Unlocking Media Exposure - Insider Secrets to Landing High-Impact - Kimanzi Constable - Freelance Journalist

SPEAKER_01 0:04

This is the Beyond the Story Podcast. A show that goes way beyond the story. Sebastian Fr. Welcome to the show, man. Thank you for having me, Sebastian. It's been too long. Way too long, man. Wait till where did we initially meet? Was it at trafficking conversions years ago? Maybe.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Maybe. It might have been there. I mean, I used to hit the circuit a lot. It might have been podcast movement. I think that's probably more likely. It might, or one of the podcasting conferences, like it was somewhere along the way.

SPEAKER_01 0:46

Some those one of those marketing circles out there. Exactly. Well, dude, great to uh connect with you. I know that we had chatted briefly a couple months back. You would you had uh searched me for a few things for an for an article that uh you were doing very short stance. That was the fastest interview I've ever done in my life. I'm like, that was awesome. I need to learn how to do fast interviews like that. Um, but I've been following you for a minute now, and you've taken your expertise uh as a journalist and and and parlayed it into being able to help people uh leverage the world of PR. And that's that's why I wanted to invite you on the show, of course, to talk a little bit about what you do specifically, but also with this upcoming software that you're about to launch that I'm personally uh excited about too. But let's back up a little bit, give our listeners some context here. Um, you know, what's what's the backstory and what really brought you to present day uh as a journalist?

SPEAKER_00 1:34

So I I started as I started um as an entrepreneur more than a journalist. Um my first business was at 19. It was a physical business. Um in 2011, I discovered podcast. I discovered uh smart passive income with Pat Flynn, most people probably know. And he started talking about making money online. And I thought, why am I like bust? I'm killing my body every day. I'm working hard. Why can't I make money like with my mind, like this guy, uh this podcaster guy's talking about? So in 2011, as I between things, I was kind of just scribbling some notes, talking about like what the everyday working person went through. And Pat was talking about ebooks. And I'm like, well, let me just take these notes and like compile it into an ebook. Why not? So I paid a formatter and an editor, I paid somebody to build a website, I put the book out there and nobody bought. Like I sold five copies in six months. And then after that experience, I thought, well, it's not the process is not broken. I just need to figure out what I'm missing. And when I thought about what I was missing, it was very simple. I had no audience. I can't sell anything if I don't have an audience. So I spent 2012 building an audience. And I, when I thought about how I looked at people that have built their audiences, I saw that the simplest way to build your audience is to leverage somebody else's audience who already has one, leveraging other people's audiences. So for me, as uh somebody who enjoyed writing, what that meant was guest posting. I started guest posting on big blogs like Michael Hyatt and Dan Miller and John A. Cuff and Jeff Coyne, some of the big people at the time. And when I simply pitched them and said, Hey, here's the uh article for you. I've studied what you write. Here's an article that's in that vein. And they're like, Yeah, this is in that vein. And when I guess posted on their blogs, they allowed a link back to my own website. And that's how I started building my audience, got my first 5,000 email subscribers, so my first 2,000 copies of my books, yada, yada, yada. So um I leveraged, and so in 2012, I was uh I I was I guess posted on 80 blogs. And I did that strategy for for four years and then come to 2014-ish. And a lot of large blogs said, hey, we are only gonna allow our students to guest post on our blog. And I thought, well, if I could, if I did this for blogs, why can't I pitch entrepreneur, fast company, businesses? It's it's the decision maker is just different. It's not the blog owner, it's an editor, it's just a different decision maker. And I love cold pitching. So I'm like, you know what? I just pitched them and I pitched entrepreneur. I became one of the first 30 contributors at entrepreneur.com when they were starting their contributor program in 2014. I pitched a Huff Post, I pitched Fast, I pitched all these publications. And so from that moment in 2014 till now, I've kind of over the years, you know, pitched two or three here and there, four or five here and there. And it's gotten to the point now where we're recording this interview where I've been publishing over a hundred publications and magazines online. I've been in a print edition of entrepreneur.com that's on newsstands all over the world. I have 12 weekly columns where I'm writing for you know, Business Insider and Fast Company and Fortune, some of the largest publications in the world. And I wake up and I love what I get to do.

SPEAKER_01 4:54

Yeah, and that's a lot of writing. So you gotta love what you're doing there because that uh my cross just thinking about all those publications on there, but you do it, man. I've been I've been following your stuff for a minute now. And I I I you're you're constantly talking about the work that you're that you're doing too. I'm exhausted by reading it, but you're deeply passionate about it. That's that's what the most important part is uh of that. And and you're you're currently working on uh you got a software that launches in just a couple weeks.

SPEAKER_00 5:23

Yeah. So because I write for all these publications, and I'm an entrepreneur that started with courses and and yada yada yada. Um I had people that said, Well, how do I do what you do? Right? Like entrepreneurs are like, Well, I want to be informed, I want to be in whatever. So by nature, over the years, I've I've had courses, I've had masterminds, I've had various things. But the one thing that I always wanted was an ability to help somebody do this without needing my direct involvement. And I just happened to uh get connected with somebody who's a software developer, and we kind of talked through like my vision for this, and we became partners and created a software called PR Pitches, which that's exactly what the software does. So if you're not sure how to pitch, all you have to do is plug in your information. We have templates in there, it's one click. If you're not sure who to pitch at a publication, we have a database of over 3 million media professionals and podcasters. Um, and it's one click, and you're sending out the pitches, follow-ups built in, metrics are built in so that you can see all the pitch was open, yada response, links were clicked, yada yada yada. It does all of the heavy lifting. PR Pitches does all the heavy lifting for you. And so I'm pretty excited about that.

SPEAKER_01 6:40

Amazing. And that drops in a couple weeks. It drops, uh, we should be dropping it on in a couple weeks, yeah. Love it. Well, I'm I'm looking forward to uh to diving into that. And I think that those listening right now, if you're in that world of uh speaking, podcasting, you know, getting getting your word out there, people publishing content on on you know about you, you're definitely gonna want to take a look at that. We'll be sure to link everything in the in the show notes on here. So I you know I've got to attack the elephant in the room when it comes to modern day journalism. We see a lot of these. I'm a Forbes contributor now. I am a such and such contributor now. I am on the council for the Forbes of the Forbes. This is a different so can we can you address this as an actual real true journalist? What is this all about? I hear it's a pay-to-play type of scenario. You see it popping up all over the place, and it's like this glorified ability to be able to edify yourself, but you're really paid to get in the room. So how does this whole thing all work? Because I've never fell for it.

SPEAKER_00 7:44

Okay, so the simplest answer is this real editorial is never for sale. You cannot buy your way into being written about or having columns in a large publication. So if somebody is trying to sell you that, run the other way, that is not real. I have written about, and Sebastian knows this because I wrote about him in an article. I've written about maybe 200 to 300 different people, entrepreneurs, parents, whatever, for all of my columns. You know how much, how much did you pay me, Sebastian, for that? Nothing. Nothing, right? I want you were an expert. I needed you in the article. I said, hey, can I write about you in the article? There's no painting involved in that. So if somebody's asking you to pay, run the other way, it's not legit. Editorial's never for sale. Now, are there things that happen behind the scenes? Absolutely. If you have Instagram, you've probably been approached by Disruptors Weekly, LA Weekly, Entrepreneurs Weekly, you know, like all of these, and they're like, hey, we're putting together a list of the 10 coaches, the 10 podcasters, or the 10 real estate agents, and then it says charges applicable. So pretty much you're paying to be written about. Here's the problem with that that is an FTC disclosure violation because that's advertising. And if you pay to be written about, you're paying for advertising, that has to be disclosed by law. More than that, all the publications have contributor agreements, have agreements where they say the contributors, like somebody like me, the columnist, I can't take money to write about somebody or link to somebody or whatever. I can't do that. So it's happening, it's all of that's happening illegally. Now, the Forbes Council is probably you know the most confusing out of all of them because it's not part of Forbes.com. The council is a coaching, it started as a coaching platform, but it's grown beyond that. It's a third-party platform started by two entrepreneurs that license Forbes name on their platform. So if I with my program paid to publish, if I went to Inc. and I license Inc.'s name and I called my program Inc's Paid to Publish course, would anybody know the difference? No, but it's not part of Inc. So that's what's happening with the Forbes Council. When you pay to join the council, you're paying to join the council, not Forbes. Your articles are not published on Forbes.com, they're not indexed on Forbes. We can't look you up on Forbes, they're not indexed in Googled. You're on a third-party platform that's siloed that um when you publish articles, they're not going to go on forbes.com. And here's the most the most important part if you ever want to be a regular Forbes contributor, you'll never do it because they have a non-compete agreement with the council. So if you join the council, there's a non-compete agreement, so you can never be a regular Forbes contributor. And here's the thing regular Forbes contributors are paid by Forbes. Forbes pays them to write articles on Forbes.com. They don't pay to be on some platform.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

Yeah. And well, I I think I I want to say it was Jeff J. Hunter that posted something about this probably a year or two years ago, and it just completely shifted my entire that's why I had not I had not revisited it other than when I see post of you know, celebrate me. I'm now part of the Forbes council council I paid three thousand dollars for. That's not really Forbes, but it kind of is Forbes because I used the name, but it doesn't really matter because I'm on the council. So um, and I thought I, you know, I've been at this for a minute now. I know how hard it is to get placed and to get written about. It is all about relationships. Had I not known you, I would have never gotten published on the article that you went and read. I know I was in entrepreneur magazine back in 2015, randomly. Um, a journalist called and said, Hey, we're doing an article on the business of books. We saw you wrote a book. Can you contribute to this on here? And I ended up, you know, with my name in the actual print version. Like it was the most random thing ever. But I did not call entrepreneur and say, hey, I think maybe you should talk about me, which will never ever work. I mean, it could in the form of in the form of it of a pitch. So I'm glad we clarified that. I I want to make sure that uh, you know, I was on the same line of thinking here that folks, it's just not that easy. Uh, if you want media, earned media is by far the most respected amount of media out there. That means the outlet reached out to you and said, Hey, we like what you're up to. We've got you've got an interesting angle here, and we want to talk about that. So the rest of it, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:06

Or you pitched, or you pitched for a placement. So if you went on Twitter right now and you searched the hashtag journal, so J-O-U-R-N-O request, you're going to see journalists, editors, uh, writers looking for people to write about in their articles or that are offering the opportunity to pitch, like you know, to get published. That's legit earned media. They tell you exactly what they're looking for. I'm looking for XYZ. You respond and say, hey, I fit XYZ, and you get earned media. You can you can also pitch it too.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

I love it. I absolutely did not know about that. I'll be saving the journal hashtag journal requests now. I have heard of like being able to reach out to journalists or um your local your local news, you know, but individuals that are looking for stories, et cetera, uh, and be able to pitch them that way through through Twitter. But again, it does come through the form uh you know of a pitch. But so that that brings me to the next thing I want to talk about, which is if someone's listening to this right now and they're like, hey, listen, we live in a very vast uh time vast and vast time of technology. It's not that difficult to pitch specific things and get a hold of media outlets, et cetera, on there. If someone's listening to this right now and they're like, hey, I got a really cool angle story, product, service, whatever it may be, and I know it'd be a great contribution to this XYZ platform. What's the process that someone takes to be able to pitch themselves to a media outlet?

SPEAKER_00 13:36

Yeah. So first you can search the hashtags, journal requests, and then also requests with an S. You can search calls for submissions on Twitter, the hashtags. You can sign up uh to be a source for Harrow. So helpareporter.com. You can sign up as a source and you're gonna get a digest of all kinds of media outlets that are looking for sources on all kinds of topics broken down by category. Um, besides that, if you have a specific hook, you can simply go to the publication of your choice. Let's say you want to be in Forbes, you can go to the vertical. So let's say this is leadership or this is marketing or this is business. You could go to that vertical on the publication's website and you can look for contributors. The contributors on there can write about people, they have the autonomy to do it. You you go to that contributor's profile, they're gonna have their contact information listed there nine times out of ten, and you simply pitch them through email. You can also go directly to the editors. You see, you can go to staff page on a publication, you can see their list of editors, you look for the editor for which your topic would fit: leadership, marketing, personal development, whatever. You look for that vertical editor, and again, through email, you pitch them in in one paragraph, you tell them what the hook is gonna be. What's the hook? Why would the readers of that of Forbes or Business Center care about what you're gonna talk about? And why are you the person to cover that hook? One paragraph, that's it.

SPEAKER_01 15:06

That was my next question. You already answered it all. See, you're learning from the best of the best right now, here, listeners. So, this is if you're trying to figure out the world of PR, and if you're in business, you're an entrepreneur, solopreneur, you're in business, and you're you're not seeking out ways to figure out PR, well, then you're you're you're totally missing the beat. I I absolutely love this. This is exactly why I wanted to get you on the show to not only chat about you know what what you're up to, uh, and of course the software drop in in a couple of weeks here, but really give some people some value on, you know, this stuff is not impossible to do. But if you're approaching these opportunities with your ego hanging out and an effort to sell someone on how cool you think that you are, probably not the best approach. If you think it's you know, it's like Media 101, what's in it for the viewer, what's in it for the reader? That's all they really give a rip about on there. And if you approach it and utilize the tips that you're given right here, this is this is fantastic. So is the software gonna take like a majority of your time on here? Is this kind of like a side project in addition to your journalism business?

SPEAKER_00 16:04

Yeah, my my business is always gonna have three approaches or three different levels where I'm always gonna write for publications because that's my first love, and they also pay me well to write these articles. Um, I'm always gonna have uh my mastermind where I teach people how to do this, and then I'm going to have the software, which is pretty much hands off. You know, so like people that want to do this and do this on their own without having to, you know, figure this out, the software is going to help them do that. I think what a lot of people don't realize is how much opportunity there is for media, how much journalists, editors, writers, contributors are looking for people to write about. Like thousands upon thousands of opportunities. So getting earned PR is not hard. It's just figuring out your hook angle, getting that very clear, getting it very concise, and actively pitching. There are so many opportunities. There's you really don't have to pay, you know, some kind of a get featured service or you know, pay for the scammy, you know, we'll get you in the classified section of whatever. You don't have to pay for that scammy stuff. You can really earn it on your own. And I look forward to you know, the software making that easier for people.

SPEAKER_01 17:14

I love what you're doing here because this is not the typical journalist protocol, if you will. Uh, usually it's just head down right, and that's just there. It's not real, but you're you let that entrepreneur spirit of yours uh what go wild, which is fantastic, which has led to launching a software, having a mastermind, teaching people I know that your content is always over over delivering on saying, hey, here's what I do, everybody. Like, here's the keys to the castle. You've got to go and do something with it as well. So I love how you take this unconventional approach to uh to journalism in modern day and not only teach what you know, which is what we should do anyway, um, but also enable people to to really maximize on that. So while I'm stoked for the software to draw, man, I'm gonna uh dive into that thing and and uh identify some opportunities for myself because um you know why why not? It's technology makes life uh you know just that much easier. So um what do people how do people learn about the software? When can they get an update or know when it drops and buy it and all that?

SPEAKER_00 18:11

Yeah, you can go to prpitches.com. PR get all the information. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:17

Okay. Easy enough, PRPitches.com. I'll be sure to include that link in the show notes of this episode. And uh any final thoughts for our listeners regarding the world of PR and exactly what you do?

SPEAKER_00 18:29

Yeah, so PR is incredible brand credibility if you're an entrepreneur or you're just somebody that wants to get your message out to the world. When people want to know who you are, the first thing they do is Google you. My question to you is what pops up when they Google you? And if you have a common name, you're you're gonna be screwed. So you really have to differentiate yourself from all the John Smiths or the whatever. Um, and if people Google you and they see Forbes, entrepreneur, business insider, and they click through and they see, you know, you're sharing wisdom, you're sharing your knowledge, you're sharing your message, it just increases the brand credibility exponentially when you post about it on social media. So, like people that I've helped get into these publications and they post about it on social media, and then they get clients and they get speaking gigs and they get all kinds of things. So, like the the value of PR is exponential. Um, Grant Cardone always says it's not the best product or service, it's the best known product or service that wins the market. So that's where PR can help you. You know, you get featured or written about PR in a publication like Business Insider, for example, that has 240 million unique visitors every single month. That's going to do something for you, your business, your message. So this is a worthy pursuit. It can be earned. There are many opportunities out there. This is something you should spend your time pursuing. And you can do it all on your own.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

Love it. Well, I'm excited for it and I'm stoked to be connected with you. I appreciate you uh utilizing me whenever you see fit uh for the wonderful world of podcasting on here. It is truly all about relationships. You and I are on this podcast right now for having that relationship. So if you're looking to build more PR relationships out there, you need to figure out, you know, who those individuals are that you need to develop that relationship with and make it happen. Well, dude, I appreciate your time. Come on, see, and I look forward to the software dropping. I always look forward to your content. And, you know, maybe you'll call me someday again and say, hey, I want to feed you.

SPEAKER_00 20:21

I will call you.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

All right, man. Thanks again, brother. Thanks for having me. Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story Podcast. Be sure to appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. Signing off from the podcast, launchlab.com studios. I'll talk to you next time.