📣 #014: How to find your story for press

The next edition from the 52 PR Tips challenge: prompts, tips & templates to help you Hype Yourself.

Hiya 🌊! I’m Lucy from Hype Yourself. Pop your email in to 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 14

What's your story?

Great PR isn't about being the best. It's about telling the best story. How can you make yours more interesting or create more feeling around it? 

The biggest mistake I see solopreneurs make concerning PR is their story starts with their business, product or service.

❌ That is called an advertisement.

What podcasts, newspapers, magazines, producers, and event programmers are looking for are stories.

✅ That is what I call showing a bit of ankle

Everything starts with a story - Hadrien Chatelet, Brand Yourself

The most underused tool by small business owners is themselves.

Example: What is the more interesting story?

Idea 1: I used to run a PR agency in London, but now I run an online membership

Idea 2: My business success working with the co-founder of my children meant I could move me and my family to rural France

They are essentially the same story, but one will give us more inspiration and takeaways, whereas the other reads more like an advertisement of what I do.

Here are my top 3 tips for finding your story:

1. Burn 🔥 your press release and instead choose one exact column, article, online space, podcast, etc you see your story being relevant

2. Read more.

   I’m not saying you have to read endless negative news articles. News is only one section of the paper. Buy a weekend paper and read the magazines OR online check out opinion pages?

   Example: Look at the Metro Platform, which we have recently been studying in our paid membership and which shows such a varied selection of stories. (Sidenote: 8 members have been commissioned to write and be paid for their opinion pieces since this session went live 🙌🏼)
   

📣 #013: REPLAY - How to pitch an opinion article with journalist Jess Austin, Metro

3. Keep a list

   After healthily spending time on media, look for moments when you see a podcast topic or article and think, yeah, that happened to me; I could talk about that. Please write it down for potential press topics.

This week, we are going to take a look at the following:

• Prompts to help you find your own stories

• 4-minute video on how I study a newspaper as a PR professional for small business

• Examples of story-led PR

🎁 As a special treat this week, Mark Leruste, CEO of StoryCast and award-winning author of Glow in the Dark, whose entire business is around storytelling, gives us some exclusive audio notes.

Why should we share our personal stories in business?

How can you protect yourself from oversharing?

How do we find the right stories?

Note: It takes momentum to become the go-to expert in your industry. If you want to raise your profile and look at alternative ways to make an income, save 40% by joining me for a year