00:00

Welcome to Make More Money without Selling Your Soul with me Polly Lavarello, evergreen marketing expert. This podcast is for you if you are an online entrepreneur who is looking to simplify their business to scale.  On this podcast you can expect to hear regular talk about wealth, about selling and about wellbeing. Because I believe these three core fundamental things are pivotal to your growth moving forward.

00:44

Hello and welcome to make more money without selling your soul with myself. Polly Lavarello, everyday sales expert and cushy business pioneer.  And today on the show, we have a guest Gloria Chow is an award winning PR strategist and 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. Her strategies have earned small businesses in nearly every industry niche, over a billion organic views and features and outlets like the New York Times, Oprah’s Favorite Things, Vogue and Forbes, without any pay to play, a former US diplomat turned small business advocate, Gloria has been on 100 podcasts and was named a pitch writing expert of the year in 2021 as part of the influential business woman awards and a Forbes next 1000 honoree.

01:47

I mean, what a woman, and she and I have been in each other’s worlds ever since this interview. And I can tell you, she is the genuine article. She is the biggest hype woman of other female business owners. I know she’s fabulous, so I cannot wait for you to wrap your ears around this conversation, and more importantly, on a selfish level, for you, she’s going to drop some gold on PR that’s going to reframe your relationship with it and hopefully help you feel fired to jump into action. I know I certainly was after this conversation. I cannot wait for you to listen to it. Hi, Gloria. I’m so excited to have you on the show. I was going to say talking all things PR, but I suspect this is going to be a rather unorthodox take on PR, which I’m equally, if not more, excited for. But before we get started, I would love for you to just introduce yourself and tell tell my listeners a bit more about yourself. Yes, thank you for having me on. So I’m Gloria Chow. I’m a small business PR coach. I say Coach because I come from a very untraditional PR path, so you’re in for a tree. I’ve never actually worked a day in my life at a PR agency or a marketing agency. I actually picked up the phone and started dialing the operator at the New York Times and newsrooms to literally cold pitch 1000s of times and hacking it from the outside. That’s kind of how I cracked the code on it. And I’m going to share a little bit with your audience, but that’s kind of my story in a nutshell. I actually used to be a US diplomat before I did any of this, so very untraditional, very kind of, you know, outsider, and I’m excited to get to get into it amazing. So I always love to ask people the question, who come in this show now, what prompted the leap from where you are now, from being a US diplomat to kind of cracking the code with PR, what was the motivation and the story behind that? So I also I grew up bilingual and bicultural, and I always loved international relations, like I studied abroad in South Africa. So for me, I always wanted to get proximate to different people in different cultures, and so I thought that that was going to be my path, you know. And so I had that, you know. I went to school for it. I studied international relations, I got my grad degree in political science, and I got a scholarship that kind of pre selected me for the diplomatic corps. And I was set up for a 25 year career with a pension and everything. And I quickly realized that there are two types of people in the world, well, more than two, but there are the bureaucrats, and then there are people who would like to be a little bit more creative color outside of the lines. And that’s me. And so I realized it wasn’t a personality fit. And I always love to be everyone’s unofficial hype woman. I always joke that in my other life, I would be like that hip hop MC, like hyping the crowd up before somebody got on stage. So I love to see people win, and I naturally loved writing and pitching and connecting people. And so communications was my thing. And so I probably applied for, gosh, like, 1000 PR jobs, like I kid you not. I have the LinkedIn receipts for it, and I wanted to work in communications, and they all very quickly, like, not only did I get rejected, but they all want a very cookie cutter traditional PR experience. And so I quickly realized, like, wow, this PR industry is a very gate kept traditional industry, and it was very kind of like, this is how you do things. And I realized I needed to be a disrupter if I were to do it my own way.

05:00

And so that’s what I did. I kind of carved out my own little space. I started getting tiny little clients who pay me, you know, a few 100 bucks here or there to get to get them on to like CNBC and Wall Street Journal. I was working with a very tiny little FinTech firm. I didn’t even know what FinTech was really and just started just looking at data, trying to pick out what is the relevant news. And because I didn’t have any contacts, I had to cold call the operator with sweaty hands and just get them to stay on the phone with me long enough so that they can put me through to the other person, to the other person. And when you when I refine this 1000s of times, I picked up on patterns of what worked and what didn’t. And now I have my CPR cold pitching method that now 1000s of founders have used to get on all the media outlets themselves, that sounds amazing. Tell us more about the CPR approach. I was gonna say CFR, but that’s not CFA. What do you call the CPR method?

05:49

So here’s the thing I’ve learned from cold pitching 1000s of times, right? The more you lead with your company and your benefits and your features, the less likely you’re gonna get featured in a top tier magazine. And that sounds very counterintuitive, because us as founders, we’re so used to marketing like we would sell to a customer, right? We are not selling to the journalists. The journalist is never going to buy from us. And so this, there’s this very unnatural act of, okay, how do we, like take off our marketing hat, and how do we put on the hat of, how do we pitch with the relevant news or the insight or the trend, and lead with that instead. And so the CPR method is three elements you need in your pitch that’s going to get your pitch super solid and get the other person on the other end to say, yes, remember, you’re not writing the pitch for the journalist. You’re simply offering them a perspective of a story for them to say, Well, tell me more. So the CPR method stands for credibility, point of view and relevance. And usually when I write a pitch, I like to kind of flip it upside down. So I like to start with the relevance, because you want to grab their attention at the get go. And what is news? If it’s not relevant, right? You want to pitch with the season. So if you are, you know, in in health, if there is a new FDA report out there, like maybe piggyback on that. If you are in wellness, maybe it’s something around New year, new you you know, if it’s something in education, it could be around graduation, and it could be around the new skills for this job market. Try to figure out, what are the relevant seasonal things that you can pitch. Put that first, what are people looking for? What problems are they looking for us to solve? And then P stands for point of view. It’s usually three bullet points under the starting relevant paragraph about three tips, three things, three insights, three things that you notice, I like, threes. That keeps it organized. And then the pitch with credibility. C for credibility, which is just one sentence of you know how you’ve noticed this problem firsthand. And here’s what you help people with. If you’ve been featured, if you’ve been on any podcast, mention it, but it’s not a necessity. And then you simply say, I’m happy to chat more about it. You know, I’m happy to chat more about it. Here’s how you can connect me. So the whole essence of the pitch is not begging to be featured. It’s not, I can’t pay for an ad, so please, you know, feature me instead. It’s simply positioning you as an industry voice with a point of view. I love this, and I think one of the things my listener may be questioning right now, you know what it’s like to be an online business owner. As we’re growing, we get to the stage where you know you’ve got your offer, maybe got a small team, maybe a VA, and everyone’s saying to you, you need more visibility. And there’ll be one advert popping up saying you need to write a book, and another one saying you need to stand on more stages, another person saying you need to do more podcast touring, and then another PR. And I think that’s one of the most overwhelming aspects at that stage of business growth, where somebody’s questioning, what is the area that I should be focusing on the most to kind of well for it to succeed, to make sure that the time that they’re investing is time well spent. So what would you say to that person, if they’re kind of deliberating, is PR the right area for them to be focusing on right now? Well, I would say, if you have a book, you still need PR, right like content alone, it doesn’t do anything. You need to get distribution for that content. And there’s no more powerful distribution than leveraging, you know, a media, a credible media outlet, because PR is the only thing that simultaneously checks all the boxes. You get SEO with powerful backlinks, which you don’t get with social media and ads. You get credibility and authority because you’re leveraging, you know, that journalist, that whatever the outlet is, and you’re getting that traffic and sales. So PR, for me, should be the foundation of your marketing, and I would rather get onto one podcast like what we’re doing here, which is PR, by the way, right, leveraging your audience, gaining their trust, and then repurposing that 29 then making 20 different reels on Instagram that the algorithm we know is down by 30% because they want you to pay to boost your posts. So to me, it’s just a different way of thinking. We’re taught to get that quick dopamine hit of, okay, let me make a reel, let me post something, but it’s not getting anywhere. So as a CEO, we need to really step back and evaluate, what are we doing for our time? How can I create a better ROI for my time? Am I creating long term assets searchable? You know?

10:00

Credible assets like PR, like backlinks, or am I just doing busy work? Because that’s what I love that. And you’re totally right. It’s the CEO mindset, isn’t it? It’s when you go beyond being that solopreneur, and you’re you’re starting to think long term. You’re no longer at the stage of thinking, How do I get by month to month? And instead, you’re thinking year to year and thinking about the bigger picture. I really love that. And a question that’s come up for me in the past. So I’ve kind of dabbled with PR. I had somebody that I was working with at the time, and they would often occasionally say, Oh, this thing’s come up in, you know, a particular publication. And I have to admit, I was a bit of a publication snob, for example, I would avoid things like tabloids, which have a much like larger reach, and be desperate to be in, not desperate, then it’s not the nicest word, but I would be keener to be in, let’s say a broad sheet that’s more respected. I mean, this is talking very UK specific, right? But I’m sure it applies everywhere, right? We’ve all got our kind of preferred publishers, but I have often kind of looked at myself and thought, am I looking at things upside down here? Is it? Is it so relevant to be so concerned about what the vehicle is, and should we just be more, you know, is there a certain way we should be looking at where we’re featured? Does it really matter? Is it something we should put in so, so I think for what you’re doing, if you do something contentious, if you’re in politics, if you have something that is, you know, a celebrity gossip, then, yeah, like you need to have a little bit more discretion, but for 95% of your listeners, it’s not really a super sensitive topic. So when you’re just getting started, more eyes is always going to be a good thing. I think there’s a different problem for each stage of business. So when I’m not getting visibility, and my question is not, well, which vehicle? The question is, well, how do I first get that visibility, and then once we get a little bit of that visibility, maybe a little bit of momentum, then you can then pick and choose. Well, you know, this avenue is not working as well, and that avenue is working that well, right? But I think at first it’s like, how do you even get the attention of the media? And obviously, you know, the tabloids, you know, they want to be sensationalist. They a may not even cover what we’re doing, right? Because it’s not interesting. So, so they’re, they’re vetting it themselves, so we don’t have to worry about that, but it but let’s say, you know, I work with a founder in plant medicine, cannabis, right? If, if they do want to interview them, then you have every right to talk to the journalist and say, here are the things I don’t want to talk about, and here’s what I want the story to be. And I just want to be clear on that before we do the interview. And a lot of times the interview is not even a verbal interview. It could be just an email back and forth. So you have, you have agency, right? You You can totally direct it, but you need to step into that and be very clear with here’s what I don’t want to talk about, here’s what I do want to talk about. And you can have such valuable advice, because I think that can be one of the fears that comes up around PR, is, we want the visibility, but we worry about and obviously, I think a lot of us, in time, hear horror stories as to where people’s words have been used out of context, or where they weren’t able to look at what it was before it was published. And it’s potentially felt more damaging, even though, of course, rarely these things are long term, but it’s felt more risky. But that simple act of like you say, giving clear boundaries just diminishes any of those issues, right? That makes so much sense to me. I turned down an opportunity to be in some big tabloid about women who have husbands, who are stay at home husbands, and when I saw the angle on it afterwards, I was so relieved. I was like, that would have been so like humiliating for my husband, and at the same time I was got to turn it on. Yeah, and even that gut check too. Like women, we have such intuition, and if something doesn’t feel right, yes, follow that. There’s always going, like, what is meant for you will always come to you now or later. So I think a lot of times in online business, we’re like, well, I want to be on that person’s podcast. And I want to be and like, once you are clear with your message, that person will find you like, absolutely and I’m sure Pauly, you know this too, right? Once you’re in your lane and you’re tapped into that flow of your why the right opportunities that’s meant for you will always come and coming back to what you were sharing earlier on. I love the simplicity of CPR that makes so much sense to me. And I love the idea of, you know, when you were referencing the relevancy in terms of, you know, whether reports just come out, or whether it’s time of year. I mean, what I like about that, when I think about that in a practical way, is there’s that sense of, there are certain times a year that we already know about well in advance, and then there are other things that we might not know about in advance, like time relevant pieces that may have just come out, like you say, a report. So there’s this kind of multi layered approach to relevancy that we can be keeping an eye on. But that raises the question for me if I wanted to do well, where someone wants to do PR and they want to do it well, I know some of the hesitations I had in the past, even though I knew things like, let’s say x once was Twitter was potentially a good place to find PR requests and things like that. I think one of the things I found overwhelming in the past was that sense of, you know, where do I find where these opportunities are? How much time do I need to dedicate to proactively seeking them? I guess, I guess that is the question, how much is reactionary and how much should be pro.

15:00

Active and in terms of the time we should be putting aside. What does that look like to actually execute PR in a way that actually works? Definitely, you know, until you get to like, a momentum where people know about you, you should absolutely be going after it just like you would send me an email or posting on Instagram. I would argue that PR is a much higher leveraged activity because of the reasons we talked about, but I love that you touched upon that, because PR, at its core is very simple. It’s, it’s writing a good pitch and sending it to the right person. And if you can put the two and two together, you can repeat it as a system in your business. And I think anyone that tells you it’s not is either trying to monetize on you or, you know, like, like, I just think for so long it’s been so gate kept by these, these agencies that charge, you know, New York, $10,000 a month for six months. And it’s really not rocket science. So we talked a little bit about how to write a good pitch, which is one aspect, and the CPR method will help you. Now let’s talk about how do you send it out. Who do you send it out to? That’s very important. So who do you send it out to? It’s not going to be info or media@forbes.com

15:59

it’s going to go into an internet black hole. It’s not going to be the going to be the editor at Vogue. They’re doing their own book tours. You want to find the very specific writer who covers your beat, whether it’s health and wellness, whether it’s parenting, whether it’s fashion, whether it’s sustainability. Do you see where I’m getting at here? And so there’s certain grassroots way that you can today start to create your own media list, kind of like a CRM for your customers. And in my program, we have a database of 100,000 journalists across 100 beats. But you can start doing it today if you install a Google news alert. So if you type in the Google search bar, let’s say if you’re a speaking coach, right, you can put communications leadership, Google will ping you with all of the articles digitally that are being published around your industry, and it’s as easy as you going clicking on the article, copy and pasting that person’s first and last name, who wrote it, and their email, because it’s all public information, into an ever growing Excel spreadsheet that’s going to be your media list. Another couple thing is that you can sign up for HARO, which stands for Help a Reporter Out it’s been bought by a different company, but it’s the same thing. You sign up as a source, and you get pinged with all the hundreds of queries of journalists that are looking for a very specific person to interview that day. And if you fit the bill, if that is you, then you can respond. I had someone in my program get into 10 different outlets just using Haro and the CPR method. Oh my gosh, that’s amazing. Yeah, this year alone, you can follow hashtags like journal requests on, you know, X and LinkedIn, and that’s when journalists are looking that day for a quote, like a last minute thing, right? Journal request. Another thing that I just came across my My thing is, I’m doing a training for my program, but if you make a physical product, you can follow people’s sub stacks. So, you know, sub stack is, like, it’s like a platform you can monetize on your writing. And a lot of these journalists have their own sub stack blogs that they actually post. Hey, here’s what I’m working on for Forbes. Hey, here’s what I’m working on for travel and leisure. So that’s also a, really, a great way to see, like, what journalists are looking at. And we live in such an incredible age where, like, it’s not the secret information, right? This information is out there. So leverage social media like leverage hashtags, leverage tools like Google newsletter, and then soon you will know all the important players in your industry that you need to cultivate a relationship with. I love that. I love that. And so obviously, beyond SEO, and the fact that, like you say, this is kind of long term return from PR, and alongside the obvious visibility piece, which is obviously incredibly potent, another thing that people talk about when they refer to PR is trust stamps. What are your thoughts and feelings around that? As in, kind of when, obviously on your own website, when you can share where you’ve featured in and all that kind of stuff is the trust you said it was in trust stamps, the, I think that’s what I’ve heard them being referred to in the past. But essentially where you kind of leverage, where you featured in, on your funnels and on your websites, yeah? So, so like, like, press logos, I will say there’s a lot of scammers out there who are, like, get featured in, and it’s actually you paying for an ad and paying them on top of the ad. So don’t fall for those. Those are not going to give you visibility. It’s not editorial, it’s advertising, and people don’t trust it, because it’s going to say advertising content. So don’t do that. I would like to leverage a couple ways. You can put it in your newsletter, you can put it in your email footer. You can repurpose it as an ad. You can put it in your newsletter. You can make it into carousel post. There’s so many ways that you can leverage it, but definitely, definitely put your press and awards and speaking on your website as well. I actually have a client who I worked with, and she has it in her in her email signature. I love that. I love that you’re an absolute goldmine of knowledge. I can’t believe everything you’re sharing, I hope anyone who’s listening right now, I hope you’ve got your phone open and you’re taking notes because everything you’ve just shared from CPR all the way through to how to get those notifications, so that you can ensure that you are getting into opportunities as and when they arise, and knowing who to reach out to. I mean, you’re holding out.

20:00

Absolutely nothing back. Thank you so much. Gloria, you’re incredible. And tell me more about the work you do with your clients then in terms of supporting them with their PR, yeah. So for me, what I do is all about access. So for a lot of female founders, especially women of color founders, we don’t have a lot of privilege and access. And I realize that this industry has, you know, traditionally, gate kept that, and so I’m disrupting it by, you know, sharing all the things I really don’t hold back, as you can tell. And I think if we were in the media more, then the media landscape would be more diverse. We need to hear stories about women doing incredible things. And so that’s, that’s really my why behind what I do. You know, growing up as a daughter of immigrants who didn’t speak English like I didn’t really see myself at all in any magazine or any TV thing, and so I’m rewriting that, and I’m helping other people do that too. You can find me on all the things at Gloria Chow PR, that’s Gloria, C, H, o, u, p r, and I have a free PR master class that actually shows you word for word, the anatomy of a, c, p r, pitch that got someone featured. And you can watch that at Gloria Chow, PR, com slash master class. And if you DM me on Instagram at Gloria Chow PR, the word pitch, I will give you another pitching freebie so you can get cracking on your CPR pitch, absolutely incredible. I think I’ll be the first one to download that, because I know I need to dive back into PR, and you have given me all the feelings like I want to so thank you so much for your time today, Gloria. Thank you amazing.

21:25

Well, if that interview hasn’t got you wanting to dive head first into PR I don’t know what will Gloria is phenomenal do go check her out on her social media channels. I mean, what I will say since being in Gloria’s world is she is the biggest hype woman of other women in this space. She is a real amazing human being to be around and learn from, as well as just to be in her world. So do go check her out. In the meantime, I will be back in your ears. And next week, continuing the everyday Sales series, there’s already been an episode dropped on an offer suite for everyday sales. There’s been an episode dropped on marketing for everyday sales, and next week, I will be talking about the sales activities you need to be doing for Everyday sales. And little spoiler alert, no, it doesn’t require you to be cold pitching people. It’s so much easier than that, and I cannot wait to share with you the small activities we do consistently in my business to ensure that we have a consistent flow of leads and Sales for everyday sales, I’ll be in your ears then.