you have the contact information of the person that you'd like to send it to the pitch itself should be very succinct.

I typically like to almost write the article for them in a way just very shortly, just a big overview of what the story is, but with the key data and statistics that make it important, the one that I've been using that stands out to journalists is that what's the pandemic.

80% of us saw almost all of our business gone completely 80% is a really big number and something that you can wrap your head around when instead of saying the pandemic was detrimental to the event industry. Okay. How and in numbers it will 80%. Okay. That's something that they can work with and you provide them the link to that specific piece of information so that they know that you're not just making it up.

And that's instant value in their inbox and they might not even respond the first time, which is okay, because sometimes they read it and they're like, oh, that's a really good idea. I just, don't have the bandwidth for that right now, but I'm going to think about that. And also if it's something that's like a story that you're like, I have some.

I have a really good insight into this particular story. I want to get my message out. They're not just going to write it about you. They're going to be presented with the idea of this story. They're going to hear your side of it. And then they're going to go off and do all of their research on that specific subject.

And then they'll come back to you and likely do a longer interview. And then they'll publish the piece. And you'll be one quote out of 10, that kind of happened recently where I was pitching to Inc magazine about vaccination cards in vaccination proof. And so I sent an email to one of the editors and I told her that I represent a prominent event planner.

And so when you pitch the, essentially the method is hello, thank you for the opportunity to contribute. I have an opportunity for you to interview a source to speak on. X Y and Z, and just put the most important, juicy details right there at the front. They want to know as soon as I opened that email, what this is about.

Okay. And so you're going to lead with the best stuff. And then you go in and you say, here are the different things that we can talk about here. So here's why it's important. Here are the different things that we can talk about. What time do you have to talk about these things? And then at the very end, you can put in more statistics, more bio, more information, pictures, whatever, and you put that at the very bottom.

You don't want to try to be putting in all this information about yourself in the pitch itself. The pitch should just be, what is the story? What are the facts? What is the information, all that other stuff about you? The icing on the cake.  And I'd like you to talk about the relevance of full-throttle press releases, what they're good for, what they don't, what they don't work for.

Yeah, of course. I think press releases are something that you do only when you have a new product coming out an event coming out, something really big. So this isn't something that you're going to be doing very often unless you get, I don't know, constantly launching products and having big events, which congratulations.

That's cool. You do a press release, you should do a press release when it's something that you're excited to share with everyone. You're just like, I want everyone to know about this thing. And so a press release should be about a page long. There's a bunch of templates online. You can use any, honestly, it doesn't matter which one you use.

Just look up, press release distribution online. That's fine. The first one likely the first couple of ones will be free or something like that. Or you can get a discounted price. You typically do have to pay to publish a press release, which is something that, I guess I didn't think of before doing them.

But they'll likely have a template for you and it's really easy. And again, it's just the facts just put in the facts and the information at all the details. And don't go over. Who, what, where, when, why that's it just answer those questions. Yeah. And as simply as possible. Yes. And another thing that I just off the top of my head that you're gonna want.

Is Grammarly. That is a Google Chrome extension. They will I even have it. I'm in here right now. I can see in my chatbox that there's a little Grammarly button. And so even if I type in this chat right now, Grammarly will bring up and tell me like, oh, you said that wrong. And then I can fix it.

So nothing that I'm putting out there is grammatically incorrect. Not always completely a hundred percent, but it gets you there. I, to add on the press releases that if you're trying to get a media outlet to cover you as a feature, just sending them a press release is going to do nothing for you. And if your, if you're paying for these companies to push out the press release, what I think is good for.

Mostly is SEO because there are a lot of people that pick up a lot of outlets that pick up these press releases and just put them on their website. So it's good for SEO, but they're not featuring you. They're not going to write a story about even that's the biggest thing. I mentioned a quote a paragraph, a feature.

This is the pyramid of what you can get published with. So there's a question about are there certain types of publications that lean more to press releases? And I guess what I would say is create your, create a relationship, give incredible value that they just, they can't deny is good for their audience, make it easy for them.

You're going to pitch them in a very short, succinct way in the body of the email. You can follow up by attaching the press. But I would, you will just be shooting yourself in the foot. If you copy and paste a press release in the body of an email and send it to people and hope that there is a reaction, they will, there will be no reaction.

There might be removed me from your list reaction. Yeah. Yeah. Press releases. Aren't valuable for people, so let's talk about writing blog posts and contributing as a writer for articles and magazines and blog posts and the experience that we've had thus far. Yeah, of course. First of all, writing blog posts is something that you can do easily for your website.

You can just start doing it right away. You don't need to get press or anything for that. You can write blog posts about whatever interests you and whatever you know, a lot about. And again, press releases and blog posts are just great for SEO. And so when people are looking up, event planner, event, production, entertainment, production, if you have a blog post that's valuable and has a lot of good information and has all of those keywords distributed, widely distributed well throughout that blog post it'll likely come up in people's Google searches.

And so your blog posts can start coming up. No. And Google searches for leads, but for journalists trying to research different things. And so that's why it's really important to do your research and to learn things so that you can share your knowledge so that you can write a blog post that's titled like five of the best holiday event trends.

Okay. And so there's a writer for I don't even know USA today. They're working on a story for holiday party ideas. They Google. Holiday party trends. We have a great website with a ton of great blog posts that include those keywords and they can go to our site and they'll likely find our blog.

They'll start to read it. They'll go, wow. These people know what they're talking about. Oh, there's contact here. I can just reach out to them and ask them more about this. Being able to share really valuable content and education and being able to educate people online is the best thing that you can do.

And so there's that I wanted you to talk about is guest blogging and guest writing and contributing to other yeah, so that's tricky too because you that's a little bit more of finding the right person within that organization because just, a writer, if you send them something that you've written, they're going to be like, okay, No, thanks.

Cause they want it they're right there. The writers, so you have to find a contact within the organization that you can send written pieces. So I'm going to use BizBash as an example, if I wanted to just have a quote or a feature and an article about something about events, I would contact Claire, who is the, she's an editor now, but we've known her for a long time so she can help us with everything.

But then there's also God, I wish I had, yeah, Ashley had they have different titles and those people are in charge of the contributed content. So that's you would find someone that had something in their title about contributing content and you can just go to their publications.

It's a bit of digging, but likely you can find a page that has a lot of their employees and what their positions are. And if not, you can get sneaky and you can go onto LinkedIn and look at the company's page and you can look at people and then you can just search like contributed content or something or whatever, and look through the different people on LinkedIn and look at their job titles and just identify who would be the best contact.

And then you can go from there and don't feel shy, reaching out to people on LinkedIn. It's a professional networking website. That's what you're supposed to do on there. And so reach out to them and just say, Hey, I love, oops, I love your writing. And I want to talk, let's hop on the phone or something, or, and how many articles have we guest contributed to BizBash so far?

Is it to something like that? Yeah. Yeah. And so they have to be really, well-written well edited. My dad is a copywriter and a proofer. I'm sorry, he's not a copywriter. He's a proofreader. And he always finds mistakes that we have made, but that's what those people are for because a lot of writers make mistakes.

But you want a great article written tip or well-received. You can't write about yourself. It's not an article about, Hey, look at us, look at entire productions. We're so cool. It has to be almost more anonymous. This is what you can do, not, this is what we did do. We could do that recently.

I wrote an article for Inc magazine about singing the National Anthem at the Giants game. And I did that as a contributor. I wasn't paid so as a contributor, you're not paid by the magazine typically. But because I'm in a group called entrepreneurs organization, we have a special byline in Inc magazine.

But that doesn't mean that they're going to say yes, every time they can deny it. But I wrote the article, I think Madeline edited it and my dad edited it, that I sent it to the EO writer. They crunched down my, I think 1300 word article into 800 words, which is what I'm sorry, what entrepreneur. Inc wanted and then it was accepted for publication, which was amazing.

And the article was, I think it was entitled seven reasons to do what scares you. So yes, singing the National Anthem with no background music acapella with a delay of two seconds in front of 30,000 plus people. It was something that would be scary to most people, including me, even as a professional musician.

So I wrote this article telling the readers, what was, what were the scary elements, and what did I have to lose, but why I did it and what I gained after it. So right now I would love for people to raise their hand, to ask a question or make a comment, come up on stage. I want to see you on one of these windows.

I believe you have a raise your hand icon or something. You might win a prize. I don't know. We haven't gone there yet. Yeah. I will say though, that contributed articles are probably the best way to raise your authority status. So if you're looking to become an authority on a certain subject, write that article and figure out what their beat is, figure out how long the articles are, how they structure them.

Cause you're going to want to almost copy the style of everything that they're writing, because typically when you want to contribute something, they gave you a sheet with all of these stipulations. It must be this many words. It must be this many paragraphs, no more than the number of sentences in one paragraph.

Like there's a lot of rules, a lot of times for contributed content. So maybe that's the first thing that you do is ask them, what's your stipulations for contributed content. I like to get started on something and send it to you. But I want to make sure that it's as close to perfect as possible.

You are just thinking about making their lives easier when you're doing this. And so as Natasha said, you're not to. Woo-hoo bragging about myself. It's yeah. Going to be anonymous almost and it might have your name and they might not even link to your website when they post it. It's all about being able to raise your authority.

And when you do have something like that, just reuse the heck out of it. Post on social media, like just do one sentence of it a day who cares? You're be excited about the media that you get because simply it being published online is not enough. You need to do something with the media that you get.

And I assume you have a question and it's our next topic. Yeah. But before we answer Karen's question, which I can't wait to do I want to get somebody up on stage and if no, one's going to come up, I'm going to drag my friend and co-founder of all seated up here Sandy, can you come up?

Somebody has to show everyone what it's like, and it's not scary.

as Sandy's coming up. Oh, let's see. I'm getting  Sabine, oh, Sabine okay come on up. I think you need to raise your hand or Jamie just pluck you out

and then we'll get back to Karen steel's question. Yes, that's a very good question.

Okay. I think it just takes a moment or two to get these people pulled up to the stage. Thanks for. Your patience in some of this technical stuff, I will say, after this session is done we'll be able to talk to each other one-on-one or in groups if we want. And then also at the end, you can take the teleporter down to the lobby and see various things that I'll see that have on display in addition to their NFTs.

Do we have Sabina up or can we get her up there, Sandy? Hey Sandy. Hi guys. Sorry. Jeremy's oh,

she bit the dust. Okay. When Sandy comes up, this is what I want to ask her where she comes from. Sandy, you guys were just featured in Forbes. Yes. Congratulations. Oh my God. How did you guys land that? So we work with influencers it's we decided to go a different route. We've, we've had press companies in the past and I don't like to say good or bad things.

It's, it's a lot of work getting press. I think what you guys have been talking about for the last half an hour for the last 40 minutes is there's a lot to be said about it. It's really hard work. It's not an easy thing to do. It's so much of what you're saying, really knowing the people for us, it was we felt that we wanted to get it a little bit faster because it is a bit of a long process.

So we knew a couple of people that influence in this area with these specific magazines. We were very targeted at where we wanted to go. I'm not going to tell you it was cheap. It wasn't cheap. You don't have to pay for it. By the way, there's also no guarantee. So even though we did get the article in Forbes it wasn't like a guarantee.

There was one price for the introduction, one price to get the press release together, and then which we had to pay, whether we were going to get it or not. And then if we got it, there was the big of price, that kind of price is, it is important for us.

So sometimes you have to pay for it. There is such a thing in Forbes, and I'm not sure if this is how you guys were published. I didn't read it the byline carefully, but you can pay. Yeah. Some publishers to be a so Forbes has the Forbes business council. You have to be admitted into it, so you have to be screened, but then you pay an annual fee, and then you can publish.

But it's not certain that your article will be right. No, we didn't. We heard about that, but it's a known process and we wanted something faster. So this is again, an influence of the new, the publisher. The publisher relies on him to bring him good articles with stories. Again, there's no guarantee, but because the influence has got a good reputation and is well known.

They don't, they don't, they bring them, but stuff, and we had to work very hard with the article you saw the title, i