Hiya 🌊! I’m Lucy from Hype Yourself. If you are new to this page, pop your email below to ensure you receive my posts sent every Sunday. You will receive a selection of posts from the 52 PR Tips challenge, personal essays and other good things on self-promotion and creative living.
WELCOME TO THE 52 PR TIPS CHALLENGE - TASK 13
Do you know what an opinion editor is?
Have you ever been paid to write your opinion?
Get an opinion
Ideally, a refreshing one that you are happy to debate. It's not interesting if you agree with everything. Be opinionated in a disruptive and engaging way.
One of the reasons I hate press releases is that they lead to terrible one-size-fits-no-one pitching.
Bespoke pitches are so much better.
The reason I love a good opinion piece is because:
✅ It either focuses on you, the founder, as an authority in your topic OR shows a human interest / real-life story which connects with your audience
✅ Stop selling. Start sharing.
This is one of my mantras. When you stop trying to show off your company/product/service with a press release and use yourself as the voice of the business, your PR becomes a lot easier.
✅ You will always get a mention of your business or product in your bio
The biggest mistakes I see with founders/writers/product owners when pitching an opinion piece:
❌ you are stating the obvious
Think less: you need to eat healthy food, small businesses need to promote themselves, and lying is bad
More: why you should eat junk food, small businesses should stop promoting themselves, lying is good
❌ not tailored to the publication, if you are pitching an opinion piece to a women’s / parenting publication but you are talking about b2b technology it is not going to work
❌ you did not read the submission guidelines. Repeat.
Once you do have
an interesting, new, quirky, combative topic
that is well-matched to the audience of that media outlet
you need to answer why now. Why should it be this week rather than last week or next week?
Some of our member articles:
https://metro.co.uk/2024/09/01/binge-eating-controlled-life-found-cause-21490755/
https://metro.co.uk/2024/08/18/needed-glasses-years-told-unattractive-stopped-21384112/
Member resources
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Hype Yourself to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
