10 ways to be Immediately Newsworthy

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription: In this video I want to talk about the power of headlines and how you can get tremendous attention by making whatever you're doing that much more appealing and attention-grabbing this video is brought to you by Appy Pie’s Academy when your headlines are attention-grabbing you're gonna get whatever you do if it's a press release a blog post journalists pitch whatever you do you're gonna get a lot more clicks on it and guess what that's gonna open doors because that headline people if they if people don't click on it if it doesn't grab potential people will keep scrolling down and they'll never see anything about you but if the headline grabs their attention enough then they'll click on a dog on your landing page of your site and they'll see oh that's what this is all about and then you'll have a chance to convert them into maybe a client or if they're journalists maybe they'll write a story about you but the entryway is this headline okay so it's incredibly important disproportionately important compared to everything else it's like 50% of everything you do is positioning them headline because if people if those headlines don't attract nothing else you do will get seen so let's go over 10 different ways and some examples that you can use to become really noteworthy and peeling to journalists who you'll be pitching so anytime you do anything emotion evoking you could even mention the word Obama the word Trump those no matter what your political views are those words stir emotion they grab attention if like did you know what Obama has for breakfast that gives him the ability to work for 20 hours a day well if it was anybody else you wouldn't really care as much but Obama you would care that much more or did you know what Obama do to make happy or to make angry somebody or Trump right so this is a why all everybody's talking about current political climate why because the current political climate has so much emotion around it that it stirs up this emotion and people click they want to know it's partially controversial but partially it's to get attention also number two uniqueness there's a concept by Seth Godin if you're not familiar with Seth Godin he's one of the top marketers today in terms of high-level thinking and his idea is the purple cow what's the purple cow obviously doesn't exist and that's why if you ever saw one you take a look so the purple cow is something that is unique that you create so that example that we just talked about dating a life of a plumber or the coolness of a plumber well it's a new thing right so you're kind of creating a purple cow it's new enough that it gets people's attention number three piggybacking of current events let's say the Titanic sank today what do you do you like here is how our product helps prevent future Titanic sinking that's your next day headline and that's your next day maybe press release or something like that or new innovation to help future Titanic sinkings simple enough you can spin almost anything and it piggyback beats piggybacking off of things that are currently in the news and guess what journalists are looking to write about things that are currently in the news especially let's say the Titanic sank today tomorrow it will be all the direct headlines everybody who drowned all that the day after will be like the secondary headline the uncle of somebody who drowned said this and that and the next day journalists would run out of stories and it's perfect because you're giving them a new angle new story so this is something that can be used other ways to piggyback up the news is create your own news let's say you have a book launch product launch new feature release anything beta launch you can scream and shout right like hey I'm launching my book and that's a good way to get publicity launching product anything giving to charity you can say we're starting from now we give to XYZ charity and you can even pick it strategically because you can pick let's say we're donating to hospitals but if your business is something related to medicine that's a good charity because it's related and the medical industry news publications and blogs will more readily pick that up also something that's really good to getting news case studies case studies are very good at there they're deceiving right there just one instance in a sea of instances so you can take an outlier instance right in either direction if you imagine a bell curve in any field at all on both sides of the bell curve there are outliers and really unique stories and you can use that as a six you know the huge success story or a huge failure or a huge sob story or a huge sum problem it just gets attention because it's also unique and good success stories are also a fantastic way to position your business for example a lot of businesses like udemy even when they were starting out they had published like ten instructors who are making a million dollars a year teaching on udemy guess what that did that guide them into Forbes and it was like all kinds of articles all kinds of magazines published that article and then what happened all kinds of other instructors wanted to teach on udemy and a lot of students read that potential students and they were like wow so many cool courses I never knew this had before now they learned about it right so if you've got a using me a lot of attention with pushing forward their successful case studies also innovation so maybe you found something based on your work with clients in my case for example I found that ninety percent of first-time entrepreneurs don't have a solid marketing strategy it's just a thing I can kind of publish a report and that report you can kind of make it sound a little fit you know look official and you that can be an interesting discovery interesting finding and of course if your business is more scientific or technical you can find more research do new things now new discovery I'll give you an example I used to run a hiking slash event website nobody cared it was one of my first businesses and nobody would join the hikes and then I decided I discovered this shipwreck hike the shipwrecks in San Francisco sounds very cool right shipwrecks San Francisco is like a big modern city how are they gonna be shipwrecks and there's actually a lot of them underwater from decades ago when navigation systems weren't as good in ships and they crashed on the rocks because there's there's a big bay and it's dangerous so I actually found the shipwrecks where they are when at low tide when they peek out of the water so when they publish that headline shipwreck hike hunt in San Francisco during low tide you've got a lot of attention the Sunday paper published a story about this I got tremendous attention from that story and I think thousands of people ended up seeing it and hundreds actually ended up joining me on my hike so you can see how basically something like that does it and sometimes when you get to a milestone so like let's say you serve food to the poor and you get to a point where a million people have been served a million people have given or a million meals have been served or something like that that's a fantastic story really good attention-grabbing number there I feel good story good for journalists good for your business and then lastly there's this example of an industry report like the Corcoran report Barbara Corcoran from the shark tank one of the ways she stood out in the very beginning was she started publishing this real estate in New York report he started getting picked up because everybody started referencing it it started sounding official and it started getting quoted and then in this in the New York Times or whatever of course that industry report was one-of-a-kind nobody else was publishing industry report so journalists really picked it up and ran with it so these are ten ways to really stand out a lot as your exercise try all ten of these to apply it to your business and of course many of them won't really make sense or many won't work but at least it will start you to thinking in the right direction and maybe like a month from now some brilliant idea will hit you that wouldn't have otherwise hit you because you've done this and you'll be like oh my god this is it and then that's gonna be the thing that's gonna get you amazing attention.