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Michael: We’re listening to an interview on hardtofindseminars.com. We’re talking to the PR Doctor. Robert, how’s it going?

Robert: It’s good. Our core business is that we do public relations and publicity for small businesses. We help them develop their stories, and we find their ideal customers. There are certain magazines, newspapers, television stations, and radio shows that their customers read and watch. Our job is to get them in front of the customers via public relations and publicity, which is free. You do not pay, if USA Today wants to write an article on your business and they interview you as a source, you do not pay for that. That can be multiplied thousands of times. There are 35,000 media outlets in the United States. We find the best fit for the customer, their product or service or whatever he is trying to promote, and we do a highly strategic campaign. There are no one-shot blitzes, sending out mass press releases and throwing spaghetti against the wall hoping they pick up some of the stories. That normally doesn’t work. This is a highly strategic message where we can backtrack; we can listen to what worked and what didn’t work, and why it worked or why it didn’t work. It goes with the testing. A lot of PR firms don’t test., but I take the same principles that I use in marketing and advertising, and transfer them over to PR. I do what I call direct response PR. I don’t just put you in the news or on 20/20 for the sake of you telling someone that you’re on 20/20 or on Sixty Minutes. There is an ultimate objective, and that’s to drive people to your website, get them to call you or stop by your store so that reflects in your bank account.

Michael: I have another business. I have a pen business, and I manufacture an invisible ink marking pen that you can mark your property. You can take this invisible ink pen and mark your TV, stereo, cell phone, and computer, anything that could be ripped off. If it is ripped off, you have your driver’s license number and you have a better chance of having it recovered. I put this into a licensing opportunity where I offer people who want to get into a business where they can make the pens right out of their home for about a quarter apiece, and then I teach them how to sell them and market them like I’ve been doing for the last seven years. They can make some good money selling these pens. Let’s say I came to you with that and I say, “I want to get exposure for this pen business opportunity.” How is it going to work? What are we going to do during our initial meeting or conversation?

Robert: During the first talk, I’ll have a list of questions where you are going to take me inside and pick your business apart and pick you license apart and pick your overall mission, and what your strategy is if you have one. We’ll discuss where you want to take the concept, the product, and the pen. Once that’s established, then we look at the business opportunity, and we look at people who want to start a home-based business or get a second income. That’s one avenue. The other thing, which is indirect, is to get the market conditions and the hard facts on the number of thefts that occur, and then we sneak what you do and what you sell into the stories. You can probably only reach the business publications because you are taking the business opportunity approach. The human and general interest have all been affected by theft, someone has stolen something from us at sometime or another. Now that’s CBS, Oprah, Jay Leno, USA Today, LA Times, that’s general interest and it reaches the public. They are affected by that. Then you sneak in your offer that anyone who would like to get into the business, you don’t lead with the business to the public. You lead with the business when you contact the business publications.

Michael: I see. It’s like, “Oh, by the way, if someone wants to learn how to do this, call this number.”

Robert: Right and that either could be the press release or in a special sales letter that you send out with the material.

Michael: If I hire you, what is this going to cost me? If I said, “Okay, let’s do it.”

Robert: A basic eighteen-week customized PR program is $2,500.

Michael: Do I have to pay it all up front?

Robert: Yes. In eighteen weeks, we write all of the new product announcements, we write the press releases, we piggyback, we write a tip sheet, we send media alerts, we write columns and we write articles.

Michael: How many different pieces can I expect?

Robert: That’s about four hundred a week going out, so that’s sixteen hundred a month.

Michael: How many different types of materials, tip sheets, press releases and that sort of thing will go out?

Robert: That depends on how many products or services you are trying to promote.

Michael: Let’s say I want to promote the opportunity on this invisible ink pen. I want to generate interest on the product and ultimately get people in on the business.

Robert: The only thing that changes is the media outlets. The hook that we use to get publicity changes. I mentioned a few minutes ago when we contact small business opportunity magazines and work-at-home magazines, you are leading with a business opportunity, what are the trends, the market conditions that make this opportunity the head of the pack. We funnel that with facts, we find out the trend or the statistics on theft. We show people this is where it’s going and why what you sell is important as opposed to just telling them it’s important. You have the proof to back it up.

Michael: Okay, that makes sense.

Robert: Every thirty seconds a car is stolen somewhere in America. We give them hard facts that can be proven.

Michael: Okay, so you are going to do the writing of maybe ten or twelve different pieces, columns, tip sheets, all kinds of formats of PR.

Robert: Right.

Michael: Okay, so for eighteen weeks you’re going to get out four hundred a week.

Robert: Four hundred a week.

Michael: What are you getting out, emails?

Robert: We use a variety, some we email; some media outlets won’t even open an email. There are some that we will fax or use regular mail.

Michael: What’s the percentage of email, regular mail and faxes?

Robert: I couldn’t even tell you on email because normally we don’t email. Most of the time when we email, it’s following up on something we’ve faxed or mailed. I already know a lot about when the editors come into the office in the morning, and they click on email and they see mailbox three hundred, they start hitting the delete button.

Michael: You’re right.

Robert: They’re not going to sit there and go through three hundred.

Michael: When you say “we,” who are “we”? Who makes up your company?

Robert: There are four other people in addition to me. I have two freelance writers who are on assignment. If I get a big rush, I just recently did a thousand-piece postcard campaign, and that allows me to farm out work.

Michael: Are you going to pay for all of the postage and everything, is that all included in the $2,500?

Robert: The $2,500 is all you pay, that’s it. For eighteen weeks, we do PR. We never come to you and say, “Well, we didn’t figure this into it and we need another $1,000.” It’s $2,500, and that’s it.

Michael: How do I know that you guys are actually going to do what you say you’re going to do?

Robert: The first thing, unless you’ve gotten publicity in the past, this is usually what happens. We get a call from you, and you say, “Did you know that so and so called to interview me?” It’s like a kid on Christmas. You’ll usually get a call from a reporter or someone who is picking up the story, and you’ll call or email us and let us know. That happens about ninety-five percent of the time. Those who are used to getting PR, they’ve worked with us before; it doesn’t affect them as much as it did the first time.

Michael: Okay, so that’s one way of proving, if I get some results. Do you offer any kind of guaranteed results?

Robert: We guarantee that you will receive publicity and the risk reversal to that is if you don’t get it in eighteen weeks; we’ll give you an additional eighteen weeks.

Michael: You’re saying I might get one call in the eighteen weeks.

Robert: You’re going to get publicity. If you came to us and we got you a top story on your local 5:00 news, just a basic four-minute piece, what you do is call the advertising agency and find out what it would cost to run four sixty-second commercials. I’ll use me as an example. We did a top story on WGN in Chicago.

Michael: Do you mean on your publicity business?

Robert: Yes, it was on a book I had written. I led with the book called “Rip Off.” I was a victim of identify theft. I talked to the guy who did the interview, and the perpetrator wanted to make some comments. He had $250,000 of restitution to pay back.

Michael: You busted the guy who stole your identity?

Robert: I didn’t bust him, the Postal Inspector and the FBI busted him.

Michael: Okay, and then you interviewed the guy?

Robert: We had to talk to his attorney, and there were different things we had to do, but he decided to write the book.

Michael: He wrote the book?

Robert: He wrote the book about how he did it and how they go about gathering the information to find the victims. He wrote it, but I found the statistics on 500,000 people who had their identities stolen, so it was almost like we had co-authored the book.

Michael: Is it a pretty good book?

Robert: Oh, yeah, and we sent releases to different media and 20/20 picked it up. The LA Times picked it up. The 700 Club, the Christian show picked it up. On WGN, it was the top story on prime time. They did a piece for four minutes. This was national; it was seen all over the country.

Michael: How many books did you sell as a result of all of that publicity?

Robert: I sold, as a result of the actual news broadcast, maybe twenty some books, but out of that came people that came in that wanted to hear him speak.

Michael: How about the national attention, what did that do for you?

Robert: Because of the national attention, I also got calls and requests from publishers. This book was self-published, but now we had national publishers who wanted to put the book out. I turned that down. We were looking at eighteen to twenty-four months before they could even do anything with it.

Michael: I’ve studied Paul Hartunian stuff, and I understand you can make the phone ring and you can do interviews all day, but the bottom line is if it doesn’t convert into hard dollars in your pocket, it’s a waste of time. From all of that national attention, I’m sure you got interviews and stuff and back end stuff that never would have happened with the publicity. But it only moved a couple hundred books?

Robert: Well, not one broadcast is going to do that. That’s why you have eighteen weeks. You do a one-shot interview like that, and we reached forty-eight million people, but that’s not going to become a best seller on that show alone. You stack the deck with all of the shows, all of the magazines and all of the radio interviews. You see, that’s what sets me apart from most firms. You can find anybody that will write a release or send one or two thousand of them, but there’s no follow up, there’s no strategic planning.

Michael: You know what I would do if I were you? I would guarantee a hundred percent risk reversal, and no matter what you pay the $2,500, and at any time if you are not happy with my services and you don’t think I’ve gotten you enough press to justify the $2,500, I’ll give you your money back.

Robert: I could do that because it’s almost like I’m a casino, and the house is stacked in my favor. I serve on the USA Today Small Business Panel. There are other publications that I am a contributing writer for, so I already know that they’re going to get publicity if I just do my job or if I book you on my show.

Michael: I know, I’m just trying to give you some consulting ideas. I would make it a hundred percent better than risk guarantee. I would make a stronger guarantee. Instead of saying, “I’m going to get you publicity in the eighteen weeks,” that’s a little weak. It’s like, “Okay, I’ll get you one mention, and then my job is done.” That’s what people are thinking, “I get one call, and that’s worth $2,500?” Do you know what I’m saying? You need to make a stronger guarantee and back it up, and you’ll have a flood of business. You and I both know that most people will never take you up on the guarantee. You’ll have one or two, but your sales will quadruple. I know it’s scary to do and you don’t want people to collect on the guarantee because you have money invested, but if you can do what you say you can do, you shouldn’t really have any guarantees. That’s one idea, and I’m speaking from a little bit of personal experience. I did hire another PR guy, and this is exactly what you talked about. Maybe I’m a little biased because I hired a PR guy and paid him $3,500 up front and he didn’t do much for me. He did write some articles and a bio and stuff, but there was no way I could prove he did a thing. It’s just like Dan Kennedy says, if the average guy is watching an Infomercial, he thinks they’re full of it, it’s a lie, and that’s just people’s attitudes. You have to prove everything. I’m just saying that in your business, you could really clink if you did that. I have a lot of people who come to this site and look for ways to increase their business. PR is something that I’ve never talked to anyone about. I have Paul Hartunian’s course, and on my invisible ink pen, I use the press release that I designed from his course. I got my press release with a full color picture on the fifth page of a national magazine called Police Magazine. My fax rang off the hook. I generated over two hundred leads from police chiefs and the FBI and the CIA, the United States Forestry Department, the Postal Service for these invisible ink pens. It was incredible. So I know the power of press. It is great.

Robert: Up until probably the middle of last year, generally I didn’t pay for advertising, why pay to be in Business Week when I have the publisher and chief talking to me. I was spoiled, I just said, “I’m not going to drop $120,000 on a full page ad when I can just pull things out of it.”

Michael: What are we looking at your hard costs, if you want to share that? Out of a $2,500 deal, you do have hard costs. You have postage and labor, and you have to pay your writers. Tell someone listening to this; I want them to know that $2,500 is not all going into your pocket. You’ve got expenses to run a business.

Robert: Oh exactly, like I said that includes expenses. When you deal with other people, you pay them for their expertise, and they pass the expense on how they bill. The postage, the printing, with the envelope and the mailing, the writing, one of the writers is a thirty-year veteran with American Red Cross, and he’s not cheap. That money goes to getting top talent, and we send out top-notch news releases.

Michael: Am I going to be able to review all of these things?

Robert: Another thing is you have total, one hundred percent editorial approval because you may say, “Okay, take this out and add this.” I write it but ultimate approval comes from you. We’re like the third party, we’re behind the scenes, and our name is not on the release. They’re making direct calls to you. Customers are directed to your website. Nobody knows that we are helping you do any of this.

Michael: I totally understand. You’re going to do an intensive interview with me the first week then you’re going to say, “Okay, I’ve got all of my information. I’m going to go do my homework. I’m going to do my research. I’m going to pull up the statistics, and we’re going to put together a plan and start putting together pieces.”

Robert: We’ll lay out an eighteen-week campaign, what we’re going to do each week. Inside of that is room for piggyback opportunities. A lot of the press we generate is piggybacking off current news. We pick up USA Today or turn on CNN, and the first thing we hear on the news is something that is similar or remotely close to what you do, we’re on it booking you. You can’t plan for that because we have no idea what’s going to be on the front page of the New York Times or on CNN. But if it is anything that you can benefit from, you can believe that you’re going to be the person we pick that the reporter hears from first.

Michael: Right, just like Paul Hartunian talks about with the Mike Tyson autographs.

Robert: Right, he did that with Tyson, he did it with Clinton.

Michael: Right, he did it with Clinton before the presidency. He did a press release on his autographs.

Robert: I have a financial author I represent and every time the Power ball comes up, who do you think they call? What happens is your name goes into a Rolodex so a lot of the press releases we jump on like last minute; you don’t have to do because they already have your contact.

Michael: Are you the one scanning the papers and stuff?

Robert: No, I have a team of readers, and I also use, are you familiar with Bacons?

Michael: Yes.

Robert: They have an office here, and I have people who read the paper who work for Bacons.

Michael: What does Bacons do in a nutshell? They’re a clipping service; what’s a clipping service?

Robert: What they do is they read just about every publication on the face of the earth. If you came to them, they would scan for the information you want them to look for, your company name, your product, or your competitors. You can get all of the press that your competitor receives and he has to know nothing about that. They have a team of readers, and they do nothing but read publications all day looking for the publicity.

Michael: How do you use them?

Robert: I use them also for clipping. That’s the way they track the results that I’ve gotten for my clients.

Michael: Okay, I see.

Robert: I also use them for business opportunities as leads.

Michael: What does it cost you to subscribe to their service?

Robert: Their service is $234 per month, and then you pay $1.44 per clip.

Michael: Do they fax you the clip? Can you get it online?

Robert: You can get it online, and that’s their electronic version. I don’t have that; I have actual hard copies of clips.

Michael: Do they fax them to you?

Robert: You can have them faxed. I think the faxes are mainly if there is a problem between the client and Bacons, to clear something up. Most of it is shipped out UPS every week.

Michael: Do they ship you a photocopy of the newspaper article?

Robert: They ship you the original when they can, but sometimes you may be in an article and another one of their clients may be in the same article, so only one of you can get the original. You do get a highly professional copy. It’s not a regular copy that is run on the copy machine. This is on newspaper-type paper. It actually looks and feels like the original article. I have to have hard copies because whenever I speak, those are visuals. It’s one thing for me to say, “Okay, I’ve been to such and such,” but when I throw down a boxful of articles and you can see that, it makes a big difference.

Michael: Let’s say if you took me on as a client and you do your thing for eighteen weeks, any press that’s generated you’ll have proof through Bacons.

Robert: Right, and we send that to you too. The proof is not for me. The proof is I want you to see what we’re doing. I never got to answer this question. There are several ways you can judge PR effectively. We do it one of these two ways. One, I really got sidetracked from the WGN story, if you were to call the advertising department and say, “I want four sixty-second commercials” if what they did was a four-minute piece, you would have to buy four sixty-second commercials that went nationwide, because remember this was nationally televised. That’s $30,000 right there for the airtime; that’s not the production, it’s just to shoot the commercial and to edit it. Two, you look at the number of sales you’ve got. Did you get more sales than the money you paid? It costs me that time about seven cents to fax a news release.

Michael: There’s no doubt it’s very powerful.

Robert: You mentioned the Police magazine. You have to maximize that, not because I do it but I love the ongoing eighteen weeks, six months, a year, however long someone does PR for you. It’s much better than someone you sign up for PR or a press release and you send them off to other people. We have a system and we can track. “Okay, you know what? This particular release generated fifteen stories. This one generated five. We’re not going to put any more money into this one. We’re going to double up on the one that got your phones ringing and shut your website down.”

Michael: Before I go on, I want to say that we’re talking to Robert Smith, the PR Doctor, and this guy has really educated me a lot on PR and how it’s done. We’re listening to hardtofindseminars.com. Let me ask you this, it’s just a thought here. Another huge benefit of press is, especially for the Internet, once that release is out and in the marketplace, it never goes away. Do you realize that? For instance, I got a lot of press on my invisible ink pens because I just blasted out a press release all over the country. I started landing in papers all over the place. You can search on the Internet today, as these search engines become more and more specific and sophisticated. If you typed in “invisible inks,” it pulls up all the press I got. They are on the online editions. They’re there forever.

Robert: If someone wants to go in and delete it, which I doubt…

Michael: That will never happen. That’s something really serious. You have to think about that before you launch a press campaign. You have to understand that once it’s out there, baby, it’s out there, so you really better know what you’re putting out there.

Robert: Also, a lot of people are in the business of writing press releases, many of which end up in the garbage can. Top media outlets receive a thousand press releases per day, emails, faxes, regular mail, and people pitching their product or service on the phone, even messengers delivering a press release. For you to fight through all of that clutter of about a thousand press releases per day, plus the ones they received yesterday and the day before that, you really need to know the message that’s going out about you and know that it’s going to be there for the long haul. It’s great if it’s positive publicity. If it’s negative publicity, we hear about Enron and Anderson and Martha Stewart, the sword cuts both ways. I love this headline on the Aspen, Colorado newspaper, for those of you who live in that area. It says, “If you don’t want it printed, don’t do it.” I want to take that and send that to all of my clients who are celebrities and actors and rap artists, and they’ll do a show and want to go hang out and things happen. The next thing you know, they’re on the front page of the news. They don’t like that headline. If you don’t want it printed, then don’t do it.

Michael: That’s true. Tell me about your HBO client.

Robert: HBO does the summer comedy tour along with BET, which is Black Entertainment Television. This is where Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, and a lot of the well-known comedians got their start. We handle the Midwest leg of the tour. The tours that go through Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Tennessee our firm handles that.

Michael: Okay, great. Four City Gladiators, who is that?

Robert: That’s a semi-pro football team.

Michael: Great, how is that going?

Robert: I think they are 0-2, so looking at if they’re winning any games, no! My job is to fill the stands, and the home games have been sold out. They are a new team; this is our first year. The community is coming out. Now if they can do their part and win some football games, that’ll help.

Michael: What have you found the most effective way, you talk about the media being bombarded with press, whether it comes through the mail or email, how do you get yours read? Is most of the press shitty press releases coming through?

Robert: A good portion, I couldn’t give you a percentage on how many of them are crap, but a good portion are. When you think about it, most people are writing like they write themselves; they’re either talking about themselves, their company or their product, and it’s that “Who care” factor. Nobody cares about that. When a reporter gets that on the other end, all they see is a promotion from whoever sent it to them. What we do is take ourselves out of the release. We either talk about a problem, we talk about the pain, and that motivates people. Nothing motivates people like pain. We talk about pain and that goes into the release. The headline is critical. I’ll tell you what puts us ahead of most is we really utilize the piggyback method. In general, a press release is pitching an idea to a reporter to say, “Hey, this is going on. Talk about this.” If you can tie into something that they are already talking about and you can offer additional information or expertise or something about the particular topic that no one else knows, or maybe someone else knows but they didn’t send the release. That’s how I’ve done big shows. It’s not that I’m so creative or that I’m the best wordsmith. I just took something that they were already talking about. Case in point, we have an author, Jackie E who wrote “Never Tell Mommy.” She piggybacked off a Catholic priest who was involved in a child sex-abuse scandal. She wrote a book involving her, when she was molested as a child, and that’s the angle she used. I think her book is a best seller on Amazon, and that’s it, that’s piggybacking. With over 35,000 media outlets in our database, we find each day there are opportunities, and there are promotional opportunities for you and for anybody who wants PR. If you don’t have the time and expertise, find somebody to do it. If you went to your local university and went to the college placement office and said, “Find me a public relations, marketing, or journalism intern,” somebody needs to be promoting and getting your word out.

Michael: There is no doubt. Here’s an idea, let me throw this at you, Robert. Why don’t we do a case study, and we can use my invisible ink pen, I don’t know which angle I’d go with, but let’s say we could tie in with crime and theft and all the uses for this pen. You could piggyback and tie into tons of things. We can do a case study with my invisible ink pen on the site, so we’ll have this initial interview for people to learn about PR, and then we’ll have an eighteen-week case study of what’s going on, what you’ve done. We’ll do a series of eighteen interviews with you and me on this particular project. Anyone listening to the site or any customers who want to know what the experience is going to be like working with the PR Doctor can use this as a case study, and they can follow along over the next eighteen weeks exactly what you can do for a product. We’ve never met before. This is the first time we’ve talked on the phone. You know nothing about this product except from what I’ve told you during this phone call. Let’s show the listeners on my site what you can do, and you can direct anyone interested in this to this exact week-by-week case study and show them the power of this. Would you be willing to do something like that?

Robert: Okay, now would you be willing to cover the hard costs?

Michael: I’ll cover the hard costs.

Robert: What I’ll do is strictly send faxes, because I can send some mad faxes, and I can do them for six cents per fax. I’ll just fax, so you cover the costs, and I’ll write them myself. We won’t pay someone else to write them.

Michael: I’ll cover all of your hard, out-of-pocket costs, like postage and stuff like that.

Robert: We won’t even use postage. I’ll do strictly a fax campaign. That keeps down on the postage.

Michael: Okay, I want you to do a campaign that you would do with any customer, and you could use this as an example. You could do whatever campaign you think would fit. We’ll show people week by week. I’ll have weeks one through eighteen and we’ll talk every week. We’ll discuss the results of what your work has done for me. I’ll go over the sales, the money it’s brought me, the money I’ve saved, and you’ll have it all documented for anyone now or in the future who is interested in your services. I’ll have it up on my site. You can take the recordings and put them onto tape, and you could even create a course out of it. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?

Robert: I teach an online course now, and this is the first step of me putting my product together. I talked Nightingale-Conant into picking up my PR, and see what they could do with it. It’s not even finished.

Michael: That’s great, that’s how you do it.

Robert: They told me they have 400,000 customers that will be in their catalog and they’ll do a separate 25,000 to 100-piece mailings offering the product. I talked to the CEO himself.

Michael: He’s open to it and he’s a nice guy?

Robert: Oh yeah, always keeps an eye for an interesting product that is going to help his customers.

Michael: You don’t have to give me an answer now, but I think it would be a great thing. I think my listeners can benefit from it, I can benefit from it, you can benefit from it, and that’s what business is about, creating a win-win.

Robert: I will definitely help out, and if you’ll put up the hard costs I’m not losing anything, and I get six cents per fax, so it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

Michael: That’s fine, and I’ll do all of the editing of the audio clips and the recordings and the web design and having it all up on my site for my listeners to listen to freely.

Robert: Did you tape this conversation?

Michael: Yes, we’re taping the whole thing.

Robert: Are you going to edit it?

Michael: I can edit whatever I want out of it.

Robert: There’s nothing you’re going to sell?

Michael: No, I don’t sell it. I offer it all free. If you go to my audio clip page, did you see all the audio clip interviews I did with people?

Robert: I saw the link.

Michael: Go to the link. I have a bunch of interviews, and you can see what I do. You’ll get an idea. I thought you had seen that already. It will make more sense to you when you go my website hardtofindseminars.com and link to the audio clip page. You can look at all of the audio interviews I’ve done with people on copywriting and all kinds of unique businesses.

Robert: Do you have a newsletter that you send out to your listeners?

Michael: No, I don’t do a newsletter. I have a list of all of my customers and people who have visited my site. What we can do is after we do the eighteen-week thing, I’ll send out an email to all of my customers, and all of the people who have visited my site. People sign up their emails and their names so if I get any hard-to-find materials, marketing seminars, I email out to them. I can send an email to all of them instantly. They’re all set up in my auto responder.

Robert: What other ways do you market your website?

Michael: I market my website through search engines, keyword placements and that’s really about it. A lot of it is word of mouth. People hear the interviews, they tell people about them, they check this out, and it snowballs. I’ve been in this niche market with this hard to find seminar material for almost three years now.

Robert: What were you doing before that?

Michael: I’ve been in the pen manufacturing business.

Robert: Right, you mentioned the pens. There are so many ideas about that we didn’t get into because we didn’t talk long enough. There are a lot of secret weapons that I can use. Traditionally it may be sent in the form of a press release, but it’s the creativeness and the hook and the angle that you use. When Oprah Winfrey actually did her show, we gave her an award, we gave Michael Jordan an award, we gave Rudy Guiliani an award, and people like that at that level, when they sneeze, it’s press. They stub their big toe, and they’re in the paper. That’s one of the strategies that we use with our clients, who is in an industry that you can give an award to. My thing is trying to do it all because there are many ways you can do. The ultimate goal is I couldn’t care less about being recognized, I like helping people. I can’t send clippings from USA Today to the electric company or to the phone company. They want a check. I understand I’m on the front line like my clients, so I have to make money just like they do. It’s not about whether we were in this paper or that paper. I always keep that in mind when I’m writing for my clients; I want their website to shut down. I want the phone to ring off the hook. I have true testimonials. An accounting firm we represent had to turn away clients this year during tax season. That’s a wonderful problem to have. PR does work, and the biggest problem I used to run into was trying to sell people on how PR helps them, not even my firm, but why they want PR. The way I eliminated that is, I only spend time with endorsements, people who will trust credibility with the markets. They are going to look to you automatically. Or people who got PR before. I spend very little time, if any, trying to sell people on the value of PR. The people I market now already know.

Michael: That sounds good. Go back to my site and get a taste of what I do with the interviews. I’ll get this interview edited and get it up on the site in a hidden area where the public can’t see it. I’ll let you review it and we’ll talk in a day or so and hammer out an agreement if we want to do this. I think it will be wonderful for my viewers of the site. It would be great material that you can use for your course. It would be a great lead-generating tool for you. There is no doubt. I’m saying let’s lay it out, let’s show them what you do. Let’s show them what can happen from week one through week eighteen using my pen and me as an example. I’ll help you put it together.

Robert: Sounds good.

Michael: Okay, Buddy, let’s talk in a couple of days. Thanks a lot.

Clip #48B

Michael: Hey Robert, it’s Mike Senoff. I’m recording here so you know. We can talk totally freely just as we normally would but we’ll call this Week 1 of our strategizing plan for the fingerprint pen product that Robert the PR Doctor is going to help promote. We hope this will be a good lesson to prove your effectiveness and a good education for anyone listening who wants to see how see how the PR process is done. How does that sound?

Robert: Sounds good.

Michael: I’m going to ask you to speak up because you do speak a little softly and I want to make sure they don’t have to struggle to hear you, how about that?

Robert: No problem.

Michael: All right Buddy. Did you have a good day today?

Robert: Yes I did. Did you?

Michael: I did, I had a pretty good day. I’m just kind of winding down. Did you have a chance to go to the fingerprintpen.com site?

Robert: I did. I didn’t spend as much time as I’d like to really get some in-depth knowledge about it but I went to the site. I have a question. Who ideally is this product for and what will they do with it?

Michael: When I developed the fingerprint pen, I developed it as a simple inexpensive way the average guy, not only, you know police departments have it down pretty good when they have all the inks and stuff. I don’t think this is really for industrial use. It’s almost like, there’s a pen that you can use to detect counterfeit currency. Are you aware of that?

Robert: Yes.

Michael: It’s an iodine pen and you can mark currency and it will tell you if it’s good or not. Well, businesses used currency detection for many years but no one ever offered this to the consumer. So I’m looking to market this to the average consumer, you or me, if we’re ever in a situation where we may want to increase our security or take somebody’s fingerprints for whatever reason. Let’s say a guy comes over and buys a car from you or you’re buying a car from him and he says he’s the owner and you pay him $10,000 in cash and you can have him put his DNA signature, his fingerprint right on any document. It allows you to take the fingerprint pen to capture anyone’s fingerprint on any paper without inks or stickers or contraptions. It’s just a simple easy way to get a fingerprint on someone. A big use is for children, with all the disappearing kids and abducted kids if parents would fingerprint their kids more you’d have a lot better chance of finding them. I think the biggest reason people don’t is because they have these fingerprint kits out there but there would be messy ink strips, they’re hard to use, and they’re ineffective. This is just a better way to take a fingerprint.

Robert: I see.

Michael: So the market really is mothers and business people and anyone who may see a use for it.

Robert: The next step, what I do is pick a market for you; basically the market just picked itself. I like the idea to use it to protect children. That’s all the news right now.

Michael: Let’s say you want clippings of missing kids in your news clipping service; you can follow those stories all day long.

Robert: That in and of itself is a campaign if all you did was piggyback and tie into missing children stories. Every three minutes or something like that is how often that happens.

Michael: All over the country there are stories running.

Robert: Exactly, this happens to be national. A lot of stories are local and we’ll never hear about them. It’s a natural for that to tie into these.

Michael: I think that’s a great campaign and you shoot PR right when a story is done so they show a problem but then they offer a solution.

Robert: What happens is the next time that story comes on and they’re talking about it, the reporters call you because now you’re in their Rolodex; now you’re on the radar. What they want to do is, with national stories you have NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox covering the same stories. They’re all in business, and they want to attract more viewers than the other stations and they’re all talking about the same products and the same problem. What they want to do is put on a guest who adds a different perspective to the problem everyone is talking about. Again, they’re all recording the same story so what’s going to differentiate them from the other stations is a different kind of guest. Now you come on with a totally different angle and that sets you apart from everyone else, from law enforcement, and from other experts, security experts. Now we have someone who is coming from a totally different angle and that sets them apart from the other stations.

Michael: That makes sense.

Robert: It’s competition for them too for their type of viewers. Any time they can offer the news from a unique angle, they’ll take that and you get more publicity and you sell more pens. It’s a win-win situation.

Michael: I agree. Maybe even in the PR we can tie it to the media that runs the little blurb on the pen where we can offer them a, if they want to endorse the pen, we’ll donate say 1,000 to the local community and area children’s groups provided that, we’d have to make some provision that they send a self-addressed stamped envelope. We’ll provide the pen free.

Robert: That or they cover the shipping.

Michael: Right, they cover the shipping or handling and they can call in or they can log on to the site.

Robert: Okay. The most important thing will be early on to find your niche. We don’t want to throw a rock into the ocean.

Michael: Right, we want to niche it. And I think that missing children and fingerprinting them easily and effectively is probably the best way to go.

Robert: And this is definitely visual; you can show a child writing with the pen. You definitely have to educate the public that this is not messy ink all over your hands and all over your shirt. You don’t have to do a lot of cleaning. When you mention fingerprinting, what’s the image that comes to the average person’s mind? They’re thinking at the police station with the black ink.

Michael: That’s correct. If you go back to the site you’ll see I have some real professional photographs on there and I’ll have a download section. If the media wants to download those photos and use them in a story they can do that. Each photo has my fingerprintpen.com site on the bottom of it so if they show those photos or print them or publish them, which are professional quality, they’re welcome to use them. That in itself will give a lead right to my site.

Robert: Is there a way currently on the site for people to know that initially the pens are free, they’re not buying them?

Michael: I can do that. I’ll set up a form like “If you’re responding to a media story and requesting your free pen”; I’ll set it up where they can pay for the shipping.

Robert: You definitely want to do that because the problem with most websites is the person or the company who has them up is not a skilled copy writer so they’ll run an ad in the newspaper and direct someone to the website and essentially the website is another ad. You never want to use an ad to direct to another ad. If you have that in place where they can order or request a pen now it becomes direct response and now you can refer people to your website.

Michael: Absolutely. I will do that; I’ll have it set up right on the site in plain gold letters “To request your free pen.” I’ll have a form for them to fill out to do that.

Robert: Do that so you’ll be able to capture their email, capture their physical address; I like that.

Michael: I have to streamline it. It does get expensive sending out free pens; it costs money to make them. I can make that money back on the shipping but I can’t gouge anyone on the shipping, but there is labor and handling in getting it together and getting it out for sure. But the Internet will streamline that process.

Robert: The business owners do have running trade-in campaigns that say anybody who trades in a business card will get a free pen; well they’re going to get the pen free anyway, but we’re just making it creative. Have them send in a business card; have some effort on their part, you eliminate the tire kickers and those who are not serious. I don’t know if you have an up sell or anything else.

Michael: There is an up sell; there is a back end because I’m looking for people to become distributors.

Robert: Okay good, you have a back end.

Michael: If they want to become a licensed distributor, I don’t know exactly what I’m going to charge, maybe around $1,500, so there is an up sell. Someone who loves the product and wants to distribute it and make some money reselling them because when they become a distributor they can buy them for $1.00 apiece and they can resell these; they call sell them for $2.00 to $6.00 apiece. There’s some money to be made.

Robert: There is, and also if you include this tape in this campaign and say we have this proven marketing system, you can sell tons of these pens. That’s another selling point. The distributor says I got them, how do I sell them? And you say that we have a proven marketing system that sold “x” number of these; all you have to do is A, B, C.

Michael: We can do that. We’ll give them a whole series of our calls.

Robert: I apologize that I didn’t get to spend more time on the website.

Michael: No problem; just whenever, take your time and go through it.

Robert: I’m thinking of who can use this right now. Who’s in pain right now?

Michael: Right and if you search on the Internet for fingerprinting you’ll find some articles that tell how important it is to fingerprint your kids. If the kid ends up missing, you only have a short window of time to find them. As every minute goes by the lesser the chance becomes of getting them back, and you want to have all of your kid’s information, their picture, their height, their weight any identifying marks and very importantly you want their fingerprints. That’s the only way you’re really going to be able to identify them.

Robert: Are there any legal ramifications we have as far as being licensed by law enforcement to take fingerprints?

Michael: No, not at all. There are all kinds of organizations selling fingerprinting kits and child identification kits. You don’t have to be licensed to take a fingerprint. You should familiarize yourself a little bit. Search around on the Internet, just type in “fingerprints.” I think we can work something out pretty good.

Robert: There are a lot of people who get publicity just for the sake of publicity and it doesn’t reflect on the bottom line or at the end of the day they have nothing to show for it.

Michael: Right.

Robert: Again that’s part of our strategy. I don’t like to say “Okay we’ll look at USA Today with 5 million readers.” Well, what does that do for them? Because at the end of the day that’s what you’re going to look at and say “Okay we were in USA Today and we got “x” number of leads and we got a couple of new clients or so and so called and they wanted to buy out product.” There are so many things that could come from that and that strategy has to be thought out and most people will write a press release and send it out and won’t think twice. You thought it through because you lead with the free pens but in the back of your mind you have the business opportunity that you want to sell. So you thought that strategy through.

Michael: It works. I did a similar strategy for my invisible ink pen. At first I was going to have you do the invisible ink pen, which is another pen that you can mark property with. I think I was telling you about it. I figured this would be better because I’m doing some promoting with the invisible ink pen and I used the same strategy. I offered to donate invisible ink pens to local area groups and businesses to anyone who would fax me their name and their address on their letterhead. The article ended up in Police Magazine and I was inundated with responses from Chiefs of Police and government agencies and all kinds of institutions. I sent out a bunch of free pens but I got some great orders, some for 1,000 pens at a time, some for 500, some for 300, some for 200. It pays for itself.

Robert: It does. I would spend a lot of time too contacting and getting in front of institutions and organizations that can buy 500 or 1,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 pens. Those are your business associations and Chambers of Commerce. If you reach them, you get in front of 500 or 1,000 people as opposed to trying to do that one by one. As you said, you’ve had success with law enforcement agencies and there are 500 different industries; find out who they go to for training and go to those people. Donate to them or give them a free pen so they can say “We’ve tried it; we know how it works.”

Michael: I think this has been a good call for a strategy session. Why don’t you tell any listeners what you’re going to do from right now until we talk next?

Robert: Right now you gave me two markets that you want to begin with, that’s child protection by reaching parents, and business. We’re going to start with those two. I’m going to email you the first four weeks of what I think will be best, and I’m talking about giving you maximum publicity that reaches the people who can buy it, who are interested in it and who have a need for what you sell. A lot of times, I want to say this real quick, PR firms will go after the small weeklies or the small businesses just to get in right away and the larger ones down the line, I think they say it takes four months to see results from a PR campaign. I don’t like that; I like to get publicity in the first weeks because you’ve spent $2,500 and your heart is beating and you’re wondering if you’ve made the right decision, but if you get a call within 48 hours and someone wants to interview you or put your product on television, you feel better. The quickest way to get publicity for anybody is to go where you know the cameras are. If you know there’s something going on in your area, show up. Pass out the product; wear a costume; hire a college student; give out free samples. You just go wherever they are, like on the Fourth of July, there were parades, there were different things going on in different places, depending on what part of the country you live in. All you had to do was show up and there is a good chance you could get publicity; I do that for my clients. I find out what’s going on where they live and say “Okay you have this upstate, or you have this fair, or you have this going on. Show up!”

Michael: That is a great idea but maybe I’m lazy and I don’t want to go driving around to those events. I think I would like to do the publicity by phone only. I don’t want to have to be in front of a camera; I don’t want my face plastered all over my local town. Do you know what I’m saying?

Robert: Do you have any employees? Do you have a relative? Do you have a friend? Is there a college career placement? Is there a temporary agency where you are?

Michael: Yes.

Robert: Get those guys to do it!

Michael: Hire them?

Robert: Yes, I understand that there are some people, some of my clients want their business to be really, really, really famous but they don’t want to be out in public. You can do that. Who’s the CEO of Burger King? Who’s the CEO of Pizza Hut? We don’t know these guys. Just hire a spokesperson or someone to do that. A college student, say “Here’s $20, go and pass out these”, and they’ll do it. You can be there in the crowd if you want to monitor the situation.

Michael: That’s a good idea. So you’re suggesting that since the cameras are down there, get in front of the cameras and letting the newsperson know what you’re doing?

Robert: If you’re odd enough, they’ll come to you anyway. If you go down there with a costume on, they’re going to come to you anyway. If someone doesn’t want to wear a costume or a mask or stand out, then go up the camera person, go up to the reporter. Most of the time they’ll come up to me because I have relationships with most of them. But if you don’t have that relationship you might as well do something that’s different. One strategy that Domino Pizza used on April 15 th is they go to all of the post offices and pass out free pizza. Where’s the camera going to be on April 15 th? At the post office! People wait until the last minute to file their taxes so Domino’s takes their store there.

Michael: That’s smart. You’re going to present to me our game plan for the next four weeks. You’re going to do some writing and you’re not going to send anything out until I check it out, right?

Robert: I’m not sending anything out. I’m putting this plan together, doing the research and getting all of the hard facts we need, then I write two or three or maybe four press releases from different angles and ideas. You give the okay for each one before they go anywhere. With that we select the type of media where we want to send this. Once you say “This is great” or “Add this” or “No I don’t want to do that,” then we move forward.

Michael: Sounds good. That’s session one. You’ve been listening to an interview with Robert the PR Doctor and Mike Senoff here with hardtofindseminars.com. We’ve just strategized our first session for the national promotion of my fingerprint pen. If you want to check it out, it’s at www.fingerprintpen.com . It sounds exciting. What we’ll do is even on your first draft of these press releases I’d like to get them up on the site for people to review what a first draft looks like. We’ll take them through the whole process, okay?

Robert: Sounds good.

Michael: Okay, Robert I’ll wait to hear from you and we’ll talk later.

Robert: Okay, bye.

Michael: Bye, Buddy.

Clip #48C

Michael: Robert, it’s Mike Senoff. How are you?

Robert: I’m doing well, happy to be alive. It’s a great day to be alive!

Michael: It is a great day to be alive! We’re pretty fortunate. For anyone listening we’re talking to the PR Doctor, and we had mentioned that we’re going to do between 12 and 15 audio conversations, a week-by-week compilation of the PR Doctor’s strategizing, and thinking and planning, and we’re using my fingerprint pen product as the test project. The last time we did a recording was on the 12 th of last month and we had set everything up. Anyone listening can go back and listen to that and get caught up. Robert, since I gave you the website fingerprintpen.com, tell anyone listening the process that went through your head. Looking at the website, what were you looking for? What you were thinking about when you were creating your strategy of how to put together a press release that you believed would generate traffic to my site and ultimately sales of my product? I’ll let you take it away, and make sure you speak up loud and clear into the phone.

Robert: Got it. In our previous strategy session, I got an idea of what you wanted to accomplish, what your objectives were with the fingerprint pen. Then I went to the site, and I picked your brain to get information. From the information from the website and information from our strategy session, I pulled together what I feel is newsworthy information and what is appealing to the public. Since this is a particular product that you wanted to market to the general public, that’s the cap I put on, the cap of the regular man, woman, boy or girl. It would be different if you were in a trade or a specific industry but this is the regular public. If it were designed for engineers, we wouldn’t waste time with the public. We would go to publications and newsletters and reach engineers. That’s the whole strategy and the idea of how I go into it in finding out who the ideal customer or client is that my client is trying to reach. Secondly, once we gathered a strategy of who we want to reach, we talked around two or three different angles. Right now, the fingerprinting is huge because you have so many missing children, and law enforcement is there on the news every day. I just read recently that they’re thinking about fingerprinting people as they apply for visas or green cards. Fingerprint is in the news; you definitely want to have your antenna up because that ties into what you do. To begin the strategy what I do is start locally. Your best chance and best efforts come the quickest way too by starting in your local area. The media loves to talk to local business owners, local residents, local citizens, so you start locally. The easiest way to do it, and it may sound child-like, is to get a paper cup and put it on a map, set the paper cup on the city you live in and then draw a circle around the cup. That’s your local area. You want to get hold of every daily newspaper, if you’re in a town with more than one, every weekly, every college newspaper, every high school newspaper, every specialty newspaper, every ethnic newspaper, every senior newspaper; you want to get your hands on every newspaper and magazine that produces a publication inside the circle you just drew around your city. That’s your local area, that’s where you start, and then you branch out regionally or statewide, which is what we did for you. We started with California where you are, and then we branched out. I mentioned the fingerprint story; some of these are national in scope so that’s where having the expertise and tying in and piggybacking comes into play because some of these stories are larger than the San Diego area you live in. They’re international in scope. You hop on those as the opportunities arise but to lay out a campaign you always want to start out where you are and put a hometown spin on it. “Local man does….” You see that all the time. Then you move it out statewide and then you move it out nationally, then internationally. Again, as opportunities arise that you can ride on, you ride them. Use the Yellow Pages to get in touch with all the television and radio stations in your area too. I like to start with the newspapers because this is what you want to look for. After you get all of the newspapers, and there are 16 where I live, you study the first two pages of every section. The reason you study the first two pages is that this is the most important news of the day, late-breaking news, hard news.

Michael: That’s going to be on the first two pages of each section.

Robert: Of each section. The reason you do that again, they’re not going to bury the most interesting news somewhere in the paper because they have to sell papers with headlines and front page to entice you into putting your $0.50 into a machine to get a paper. The most exciting, late-breaking interesting news is on the first two pages of each section. Then you read every story, every article of every paper that you have around your local area and see where you can tie into what you’re selling, what you’re promoting, your cost, your service, and your product. Tie it into something that they’re already covering. It’s much easier to pitch yourself, your product to something that they’ve already spent time, money, effort, and manpower covering than to say, “Hey I’m doing this over here; why don’t you guys look at what I’m doing?” That’s ninety percent of what press releases are. What I’m trying to get people to understand is how to get publicity within 48 hours. Sometimes I’ve gotten it within 30 minutes, and that’s the strategy I use. That’s really letting a big cat out of the bag. If people would apply that one technique I just explained once a week, no less often than once a month and your strategy was correct, and you knew how to direct readers to your website or office or store or an 800 number, you will start to see a difference. Most PR professionals will tell you that it will take four months to start seeing results from your PR efforts. My clients don’t have four months; I don’t have four months. I like to wile them within the first week. This is how I do it and they wonder, “How did you do that? That was so quick.” This is exactly how I do it. You send out the regular press releases but while you’re waiting for those to hit or an editor or reporter to pick up on them, you get stories where you are tying into something they’re already talking about. You don’t charge people to listen to these audio tapes, do you?

Michael: No, not yet I don’t.

Robert: Okay, that’s my concern too is a lot of times when people can get information free they don’t place the right value on it. My time is $200 an hour if someone wants to consult with me, so each time we talk, each time you put an interview or a strategy session on your website, whoever is listening is getting a free $200 an hour. That’s the mindset I want you guys to have. This is $200 worth of information every time you go to hardtofindseminars.com and listen to the interviews. If you were to charge them for a password or a monthly subscription, they’d understand the value because they had to pay for that. People tend to get lost and when something is free.

Michael: There’s no doubt your information is extremely valuable and I appreciate you sharing it. You and I both know in the long run if someone likes your advice, they’re going to email me and say “How do I get in touch with that guy?” and I’m going to hook them up with you and you’re going to potentially have a lifetime customer, particularly if you can perform for them. What we’re doing here is putting you to the test; we’re using one of my products as a sample and we’re going to follow it chronologically for people to learn, and I have people who have already emailed me saying, “When is your next audio interview with the PR Doctor? I’m ready to hear this.” So people have been waiting to hear it and I think it’s going to be great for both of us.

Robert: Right, and I have to watch myself too because lot of times when someone gives you a check, you say “Okay, they paid me, now that’s delivered.” When you’re dispensing free information there’s that chance that you’re going to say “They’re not paying for it; let must just throw something together.” Obviously, I go more in depth; there are questions that are more specific or concerns that I address.

Michael: I’m sure that we’ll get to them.

Robert: I like what you say about your customers. They’re very enterprising people. They want to know what the PR Doctor is thinking, is doing next, hopefully to do it on their own without paying me. I did the same thing with a well-known, highly paid copywriter. He sent me a sales letter selling a program on how to write sales letters. Either I could pay $300 to learn it or I could pull from the sales letter he sent to me. I sense that the people who are listening to this are enterprising, they will try it on their own first, and that’s good. Test it out; see if it works; pull whatever you can from the interview and piece it together. Be consistent. Repetition is the mother of skill. You keep learning.

Michael: Let’s talk about the two press releases that you submitted to me and let’s go into a little bit about the thinking of them. I’ll be posting them on the site for anyone who wants to see the two press releases that Robert came up with for my fingerprint pen so you can pull those down. If you’re listening right now, it’s in a word file. Robert, do you have them in front of you?

Robert: No, I don’t, I’m sorry. I can pull from memory.

Michael: One was you had talked about a list, a tip sheet. One of the press releases Robert did was called “The Tip Sheet.” Why don’t you go into your thinking, why you chose the tip sheet and why a tip sheet is important and why the media likes tip sheets?

Robert: Okay, great. Tip sheets are similar to press releases, meaning they are telling your side of the story; however, it is giving tips. We’ve all seen “Nine Ways to Do This” or “Eight Things You Need to Know about That.” All that is, it leads with a number, and you’re giving tips. They are designed to be published or read on air if you’re sending them to broadcast agents as is. The media loves them because when you send a press release there is a certain element of rewriting that has to go into it. Tip sheets you mention the problem, the pain point, you throw in the tips to make it better, then you call the action. Those are very simple. Stick to that formula to start with, the pain points that your particular market is going through, the solution, the tips, and then the call to action. What do you want people to know? What do they have to do? Once the media gets this, they read through it. In your particular case, it’s still timely because they’re running right now with missing children; they’re running right now with terrorists and Congress trying to pass laws on fingerprinting people that are coming into this country so any time fingerprinting is mentioned it’s timeless. When that tip sheet comes through the fax machine or comes to the mailroom and they pick it up and fingerprints is something they’re already talking about, you’ve already set yourself apart from eighty percent of the information they received that day. It’s real simple; you’ve made their job easier. They don’t have to do a lot of rewriting; they’re on deadline; they’re constantly on deadline. Yours is good to go. It does the same

thing as a press release but you’re offering tips. You tie your product, service, or cause into one of the tips. I think the third tip, and correct me if I’m wrong, is “children should be fingerprinted.” That wasn’t by chance that was put in there. That is one in law enforcement and other security professionals, that’s not just me saying that to put our slant on it. These are studies, surveys, and interviews that law enforcement have given and said that fingerprinting is important when you are trying to protect children. All the more, it benefits and validates what we’re doing.

Michael: A concern of mine is it’s a tip sheet and it’s general and it mentions children should be fingerprinted and “Oh by the way you can go to fingerprintpen.com to get a free sample of your pen,” but do we need anything more? For instance, I submitted three press releases that I whipped up, a little different angle. I may be totally off the subject, but I’m emotional with my product and I probably can’t see it as well as somebody standing on the outside looking at my product. I’m too close to my products. But I provided you three different press releases that went into "new pen allows you to take FBI-quality fingerprints any time, any place, on any paper" identifying more of the features of why this fingerprint pen is different from messy inks and better than using messy ink strips and stuff like that. What’s going to be a better approach, or is it something that we just have to test?

Robert: Testing is always the best approach, the best thing to do even with my level of experience and your level, who is to say that mine is poorer or better than yours? I will say this; when you get into the features of a pen or a product, whatever product that is, that’s running more along the lines of a new product release announcing or introducing your pen to the market. This tip sheet and the press release was not designed to do that; it is totally playing into and tying into the story they are already covering on how to protect the children. To go back, maybe you could interject a little about the pen but not too much because the tip sheet is not about the pen. It’s about protecting your children, and by the way, this is one way to do it by getting the pen. So we’re not selling the pen so much in here. Press releases or new product releases that are promoting the pen then you want all of that about the pen.

Michael: I had read that if the media feels like you’re selling anything they’re going to stay away from it.

Robert: That or they will cut and slice that baby to pieces. If you did want to promote that and you decide that you’re not going back to the drawing board, you want to do it like this, then you want to put your selling information towards the middle and towards the top because when they edit, they edit from the bottom up. That’s if you make it past the first stage. A lot of the press releases and information they get are too promotional; someone is trying to pitch an ad but they wrote it in press release form. That’s what I have to stay away from. In some instances, if you’re sending a new product release, you have no choice. You have to tell the features and the benefits and if you have a testimonial or a story it’s the same thing as an ad, but it’s in press release format. When you get into some of the media that we’re sending this to, they’re going to see right through that.

Michael: So how are we doing with my project? What is it that you’re going to do now that you have two different press release ideas; one a tip sheet and I forgot what the other one was but I’ll get it up on the site? You have them done; what are you going to do now with this press release in the next week? We’re working on an 18-week program.

Robert: This week the California market was taken care of, your local market. Next week is the other release for the business opportunity. That may even be pushed a week back depending on the results and the feedback we get from this one. This is one stage that we did.

Michael: Has the release been distributed to the California media?

Robert: Yes.

Michael: Okay, when did that go out?

Robert: The first one went Wednesday.

Michael: I could go back to my website and see if I’m getting any hits on the site or any traffic and that’s going to give me some idea of any results, right?

Robert: A little bit, but that depends on how much other marketing you’re doing. If you’re not doing anything to promote, then you’ll know.

Michael: I’m not doing anything right now.

Robert: Okay, then you’ll know. Also, it’s been just two days. Sometimes some media will call; you’ll get a call from a reporter. The majority, I can tell you right now, won’t call. They’ll just run it as is and you’ll have no idea that it ran until people call and go to your website. But there’s always that one or two reporters who are tying into a larger story that they’re doing anyway and you’re giving them a fresh angle.

Michael: You never know what’s going to happen.

Robert: That’s the good thing. It’s like the lottery, though; you can’t win if you don’t play.

Michael: That’s right, the phone can ring in the next ten minutes, and it could be a reporter trying to verify a story.

Robert: A larger point of that too is your major talk shows, Oprah, 20/20, Jay Leno, have staff who read newspapers and small town papers looking for interesting guests. This has happened to countless numbers of people where you don’t think anything because it ran in the San Diego Valley or some small out of the way paper. But all it takes is for one person to read that. It puts you in a position for a company to have you come speak, a position to buy some of your product, to sell to their team and they know people, and they know people, and it can all start with one press release.

Michael: That’s right, it’s interesting. Well look, this has been enough I think for this session. We’ll plan on talking in a week and when we talk then, I’ll be reporting any kind of progress or any calls from the media from the California market and we’ll monitor the results. I’m excited to see what’s going to happen this week, and I hope that anyone listening will tune in next week for our next interview with Robert Smith, the PR Doctor. All right, Robert, I appreciate it and check out those press releases that I sent to you. Did you get a chance to see those?

Robert: I’ll make sure I do that this weekend.

Michael: Okay Robert, we’ll talk to you soon. Thank you very much.

Robert: Okay, thanks a lot. Bye, bye.

Clip #48D

Robert: Hello?

Michael: How’s everything going, Robert?

Robert: Great. Have you gotten any calls yet?

Michael: I have not gotten any calls. It’s been real quiet and I’m worried. You’re the doctor, Robert and I need some help! We’re into three and a half or four weeks. Tell me what’s been going out and what do you think is the problem here with it? I might have a loser product. I’m not too proud to admit that I’ve probably fallen in love with these stupid pens and that’s one of the cardinal mistakes. If the market says it isn’t interested, I’m open to it.

Robert: Are we rolling?

Michael: We’re rolling!

Robert: That’s an interesting point you brought up because you may not have a product where there is a market that shows the same enthusiasm and appreciation as you do. Getting back to why PR is a wonderful thing, because you are able to test. If you get a full-page article or you can get an hour on a radio show or a television show and nobody buys, even if you paid for an ad they won’t buy it. That’s what I call the halo effect; it’s totally a plus, the PR. It’s a good way to test a product or service or a business without wasting a lot of money advertising. The downside to that is you have to sell your product twice. First, you have to sell it to the editor, it has to be interesting enough, unique enough or somehow newsworthy to them, and then you have to sell it to the consumer who is watching or reading that particular publication. We’re still just 3-1/2 weeks into the campaign so don’t jump overboard yet! It’s still very early. Most PR professionals will give you a four-month lead time. I don’t want it to take that long; that’s why we immediately tie it into some of these stories. I got hold of quite a few San Diego newspapers and they are running how to protect children, how to keep your kids safe, so somebody else funneled information to them. I was able to clip and cut out articles myself on ways to protect the children. They’re hitting on some of the same points we hit on in our press release so a lot of it is they got there first. Usually with a newspaper you’re looking at, depending on the size of it, a two-week lead time. The larger the publication, the longer the lead-time. What I found out is there are already people disseminating information on protecting children.

Michael: Absolutely, with all the cases going on, especially here in San Diego.

Robert: Exactly, now there’s nothing as far as anyone promoting or giving away a fingerprint pen, but there are some of the same steps and ideas and advice for protecting the children. I’m thinking now what we’re going to do is take those press releases and turn them into public service announcements, and that’s different. You have to get it precise in 15 or 30 seconds because this will be read on the air. I’m not really ready to give up on the pen as long as they are talking about missing children and that’s in the news and in the forefront. What probably happened is your release got filed. They got it and it went to a file so when stories come up at a future date, that’s another halo effect of PR. You may not get immediate response or immediate story placement, but they hang on to that. I’ve sent releases and had editors call me six months later. Then I’m trying to say “Oh yeah, I remember that”. They get them and they file them away because they know they’re working on a much bigger story; they know it ties into another story and they want to hang on to that.

Michael: I’m sure it is very early but did you see those press releases? I put a link to the fingerprintpen.com.

Robert: I love the one for the business protecting against fraud. For those who are listening, Mike and I have quite a different arrangement than if I were to take on a full scale client. I like the business angle because there is a whole audience where we are dealing with business owners, companies and entrepreneurs who need to know and want to know and ought to know how protect themselves and how to detect check fraud, credit card fraud and the pen does that. They need to know it and I like the release. It was well written. I can’t recall; did you talk to or include someone who has been ripped off or had received a bad check?

Michael: No, I didn’t actually.

Robert: Was this a new product release or are you just letting the world know about it?

Michael: I had found a guy on eLance who worked as a reporter, and I paid him a long time ago to do some releases on the fingerprint pen as I was developing the site. I had them there and I finally got off my butt and put them up on the site and I wanted you to review them because they are more product oriented than missing child-oriented new tool to fight the problem of missing kids. It was a little different focus, and I don’t know, maybe the media will pick up on the actual pen as a new invention or a new tool.

Robert: That’s one of the things too that we do here. First, we get an idea of who your market is and we talk about that. With the fingerprint pen, the idea is in the back end you want people to get into a business opportunity. Your customers, as I said, are business people. Now the other one about avoiding or protecting yourself from check fraud did you get any response from the reporter who sent that out?

Michael: No, we never distributed the press release. It was just written and ready to go.

Robert: That, as it stands now, is an excellent new product release. Any time you read a magazine and they’re featuring a new product, that fits right in, the way it’s written now fits the new product release. What I do is turn it into a general business interest story and I’ll talk to someone who has received a bad check. I don’t know if you can personally say that you have.

Michael: I can be a testimonial because I have received bad checks myself.

Robert: You mentioned the pain you went through; pain always sells more than pleasure. People do more to avoid pain than they do to seek pleasure. So what did that do to you? Did you lose sleep? Did you lose money? What did it cost you? Did the bank talk to you? Did you have to go to law enforcement? Did they brush you off? They couldn’t care less; that’s not their problem; they’re trying to get rapists and murderers off the streets. So you hit all of the pain points you went through because of a bad check. It already ties into the fingerprint pen. These releases that you have now on the site are perfect for the new product section in a magazine. The one you have now fits that. If you wanted a feature article on the pen, you’d have to show the pen and who it helped, how it helped them, how their life changed, how it helped them to avoid problems in the future. You have to give them a story.

Michael: I want to say real quickly that anyone listening can go to the second interview I did with the PR Doctor, and there’s a link that will lead you directly to these press releases that have been written specifically for this fingerprint pen. You can study them and look at them as we are talking about them. There is a different variety of releases there that can be angled different ways and hopefully something is going to hit.

Robert: That’s all it is because you figure the typical newspaper or even a magazine, you have different departments and different sections of the paper, and so what the business advice is based on would be the same as a feature. What you do is tailor it and it still is based on the fingerprint pen but you changed the hook; you switched bait. I do that; if it’s going to, like you said the pen is the same pen, we’re already tackling two different markets with the same product. You’ve done more than ninety-five percent of all other businesses because what they’ll do is have a product and they’ll blitz everything about the product. It’s a new product; let’s tell the world about it. They’re targeting either business, or a certain segment or a target market, they’ll target that market and that’s it.

Michael: If I sat there and thought about it, I’m sure I could think of 20 or 30 different niche markets.

Robert: You could. You sit down and brainstorm and say “Okay what are all of its uses? Who would love to have this pen? Who could this help? Who could this protect? Who could this enhance?” Then your brain is going to start finding people for this particular market. From there you move on to the presentation with the news editor.

Michael: I do have a question for you and this will tie into some of my other things on the site and I can get your expert advice on this. Let me tell you what I was doing. I went to the SRDS and I was researching mailing lists and I found a mailing list for a company that had about 345,000 names of people who have bought a child identification kit. I called the list broker and said I was interested in the mailing list and asked if they could send me a usage list and an example of the ad that generated all of those leads. They sent me a usage of who has rented the list and they sent me this little display ad but they had the company name crossed out so you couldn’t see where the company was. These are great names but I wanted to verify if these were legitimate display ad. Where did it originate? So I went to the library looking in all the baby magazines, kids’ magazines and couldn’t find it. If you have an ad bringing in 345,000 sales at $10 apiece right there those are the numbers, these are the people who mailed in a check for $10 for this child ID kit off of this display ad. I couldn’t find it anywhere so I became suspicious, so I’m asking you from your expertise and your understanding of the clipping services, could a clipping service identify if this ad has been run?

Robert: Do you have the ad in front of you or do you remember some of the copy?

Michael: Yes, I have it in front of me right now. It says “Protect Your Child With Baby Fingers Easy to Use Child Finger Imprint Identification.” I think Baby Fingers is the company. I’ve searched public records for Baby Fingers; I’ve searched the Internet for “Baby Fingers” and I’ve come up with nothing.

Robert: How old is the ad?

Michael: These have to be running because these are hot line names so it’s supposed to be an existing ad.

Robert: Is there an 800 number? Is there a phone number?

Michael: There’s no phone number; there’s a PO Box, and they have the address crossed out, so I can’t identify where the company is.

Robert: Can you do a match to see how genuine the ad is?

Michael: Hey Robert, if I have an example of a little 2” x 2” display ad with the words that have sold 345,000 child ID kits at $10 apiece that’s millions of dollars every year, and I’m looking, if this is legitimate, at the ad that produced these sales. I don’t know what my cost of advertising is in the business where an ad could be building a list to generate income just off the list rental because some pretty big players like Readers Digest and some other big players rented the list.

Robert: You’re dealing with the SRDS and they’re pretty credible and reputable.

Michael: Could a clipping service find this?

Robert: You would tell a clipping service you want every ad by a particular company, if you knew the name of the company. Is it “Baby Fingers?”

Michael: What if we don’t know the name of the company? What if this isn’t a legitimate company? Could they search it any other way?

Robert: If they ran an ad, whether they are a legitimate company or not, whenever that company name popped up, they’d clip the ad.

Michael: What is the clipping service searching?

Robert: They’re searching by name.

Michael: By name in the actual display ad?

Robert: In any publication, whether it’s an article or an ad. You specify that you want ads or you want articles or you want both. They do it by company name or you can do it by two words. Let’s say that the company name is marked out so you want every ad that has “child ID” in it.

Michael: They’ll pull up the actual display ad and send it to you?

Robert: Every ad. You can have it faxed; normally they mail it out.

Michael: Tell the listeners who to call to get this done.

Robert: There are three leading clipping services. First there is Bacon, that’s who I use. Go to Bacon.com. Second is Burrelles.com and then there is Luces.com.

Michael: Can you do the searches on line?

Robert: No you can’t do the searches on line. That just tells you about the company.

Michael: What am I going to pay to get set up with that search?

Robert: I believe they all start you out with a discount just to get you on board. The normal rate for Bacon’s is $234 per month plus $1.44 per clip. You pay the monthly fee, then on top of that each clip costs extra.

Michael: If I search “child protection,” I could end up with thousands of clips.

Robert: You could, so what you do is break it down, restrict the list. Now if they pulled this many people I’m thinking Paducah, Kentucky didn’t even waste their time on small publications. You do like the top ten. Can the SRDS tell you if they ran in a newspaper or magazine? That will help a lot.

Michael: This was under the SRDS direct response mailing list. When you search SRDS direct mailing list, they have different volumes where you can identify all the newspapers in the country.

Robert: If it ran in a magazine, then you go to Bacons and say “I just want to search magazines.”

Michael: I’ll have to find out, but I can’t imagine this running in newspapers. It’s got to be targeted magazines.

Robert: Parenting and that type of magazine; and you hit on a very important and time saving and money saving point. If you have a proven ad that’s been proven to all of these reporters, the copy writers, and I’m not sure if they copyrighted their ads because you don’t want to plagiarize and steal from them, but you can get the flow and transfer that to a postcard. I always test with a postcard. Right now I get 1,000 two-sided color card-stock postcards for $63.

Michael: Do you realize how powerful this is? If you go to the SRDS, identify a list, call the list broker, tell him you’re interested in the ad, and have him send you a usage list, which will tell you how many times it’s been used. Have him send you a sample of the actual piece that pulled in the orders. They will do this and you have a right to do this because if you’re interested in renting this list you want to cover yourself and make sure it’s legitimate. You can look at that sales letter, postcard, or display ad and you have a formula that tells you how many sales this ad or letter is pulling and how many dollars it’s bringing in to the company. The only missing ingredient is your cost of advertising.

Robert: Right and that’s why I brought up the postcards because if you don’t have the $3,500 to run a full-page ad or $800 for a quarter-page ad, you can come up with $63 and get 1,000 postcards.

Michael: That’s a great idea. I could take this ad right here and change it and instead of fingerprint kit, I could do fingerprint pen using almost identical copy and send out 1,000 postcards.

Robert: Exactly, and test your product. You’re talking to somebody who is familiar with and understands testing. Any time you can test something for under $100, and then do it. If you do a thousand-piece mailing and you have copy that’s done and it’s only going to cost you $54 plus $0.23 for each postcard you mail, which is $230 if you’re going to do 1,000, then you test the results that come in.

Michael: Robert, and anyone listening, you gave me a great idea. This is what I’m going to do and we’ll talk about the results of this test. Between now and the next time we talk, I’m going to take this ad and create a postcard. I’m going to get a list of new mothers, which I have available to me, and I’ll mail out 1,000 of them and I will report the results of the test on our next talk. This is a great idea if this works. Babies are always being born! In fact next month I’m going to be having a baby, or my wife is! There are always going to be new mothers. This is exciting, Robert; good brainstorming.

Robert: I want people who are listening to understand the application of this. There are people in business who have master’s degrees in business who do not know what we are sharing. In a textbook, they give you practical knowledge but what do you do if that doesn’t work? They give you information that if you have $25,000 or $100,000 or $1M to launch a product, this is what you do. The average person doesn’t have that kind of money. I like the SRDS for anyone doing any type of direct mail campaign. Do what Mike said; get the usage on an ad from the list broker. A company like Reader’s Digest or Publishers Clearing House or Time Magazine or Gerber if they’re doing a roll out, and what that means is before they rolled it out they tested on a small scale to see how it’s going to sell, even most of the large corporations test. Some of them don’t; they have deep pockets and can throw spaghetti against the wall and hope some of it sticks! The more savvy ones will test and they’ll say “Hey wait a minute," and that worked. Now let’s roll out the whole thing.” That’s a roll out. If Reader’s Digest will roll out, then you know it’s working.

Michael: Did you get the testimonial I sent you?

Robert: Yes and I’m glad you emailed that to me.

Michael: I’d like to read it for anyone listening. This is a guy I talked to yesterday. I’ll have his recording up on the site. His name is Peter Perreca and he mentions toward the end of his testimonial “But my favorite was the PR Doctor. I learned more about PR from that one audio clip that I have learned in my whole life. I love the idea of piggybacking on the hot news and I listened to both clips about your test cases with your pens. I look forward to following that every week. I’ve learned more in five nights of listening to these audio clips than I’ve learned in the last five years of studying and listening to tapes from different marketing gurus.” This guy is a guy who is paid thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars for high-end marketing seminars. That’s the power of this information. Let’s talk a little bit more about this clipping service. How else can they benefit someone in PR?

Robert: You can find out what your competitors are doing. Let’s say there is another company selling a fingerprint pen on the East Coast. You can go to Bacons and say “I want every article, every ad that mentions this company,” so you always know what they’re doing.

Michael: What advantages am I going to have going to Bacons rather than going to the library to search or going on the Internet and searching Google for a company name?

Robert: Bacons spends $1M a year on paid subscriptions to newspapers and magazines. I don’t know a library that has the budget to do that. You guys have a nice library in San Diego, but your library doesn’t specialize in every newspaper. That’s every newspaper, whether you want a daily or a weekly or an ethnic or a college or a specialty; whatever you want. Your library is not going to carry every single newspaper or every single magazine; Bacons does. You can even do it for a three-month trial; you’re not obligated to six months or a year. I’d do a month if I were going to try to find out more about this ad, pay the $238 and tell them to TSCOO, which means “take same clip only once.” If this particular company ran that ad in twenty parenting and children’s magazines, you don’t want twenty if they’re all saying the same thing.

Michael: Oh, twenty different magazines. But then again we could benefit because we would have their entire advertising campaign.

Robert: You could, but then you’re paying for each clip and they’re all saying the same thing.

Michael: That’s fine, but think about it. What’s the missing ingredient when we have the words that have made the sales; we have the numbers. The only missing ingredient is how much their advertising is. By taking all of them, if you have the money to invest, for instance if I took every clip that has this Baby Fingers company name in there and I had a list of every single publication it ran in and I could segment those by month I could have an identical advertising campaign and figure out exactly what they spent on the advertising and then come up with a figure of what my net profit is going to be after I deduct my costs for marketing and the product.

Robert: There you go! You can do that.

Michael: With my pens I’ve gone about it the wrong way, because I started this pen business almost out of desperation where I needed something to hustle and I went with product first then went and hustled the market. The smartest thing, and sometimes it takes years to realize this is to be a student of markets. Study the market and reverse engineer it. Find a hungry market and then find someone else who is in the same ballpark, for instance my market, child ID kits. Find a company doing child ID kits, figure out all their advertising, what they’re paying, their profits and compete with them and do it better; offer more value, better price, do better headlines.

Robert: That depends on how dominant they are and how deep their pockets are. Maybe you could do a joint venture. In my opinion, chances are you’ve stumbled onto something great. If a parent is interested in a child ID kit, which I think includes some sort of identification but doesn’t include your pen, that’s a non-competing profit, you could sell to them. They’d buy 1,000 pens to offer as a bonus or premium for getting the child ID kit, and maybe they can up sell or back end it. There are a lot of things you could do. Go buy a book of stamps and find out in whatever your product is, when somebody comes to you, what else did they do before they came to you? What do they do while you’re helping them, and where do they go and what do they do after you service them? Then find a company to do that. Go to them and create a joint venture or a partnership or some kind of strategic alliance. I would do that at the county level because any time you start a company if it’s a fictitious name other than your name, you have to register it with the county. I go to the county; where I live there are fifty new companies started each month, so that’s over 500 leads that I get free. Have a brochure; have a sales sheet; have a flyer; have a manual; have a booklet and say “Here, I’m not selling anything but include this in that package when someone comes in and wants to start a business”, and give them a packet with information they need to know, and have them put that in the package.

Michael: Okay, you just reminded me of something. To anyone listening, I’m going to give you an incredible source. When you go to the county to search for those records, I’m going to give you an online source that will allow you to search every single public record in the entire United States. If you are in California it’s even more extensive. You can search criminal records and divorce records. If you want to search on somebody, you will have all the dirt on them; when they were married; when they were divorced; if they are incorporated; if they own a house; what bank is financing their mortgage. It’s a company I learned about a few years ago. I’ve used it over and over again. If you want to do a background search on someone and make sure they’re legitimate and they are who they say they are, the company is called Merlin Information and they have an 800 number, which is 1-800-367-6646. You can go to Merlindata.com and get registered. Check it out; it is absolutely incredible. It’s all online and you don’t need to go to any public records or downtown facility. This is used by private investigators and police, it’s really incredible. How else is Bacons going to benefit us?

Robert: They will give you an idea of the size of the ad budget of the company that you want to know about. One thing you won’t be able to find out is which publication pulled more than the other one. You won’t know that Parenting pulled better than American Baby.

Michael: If you can determine that ad has been run month after month, then believe me they’re not running an ad month after month if it isn’t making money. Here’s another thought. This occurred to me because I haven’t been able to find the source of this ad yet, and it makes me think there is a lot of fraud in the direct mail industry and there are a lot of companies who create fictitious mailing lists and rent them out and they are totally bogus. It is possible that even Reader’s Digest or some of these big companies who rented this list may have bogus names because I don’t know what kind of procedures Reader’s Digest has when they rent a list. Do they really check it out? I don’t think they’d have any more information than I have right now from the list manager. That’s something to keep in mind. You also want to keep in mind that this company selling the fingerprint ID kit may be taking a loss and may be making absolutely nothing on the ID kit but may be making all their income on the list rental. If you rent out over a quarter of a million names a few times a year you’re making some big money.

Robert: That still says a lot for the people who bought the child ID kit. If the company sells the child ID kit but their major profit center is the fact that they rent these names out, you still have the names of the people who ordered the child ID kits, and they don’t know the back end too well. They just want to rent out the names. You were interested in the child ID kit I presume to protect your children. That’s why you have to do your research, and then sometimes that’s not enough. Who would have thought that corporate American would be where it is? I’m sure a few did their homework and their research and their due diligence and went to Merlin Data and went to Dig Dirt, and went to IQ Data and did their research.

Michael: No one wants to believe they’re going to be ripped off. Doing your research really is important.

Robert: I deal with what I presume are reputable companies and I continue to deal with the same list companies. Some of the other ones, you take your chance on anyone you use, but they’ve done right by me and I haven’t seen anything fraudulent in the list pool. That’s the main thing, I didn’t lose any money. So I continue to deal with one or two list brokers.

Michael: Robert, for anyone listening why don’t you go ahead and plug your business, and if anyone listening has a product or a service that they want to promote through PR with your expert advice, what’s it going to cost them? Give them a rundown and if anyone wants to get in touch with Robert, shoot me an email and I’ll put you in touch with him. Go ahead, Robert and give them the breakdown on what it’s going to cost them.

Robert: Okay. There is a program that I developed that’s called “Small Biz PR,” and that is an 18-week customized program to get publicity for your product or your service. I do screen, if say you are trying to sell to one-legged midgets who served in Viet Nam I may not take you on because the market’s not big enough. I don’t just accept anybody who says “Okay I have $2,000. Help me.” My long term is to make this work and make your business possible, so I take you through a process, and if you qualify we move on, that’s it. There are some things because of my spiritual beliefs that I will not promote. That’s just me; I’m not hard up for money and I don’t take just anybody who wants to pay me. If it goes against my beliefs I won’t help you because ultimately my job is to help people buy whatever you sell. That’s the first thing. So if you will get in touch with Mike he’ll put you through to my email and we’ll talk and I’ll run you through the process.

Michael: Do you want to talk about what it’s going to cost in dollars, ballpark and explain why that is an investment.

Robert: It goes back to the training where I gained all this and if they say “You’re the guy for us” and they really passionately believe in what they are selling and it says it’s $2,500 for 18 weeks, that’s not a one-shot. What I mean by one-shot is there are some people they’ll list your press release and if it sticks, if they pick it up good, if it doesn’t, you’re out $2,000. The beauty of this in listening to these interviews week by week they found out the first two weeks are slow. Well you know what? We still have 16 weeks. That’s the beauty of doing this because you’re not putting all your eggs in a basket. It’s better long term for anyone who is serious. No tire kickers, nobody who just does something on the side. If you are really serious about building wealth with your business then you have to do PR. Don’t take my word for it; McGraw-Hill did a $400,000 study on the top 500 companies in 500 different industries and they all, every single one used public relations and publicity to some extent; some more than others, some better than others but they all used it.

Michael: Hopefully we’ll be able to use my fingerprint pen as a product that, I haven’t sold one of them, the site is developed, the product is ready to go and we are starting from day one fresh with the PR Doctors efforts in promoting this so hopefully we’ll see a good investment by the time we’re ready to go.

Robert: You’re dealing too with some other dynamics. You’re dealing with, the pen is free but you’re asking for them to cover shipping and handling. It’s through the Internet, you mentioned that there is Internet fraud, website fraud; there’s fraud in everything. Your customer may be scared or apprehensive about sending, even if it is only $3, to someone they don’t know much about.

Michael: That’s right. I think we’re going to wrap it up right here because the battery on my phone is dying and I don’t want to cut off at the end. Robert, this has been an incredible recording and I hope anyone listening can benefit from this. We’ll plan on talking in about another seven to ten days.

I want to thank you for listening. This is Michael Senoff with hardtofindseminars.com. If you want to get in touch with any of the people we interview please email me . You can reach me by phone at 1-800-982-6487 or 858-274-7851. Anyone listening, if you want to be interviewed please contact me and give back to others and thanks for listening.

Clip #48E

[Michael: I’m calling Marla Bacon. We’re going to talk about getting a clipping service. We had talked to Robert the PR Doctor about this.]

Marla: Hi, this is Marla.

Michael: Marla how are you? My name is Mike Senoff I’m calling from San Diego.

Marla: Hi, Mike, how are you?

Michael: I’m doing very well. Marla, can I ask you a favor? I’ve got a terrible memory and I’ve got this new gadget on my computer to record the call just for reference because I forget things. Can I have your permission to record it? I’m interested in getting a clipping service and I want to ask you a bunch of questions.

Marla: Sure, go ahead.

Michael: Okay great. I went to your website, and the reason I’m calling is I have a product that I manufacture and I learned about what you guys do. Basically in a nutshell, what does a clipping service do? What kind of customers do you have and how does it benefit them? I’m trying to get a good idea.

Marla: We handle corporations, non-profits, public relations firms, anyone that does any kind of media outreach, which means sending out press releases and then basically what we do it track to see where your press has landed.

Michael: If I was going to do public relations for my product and I sent out press releases, you’re going to track them to see if I’m getting any results.

Marla: Correct.

Michael: Is that what most of your customers do?

Marla: Correct.

Michael: I see. I’m doing it the other way around, at least at this point. I want to track a display ad. There is a product that I manufacture and I was interested in renting a list from the SRDS. Are you familiar with that?

Marla: Yes.

Michael: I found a list broker who has this list.

Marla: How much are you paying for the list?

Michael: I haven’t bought it yet. I’m doing my research now.

Marla: We put together lists as well.

Michael: Let me ask you this. This specific list I asked for an example of the ad that generated all these sales, it’s a direct-response list. They sent me a little display ad that supposedly is the result of over 300,000 buyers over the year of people who have bought this product. I was trying to do my research, and I want to make sure it’s not a bogus list and I want to find out where the hell this ad is if it’s produced so many results. I thought if I could search maybe some key words in this little display ad that you can find it for me.

Marla: We track ads as well as editorial copy.

Michael: Let’s talk about this. Tell me about the clipping service. For every single magazine out there, every single display ad you’ll type those in and enter them into a computer?

Marla: Yes.

Michael: So if I had the words of my ad, for instance it said “Protect Your Child with Baby Fingers Easy to Use Child Fingerprint Identification,” you would type that into your database and pull up all the publications that this little ad showed up in.

Marla: Just about; nothing is foolproof, but we track a number of publications, over 20,000 heavy-duty in trade, newsletters, dailies, weeklies, and monthlies.

Michael: That’s incredible. This is what I want to do. What is the least expensive way that I can try to identify the source of this ad?

Marla: You would sign up for a three-month minimum, which is $283 and $1.58 per clip.

Michael: I would pay $283 and then I would contact you and I would fax you the ad or I would tell you what it says.

Marla: You could fax me the ad. When you sign up for the clipping agreement you put on search terms. That basically alerts our readers to what you want us to track for you.

Michael: I would say search terms?

Marla: Yes.

Michael: I have maybe forty words of copy on this ad.

Marla: You wouldn’t do forty words of copy. You would specifically write down the product and write down if it was editorial or advertising.

Michael: Okay, so this would be a display ad and I would write down the name of the product. I don’t know the name of the product but I would assume it’s called “Baby Fingers.” You would search that term “Baby Fingers”?

Marla: I would take a look at the ad and we could ascertain it from there.

Michael: Once you do the search, does it show you the physical look of the ad?

Marla: Yes, they clip out the ad and they send it to you.

Michael: What if this ad is running in thousands of magazines and my finances are limited?

Marla: You can put a cap on, only send “x” amount of ads.

Michael: When I’m doing the search terms, would you recommend I say “only search,” I mean I don’t know where the ads are coming from. I would assume they are coming from children’s and baby magazines but I don’t know that for sure. How many years back will it search?

Marla: We don’t go years back, it’s only a week.

Michael: What if this ad is originated from a year ago? Is there any way you could search old ads.

Marla: We could do a back search but it’s only about 8,000 publications.

Michael: That you keep in back search?

Marla: Yes.

Michael: What happens with the other stuff?

Marla: We don’t catalog it.

Michael: You don’t save it digitally or anything?

Marla: No.

Michael: Let’s say I capped it and I paid the $283 and I say “Give me a hundred results of this ad”, am I going to get this exact ad or could you be coming up with other display ads that are selling something similar?

Marla: It all depends upon what’s out there. There are other ads that feature the product for sure.

Michael: How am I going to get the results after you get them?

Marla: You get the results; we clip them and then we send them to you.

Michael: Do you clip a digital image of it?

Marla: No, we clip the actual physical ad.

Michael: You find the actual ad from the magazine?

Marla: Yes.

Michael: Do you send me the whole page?

Marla: I don’t know if we’ll send you the whole page but we send you the clip.

Michael: How long does that take?

Marla: It takes about a week and a half to get up and started and then we read a week behind, I think about a week and a half, maybe you’ll get something a couple of times a week.

Michael: As you’re finding them, I’m getting them?

Marla: Correct.

Michael: Let’s say I’m asking for 150; how many am I going to get the first week? Do you have any idea?

Marla: I have no idea.

Michael: What else do I get with the clipping? Do I get the date and the name of the publication on a printout?

Marla: Yes.

Michael: What other services do you provide in the clipping part?

Marla: If you have a press release we can also track editorials. I don’t know if that would be of interest to you.

Michael: If I get a write-up?

Marla: Yes. Basically on your search terms we could write your company, we could write a company you want to do any kind of recognizance marketing or fact gathering on another company. This one company in particular, what is it “Child Fingers”?

Michael: It’s “Baby Fingers.” I want to research this company.

Marla: Then I would write that as a search term as well, not just the ads but actually anything on the company. I’m sending you all of the information right now.

Michael: Are there any hidden fees that I don’t know about with this service, like am I paying per search term?

Marla: No, you have unlimited search terms up to ten free searches. I’m sorry, ten free sorts. Each search term is a subject and what we can do is sort out all the clips that we would gather for you.

Michael: Ten free sorts.

Marla: Yes, but you have unlimited search terms.

Michael: I don’t understand. Give me a specific example.

Marla: Okay, say you are doing “Baby Fingers” and we clip all these articles on “Baby Fingers.” Then you’re looking at “Baby Toes,” that’s a whole other subject and we’re not going to co-mingle the articles. It would be like one batch would be “Baby Fingers”; one batch would be “Baby Toes” another batch could be “Baby Socks.” You get up to ten sorts, unlimited search terms. The clip price is $1.58. If you indicate that you’re interested in getting a TV transcript of the actual TV news show, that’s $5.80. If you’re not interested in that, don’t click it on.

Michael: What about infomercials that sell products?

Marla: That I’m not quite sure.

Michael: So if Access Hollywood or one of those shows did a story on “Baby Fingers” you’ll have that and you’ll pull the transcripts for only $5.80?

Marla: Yes, that’s the only hidden charge.

Michael: What other media?

Marla: Not radio.

Michael: Is there someone who does radio?

Marla: I don’t know. Radio is very hard to track. It’s nearly impossible.

Michael: You do newspapers, trade publications, newsletters, transcripts for TV; what else do you do?

Marla: And 3,500 websites.

Michael: Why only 3,500?

Marla: Because that’s what we’re currently doing.

Michael: Where are you guys located?

Marla: The main office is in Chicago, but the office you’re calling is in Los Angeles.

Michael: You’re a satellite office. Do you have offices all over the country?

Marla: Yes.

Michael: How many?

Marla: Look on our website.

Michael: Have you been with them a long time?

Marla: Yes.

Michael: How did this company start, do you know?

Marla: We started as a – you’re asking a lot of questions!

Michael: I’m interested!

Marla: That’s good. We started as a, we published the Bacon Media Directory so we started out publishing and we’ve been in business for about 75 years.

Michael: As a member, do I get any kind of special on the directories or is that a separate division?

Marla: That’s a separate division. The four main divisions are pretty much in sync with the PR life cycle. We have Distribution where we can build lists for you; we can send out press kits, we can do a full mailing.

Michael: You can build lists of newsletters?

Marla: Newsletters, whoever you need to reach.

Michael: How do you compare with SRDS?

Marla: I’m not quite familiar with them. What we do, we have an on-line database and we publish the books that we have to stay current. We do about 4,000 updates a day on all of our information. We are constantly checking to see where a particular editor is and how they like to receive their information.

Michael: If I signed up, could I build my own lists on line?

Marla: Yes.

Michael: What does that service cost?

Marla: We have a media source on line, which is an on line database and that costs about $2,400 a month.

Michael: That gives you all the media?

Marla: Television, radio, newspapers, whoever you need. You just type in your criteria and it pulls a list. You can then export it to a .pdf file and that’s your own proprietary information.

Michael: So I own it?

Marla: Yes.

Michael: It’s not like I’m renting it?

Marla: No.

Michael: So I can pull a list of every single – do you give the media contacts?

Marla: Yes, how they like to receive their information, perhaps phone calls, email or however they want it.

Michael: That’s $2,400 a month?

Marla: Yes…no a year.

Michael: You can do anything you want with the list.

Marla: Correct.

Michael: How have you seen that used?

Marla: I’ve seen that used with anyone who does any kind of media outreach, for instance if they’re sending out any kind of releases, corporate announcements. The person handling “Baby Fingers” the person who would be handling the PR would be responsible for contacting, I would assume Parents Magazine, trade magazines, Parenting, nursery and home schooling, whomever depending upon the nature of the product. If there is a new announcement, if there is a survey done stating that “Baby Fingers” is the best thing to have, what they would do then is create a release and using the media source on line they would then type in the criteria of who they want to send it out to so they could either send out a press kit, they could send out, based on the media source you can also export and create a list and then print out labels on your Avery printer. Then you can send out your information via emails, snail mail or a fax.

Michael: That’s incredible. Can you build the list by category, like magazines and FIC codes?

Marla: Yes, or based on the circulation. Any publication that has a circulation over 100,000 you can pull it up by that, by city, by editor beats, by if it’s a daily, a week or a monthly newsletter, free-lance business.

Michael: And you totally own the list once you subscribe?

Marla: Yes, the beauty of it is if you pull up a list and save it, and go back to that list in a month and a half and you will see all of the updates that they have added.

Michael: How can they keep everything updated; are there people on the phone calling?

Marla: Oh yes.

Michael: You must have a warehouse full of people making calls.

Marla: Correct.

Michael: That’s a great service. What other kinds of services do you have?

Marla: We do analysis.

Michael: What does that mean?

Marla: Do a clip analysis, the ad weight, and the ad value. Say if you get one article in the New York Times we do analysis on what is the ad equivalency.

Michael: So if I do a press release, you’ll tell me how much I’ve saved in advertising.

Marla: Basically you will get a monthly monitoring report that pretty much gives you the ad weight based on what the publications have reported back to us.

Michael: Why would someone want that?

Marla: It’s qualified, public relations is like the third party, and you’re going after third party endorsements. You’re looking for somebody to write a story on you and you need to garner and see what the ad equivalency is. The message comes across different if someone reads it based on a news story or if someone is writing an article on it as opposed to seeing an ad. It adds credence to it.

Michael: Does a public relations firm charge their clients based on that value? Do you know?

Marla: That I don’t know. But they do justify their work and their billable hours based on what kind of ad values they generate for their clients.

Michael: They could do a press release campaign and say “Look I’ve gotten you in this media and this media and this media. You would have had to pay $50,000 in advertising.” How much is that service?

Marla: It varies.

Michael: What other services do you offer?

Marla: Media monitoring, which is what we’ve been discussing.

Michael: With the display.

Marla: Yes.

Michael: Very interesting.

Marla: Listen, Michael I sent the information to you. You should have it. Download it, print it out and fax it back to me.

Michael: I have it right here.

I want to thank you for listening. This is Michael Senoff with hardtofindseminars.com. If you want to get in touch with any of the people we interview please email me . You can reach me by phone at 1-800-982-6487 or 858-274-7851. Anyone listening, if you want to be interviewed please contact me and give back to others and thanks for listening.

Clip #48F

Michael: We are talking to the PR Doctor. Robert, how are you?

Robert: I’m well. How are you?

Michael: I’m doing well. I know that you’ve been out of commission for the last couple of weeks. A lot of our listeners have been wondering where you are. What the heck is going on?

Robert: I had a dental problem. I am still in the process of having a root canal done. For any of you that have ever gone through one, you know it’s a lot of fun!

Michael: It’s doesn’t sound like a lot of fun.

Robert: No, it had me sidelined, but I’m feeling better.

Michael: Let’s get back to the progress on the fingerprint pen campaign. Where are we with that right now?

Robert: Right before I had the dental emergency, I wanted to switch gears. We had initially launched tying into and piggybacking off the missing children. After we did that, I started getting articles from California papers that there were already experts out there saying how to protect the children. So that angle wasn’t new. The pen was a different slant to it.

Michael: Let me interrupt you. When you say you were getting articles, with your subscription to Burrell’s you were looking for what other kind of media was out there on fingerprint and missing children. Describe what you started noticing when you got this series of articles from Burrell’s.

Robert: What I noticed was the same thing that teaches them how to protect children. Some of the things were the same things that we did. The only difference was that they got there first. There’s about a two to three weeks lag time from the time an article is run until the time I get it, two weeks have gone by. When I got the article, and again it was two weeks old, and there were already experts, law enforcement and other security experts who were feeding information to the media. This is what came across my desk. First, this told me that we were on the right path. It’s just that they got there first.

Michael: It seems to me that it died down a little bit on the missing children because there are not existing missing children cases except there was one guy, the guy with the aneurysm who died. It seems that it’s dying down a little bit as far as that type of story for right now.

Robert: They are not as prevalent as they were a few weeks ago, but there are still one or two high profile cases that are perfect for piggybacking. The thing is when it dies down is, not necessarily your competitors, but a lot of people who were on the story before, wisdom or common knowledge would be that this is dying down, and there is not any more information. There’s a case right where you live where a seven year-old was killed in San Diego. I think he went through trial, or he is going through trial and they’re still talking about that. There’s another case on the East Coast. Again, there aren’t as many stories, but there are still one or two high-profile cases. All you need is one high-profile case.

Michael: What it looks like is part of your service, what you’re going to provide to somebody is you’re putting in keywords and looking out for articles relating to my PR campaign. You’re getting me a couple of times a week, whether through the mail or fax, you’re reading them and seeing what everyone else is doing and you’re going to develop a game plan from that.

Robert: That and be spontaneous about it. We always lay out a game plan ahead of time. What this did was I just wanted to know what type of stories, what type of coverage and what people were already putting out there, and except for the fact that you are the only one giving away a pen, it’s all pretty much the same. There are only so many ways you can protect yourself. You want to stay in the line of sight; you want to keep your children in the line of sight. You want to talk to your kids on a regular basis; you want to tell them not to talk to strangers. These are just common sense things that everybody knows, but the pen was unique to you. The only way we’re going to know truthfully whether you got any PR or not is to track it. There may be some obscure publication in California who ran the story, and we don’t know.

Michael: That’s true. There’s a guy I’m working with on my invisible ink pen, and he just sent me a link to a piece of PR that was done in an Arkansas newspaper over a year ago, and I said, “Wow, I didn’t even realize they ran it.” I just put it up in my press releases. You can read it on my hard to find seminars page and I didn’t even realize it was out there.

Robert: Right, because 99.9% of the reporters when you send them a press release via email, mail or fax, they are not going to call. You can imagine how bombarded they are with letters and press releases, and they don’t have the time or the manpower to call every single one. That’s why it’s valuable to track. Like you found out in Arkansas, you wouldn’t have known that otherwise. So that’s the value of tracking.

Michael: Here’s another thing I just found out. I don’t know if we touched on this before, but let’s talk about the residual value of press, especially now with the Internet, because I realize this. If I type in “invisible ink marking pen” or “branding pen” which is one of the trade names I had for my invisible ink pen, you could find on Google and some of the search engines over ten or twelve press release articles that went in different papers all over the country on this invisible ink pen. If it’s in the papers, it goes into the archives, and it’s there forever.

Robert: And anyone who may be behind the times and they don’t have the Internet, they can go to the local library and get on the Internet there. There is also a database that most major libraries provide, they subscribe to newspapers, you can run a keyword search, and it will scan newspapers just like you did on the Internet. With the Internet, it will scan any website that has the keywords that you type in. This particular database only searches newspapers or magazines, whichever you choose.

Michael: Do you know how far back it searches?

Robert: The one I use just went back to 1997.

Michael: It’s similar to what Burrells does.

Robert: It is, but on a much smaller scale. You’re dealing with the library and I’m sure their funds are much more limited than the large corporations are. What I tell people to do is go after some of the larger publications that you know a library would subscribe to, the LA Times, the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. If you sent press releases to the top fifty markets, chances are your local library will subscribe to those newspapers, and those are the ones you want to search. A lot of the smaller ones, Bacons and Burrells will get the smallest weekly with 1,000 readers, which your local library probably wouldn’t pay to subscribe to. That’s a do-it-yourself track. You don’t have to pay a Bacons hundreds of dollars a month to track. You can do this easily.

Michael: You can go down to the library, search it yourself, compile all of these releases on your subject, print them out, and create your own press releases from those that you have seen.

Robert: There you go.

Michael: Change it around, don’t plagiarize it, and put it into your own words and you’re set.

Robert: If you have salespeople, get copies of the stories to your salespeople. If you have customer service, get copies of the stories to your customer service people. What you want to do is maximize your story and everything about what you do. You don’t want salespeople telling one message and advertising giving another message, and when people call and get customer service, they’re telling them something else. You want all of your people to be on the same page so it doesn’t confuse the customer. If you have no idea of who you are and what you do and what your customers get, how are they going to know. You want all of your people on the same page and you can do that with the story that was written about you.

Michael: Let’s talk about how to hit a homerun, how to land your press release with the AP. Can you describe what the AP wire service is? Give people an idea of how they can hit a homerun with just one press release.

Robert: AP is simply the Associated Press and it’s a wire. It’s the largest and one of the oldest. A wire service gathers news, just like your local paper; however, newspapers from across the country and across the world subscribe to AP to get their stories. This is a way for a newsroom to stay in touch with what’s going on outside of their local area. They pay a subscription fee for the rights to run any story that the AP sends across the wire. It’s not actually on a wire any more and hasn’t been on the wire in a long time, but we still call it the wire. You write one press release, you send it to the AP, UPI, Reuters, Copely’s, Knights, Ritter, there are so many of them, but AP happens to be the largest.

Michael: Are those all different wire services?

Robert: Those are all different wire services.

Michael: What do you think it costs to subscribe to a wire?

Robert: I don’t know.

Michael: Maybe we’ll do a call and find out. When we’re sending out our press releases, do you recommend sending them out to the wires?

Robert: The wires are twofold, meaning if it is of national significance, if your product, service, story, company, business has national significance then you want to send it to the headquarters, the main newsroom in New York City. Each state also has a bureau. A lot of people overlook the bureau, so in your case, I would send a national out and I also wouldn’t overlook the San Diego bureau of the AP. Michael: Each state has a bureau or a sub-office within the state.

Robert: Yes.

Michael: Is it controlled by the AP?

Robert: No, these individual bureaus have the choice of what stories they want to run. What they are paying AP for is the stories and the press releases that went out that day, and they can pick and choose whatever they want. The AP doesn’t care. They paid their subscription fee, this is what was fed out this morning, or afternoon or late evening, or however often they send out the news for that day, and the editor or reporter on the other end decides, “Okay, this is relevant to where we live,” or “I’d like to put this in our paper to help out readers.” AP happens to be by far the largest, but don’t overlook the others because most of the news bureaus will subscribe to the others. This is something I want to research too, why some of these stories come from the AP when you have thirty different wire services.

Michael: Maybe they have the highest credibility.

Robert: That could be. If you want to get your story in all of the papers in your state, then you definitely want to target the AP bureau for whatever state you live in. This isn’t a guarantee that the papers are going to run it, but at least they’ll see it.

Michael: What happens if the AP picks your story up, they have that as a choice to every newsroom or person who subscribes to it, and they have the ability to pick it up and run it within their newspaper or magazine or publication? When I talk about a homerun, I’m talking about when you have a conglomerate of newspapers, maybe one newspaper group that owns hundreds and hundreds of newspapers, if they choose to run that story from the AP, it could be in multiple newspapers overnight.

Robert: If a major conglomerate owns the newspapers, the process is the same. It still went through the AP. That doesn’t guarantee that the same media company, even though it’s an AP story, may own the paper here, where you live, they still might not run it here or they might not run it there, or they may run them at different times. I found that out that a story can come out today, and it’s good for whenever the editor or the newspaper personnel decide to run it. There is no deadline for when they have to run the story. They can hold on to it a month, two months, six months, however long they want to. They pay for it, and they can run it when they want to. A homerun means there is one press release that you are writing and you are sending it to one place, and it has the potential and the capability to be put in thousands of newspapers with just that single effort that you put forth.

Michael: I see.

Robert: The Tribune Company is one of the larger companies that own a lot of newspapers, and just because it ran in the paper here that is owned by Tribune doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to run in New York City. The more national scope the story and how it ties in, there are certain things that you can do to better your chances.

Michael: Would it be fair to say that anyone who subscribes to your service for you promoting their product or service that the press releases that you develop, it is standard that they are going to go out to all of the major wires?

Robert: I always send them to the wires. That makes my job a lot easier. Actually, there are your major wires and then there are forty or fifty other wires that are not as large. The scope is a lot broader than the AP. That just happens to be the one that most people are familiar with. If you wanted to email your story idea or press release, let’s say people are listening, and they took examples from your website or they are already familiar with writing the press release but they aren’t quite sure of how to get to the AP, they could email their press release to PR@AP.org . This email is designed for people to pitch their ideas and send their press releases if you don’t already have a personal contact or a reporter that you have a relationship with at the Associated Press.

Michael: Okay, wonderful, that’s exciting.

Robert: What you have to remember too is, I’m glad that I said that, when you send the email, the subject is your headline, so make sure that’s catchy to make them want to open and read the press release. Don’t just put “Press Release” in the subject line.

Michael: Let’s talk about the format of the actual physical press release if you’re sending it as an email. Then we’ll go into some rules that we need to keep in mind if we’re sending it as a fax, and rules we need to keep in mind if we’re sending via mail. Let’s start with email.

Robert: I keep email real simple because I haven’t figured out how to tell, once they print it out, how many pages it is unless I could print it out first. It is a rule of thumb that you want to keep all press releases to one page. You have one page to tell your story, and tell your story well. The more pages, the more likely that it won’t get read. Put yourself, not even in the reporters’ shoes because they’re not standing by the fax screening all the press release. That’s an entry-level person or an intern, and they have all been instructed to look for several things. One, eliminate all grammatical and spelling errors. They see those and you have just lost ninety percent of the battle right there. If you can keep it down to one page, spell correctly, have it in the format they like, it’s double-spaced, you have the contact information in the upper left or right-hand corner, and under that you want to have “For Immediate Release” or if there is a set date that you want it to run, you have the actual date “Please Run” and you fill in the date you would like for it to run. Space down from that and you have your headline, and I use the font that is larger than the actual type because I want that to stand out. That’s what they’re going to see first. I use bold type, and I make sure it’s larger than the rest of the copy. The whole job of the headline is to get them to read the press release. You want to pull them into the press release. Make that stand out. Then, the first paragraph should grab them by the throat. If you go to these books, they will teach you the five “W’s”, who, what, when, where, and why, everybody who is writing a press release follows that old format, and they wonder why they aren’t getting results, because everybody is doing the same thing. I incorporate who, what, when, where, and why but it’s not the first thing they see. They need some hard-hitting, news-evident stories. Keep it down, if you can to one page. If it does go over, what you want to do is on the first page type, “More” in the middle or the bottom of the page and let them know that there is another page following. We just went through the email, but I don’t send very many by email. A lot of times, an editor or a reporter will come in and go to his email and there are three hundred messages. He’s hitting the delete button. He doesn’t have the time to go through three hundred press releases. I stick with the tried and true, which is mailing or faxing, and in rare cases I will email, especially if I know I have a relationship, I’ll email. Those who are not familiar with my writing style, my clients, me, and then my first introduction is not an email. The same things that I just mentioned hold true if you are going to fax or if you’re going to mail it, just keep it down as much as you can to one page. Follow the same things. You want to double space, you want to have contact information in the right place, and you want your headline to stand out. That’s the correct format.

Michael: Should you have a space in between paragraphs?

Robert: Yes, you want to the whole press release to be double-spaced.

Michael: I mean if you have a new paragraph, should you keep it double-spaced and indent or should you give an extra space for a new paragraph?

Robert: I give an extra space.

Michael: Do you indent on paragraphs?

Robert: No. There are some people who single space, they don’t double space, and they get stories. There are so many people sending them, they aren’t all going to look alike, and you’re going to find some exceptions. This is actually from the reporters themselves and the editors who say, “This is the standard. This is how we like it.” The reason that they like double space more than single space is because it’s much easier to edit the press release because they have space to work with.

Michael: Should it be upper and lower case?

Robert: What’s that?

Michael: When you write to them, it shouldn’t be all capital letters.

Robert: No, just like a standard letter in the sense that when you are beginning a sentence or a paragraph, you want to use capital letters. As far as my headline, those are all upper case.

Michael: What typestyle do you use?

Robert: I use Times. A press release is not where you want to show how fancy you are or how creative you are. Get creative in the story, not the format.

Michael: Let’s talk about a mailing piece. What kind of envelope do you send it in?

Robert: I put it in a regular business letter-size envelope, plain white.

Michael: A number ten?

Robert: Yes.

Michael: Security, where they can’t see through?

Robert: I use that, but if you don’t have security, you just use a basic envelope.

Michael: Do you put just the press release in there, or a cover letter or what?

Robert: What you can do is for thirty-seven cents, the price of one stamp, you can fit four sheets of paper in one envelope. That gives you more room. You still want to keep the initial press release down to one page, but you can include a bio, more about you. You can include a photo. You can include a draft. You have four pages to work with. I wouldn’t advise you to fax four pages to the media, but since you have one envelope and it’s all tying in together, you can put all of that information in one envelope. I hand write the person I’m addressing it to, and I use just my address as a return address. The whole curiosity, the “A Pile” “B Pile” thing, I don’t know if people are familiar with that concept.

Michael: Gary Halbert’s “A Pile” “B Pile” theory.

Robert: Exactly, the same thing holds true for the media. Let me interject this. A reporter is simply a man or a woman first before they are journalists. They do the same things we do; they go through the same things we go through. That’s how I address them. I know if I have a typed out label with my company name plastered in the left-hand corner, it’s going to look like junk mail, or that you are trying to sell something, but if I hand write it, and I don’t completely tell who is sending it, now the curiosity antennae come out. “Where is this from?” “Who is this?”

Michael: Sometimes you can even send it with no return address, which works pretty well too.

Robert: All that is designed to do is to get you noticed and set you apart from the other people who are sending information there, and I can tell you most of it looks the same. Most of the high-power PR firms with twelve last names in them and the company name, they use their corporate letterhead, and they use their corporate envelopes, and a reporter gets it and knows what it is and he’ll set it to the side, he’ll get to it. The letters that are personal or appear to be personal what get read first.

Michael: Let’s talk about this. When a reporter gets a press release, what are they thinking? They have to decide, “Is this press release credible?” What is their responsibility before they take that press release and run it in their paper or magazine?

Robert: The first thing is they are looking to see if it fits the format, are there real noticeable misspelled words, any other blatant errors that make the press release look like crap. If you pass that first stage, they don’t have a lot of time to go through everything they get. Here is a personal story that I’ll share with you. I did WGN-TV in Chicago, and the editor told me that they receive one thousand press releases every day. This is WGN; you can imagine NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, FOX and all the rest. They are getting either the same or more. They don’t have a lot of time. You have just a few seconds to catch their attention, to say, “Hey, this is something that you need to be covering.” That’s the job of the headline. When they are pulling these press releases out of the fax machines, whoever this office person is, they are familiar with which reporter covers which beat, which editor, if it’s sports related or metro or if it’s city or if it’s national, they are trained to look at it, judge it, and say, “Okay, this needs to go here, this needs to go to features, this needs to go to city.” Now, you have to know what the best fit for your story is. Some papers, if you are dealing with small offices, and I’m sure you have people who live in cities of different sizes so you may not have eight or nine different sections or departments of the newspaper, so that’s not really a problem. As you get into the larger publications, there a certain reporters and certain editors that cover certain beats, and you want to tailor and cater that to them. Again, the intern or the entry-level person that opened the mail and got your release or got it from the fax machine and it meets all of the criteria we just mentioned, they are thinking, “Okay, this needs to go to this person,” and they’ll take it and set it on their desk or put it in the inbox, or think it’s totally irrelevant and throw it away.

Michael: Let’s say it gets into the box of the New Products Editor. What’s the job of that person? Do they have to make sure my fingerprint pen is credible? Are they going to go to the website? Are they going to do some research on me before they choose to run the story?

Robert: No, not every publication is going to do that.

Michael: Some will be lazy about it, but some will do their due diligence.

Robert: Exactly, some will do their due diligence. Others will take you for your word and run it, whether there is an actual fingerprint pen or not. One thing you’ve done is you are giving the fingerprint pen away. They love to be able to offer free samples to their readers. That helps you. Any time you are asking for money in the press release itself you have a good chance of them following up to make sure, they are going to ask you for a sample. If it’s a book, they’ll ask you to send them a copy of the book, but that’s not true in all cases. I’ve had some run where they didn’t call.

Michael: Let’s wrap this up. Give us one or two success stories that you’ve had with some of your clients with press. Share that with anyone listening.

Robert: I had a client who owns an accounting firm. This was around tax season, it was around April 15 th, and everybody is saying the same thing. We took a different slant and focused on those who were going to file for an extension. All of the press previous was, “The deadline is such and such. This is what you need. This is where you can get certain forms.” We were tied into that. This is the main thing to tie into something they’re already talking about, but give them a different angle. No one was talking about the businesses that had to file for an extension, the high net worth individuals who had to file for an extension. The reason I specifically said businesses and high net work individuals is because this is who my client was going after. She was not targeting the average Joe working the nine to five, forty hour a week job. That’s an important distinction. You don’t just want publicity for the heck of having publicity. We have an objective in mind of who her perfect client is, and it is companies, small businesses, and wealthy individuals that would tie into the press release. If you were reading her press release, and you did not own a business or your net worth was not over a half million dollars, then it did not appeal to you. There was no call to action to you. It simply was not for you. For those who say, “Wait a minute. I want to know about this deduction in my business. I actually had a loss. I had a new product. I launched something that didn’t work. I want to know what I can write off, what I can do.” That’s who she appealed to, and a reporter called within twenty-four hours, picked up the story, interviewed her, got her publicity, and she couldn’t take any more clients. That’s how much of a response she got; she had to start turning people away.

Michael: Was it a local area?

Robert: It was a local firm, not Anderson or any of the large one. This was a local, small accounting firm right here.

Michael: That’s a great angle. I know personally I filed an extension for my taxes, and that’s something that taxpayers, when they haven’t met their April 15 th deadline, think about every day. I’ve thought about it today, I have to get my stuff to my accountant to meet that extension. That’s a great angle.

Robert: I think what most people would have done was said, “Okay, that’s a great story for tax time,” and they would have run it, and they would have wasted a lot of time getting calls from the average person who couldn’t afford her services. If you stick to just filing an extension, then the guy who works at Chrysler or the guy that works at McDonald’s will, for whatever reason needs to file an extension is calling.

Michael: What do you think that was worth to her in financial terms?

Robert: I don’t ask, but a lot of times, they volunteer the information because they are so happy. I know she personally told me she has several clients, and before that, she had maybe close to a hundred.

Michael: If she keeps those clients, that’s year after year after year in business.

Robert: Right, every year they are in business and every year that they have to file taxes.

Michael: Her investment for your services probably paid for itself a hundred times. Maybe five years from now, it will pay for it a hundred times.

Robert: That’s true, and the thing about this is it worked this year. Bar any major changes in the tax law, it will work again next year and the year after that. Often when I speak, I mention Columbo, this is a favorite story or illustration that I made up. If anybody is familiar with the old detective show Columbo, it is still on the air. The show originated in the 1970’s, and it’s still on the air. Why? Because it is successful. People keep watching it. It’s the same thing with the press release. If you have a homerun press release, you run it until it stops working.

Michael: A homerun press release is like a homerun direct mail sales letter. It doesn’t get the sale directly, but indirectly through getting stories run.

Robert: It may even work better than the sales letter because a lot of people believe if a reporter is saying this about you, it must be true, whether it is or not. If it’s a direct mail piece or a commercial, the safeguards come out. They know they’re trying to be sold.

Michael: Let’s talk about another success story.

Robert: Another client, this is so unique, this was a guy who went to prison for bank fraud, identity theft, and credit card fraud. He wrote a how-to book, how he did it, how anybody could do it, how to rip somebody off, while he was incarcerated. He wrote a book on how he did it! I was introduced to this individual and it actually read like a how-to book. He told you what to look for if you go to the courthouse to get people’s social security number, to get their tax information, to get their property information, to get any personal information you wanted to know about anybody. It’s all a matter of public record. You just need to know where to look. He told people where to look! So I said, “Okay, but you don’t want to position this because this is a step-by-step how-to guide. You just want to let the people know a product; you are putting it out there so people can protect themselves.” That’s what we did, and I got the statistics. There are 600,000 people a year who are victims of identity theft. Law enforcement officials for the Chicago Police Department read the book, so we got it from their perspective. We got a victim, they were not a victim of this particular individual, but at some point, they were a victim of identity theft. So we got the victim’s point, we got what law enforcement thought about the book and someone putting the book out. His quote was very good because he way saying, “This information can do a lot of damage if it gets into the wrong hands, but it needs to be out there.” So now, people want to know, “What’s in there?” They want to know out of curiosity. We sent out the press release to all of Chicago. He was on some type of house arrest or something where he can’t leave the state, so there was no sense in blasting 20/20 and CNN if he can’t leave. We just kept it to a local campaign, all of the media outlets came to where he was, and they got a copy sent out. We sent out a few copies of the book beforehand, and they tied a whole complete story around his book, his life and his website. He got some speaking engagements, things that he didn’t plan on, he just wanted to sell books. He got banks from the very base that he ripped off! Now they’re paying him to come and speak.

Michael: That’s great. Now anyone listening, there is a catalog of books like this. I don’t know, Robert if you’ve heard of it. It’s a publishing company like one of those off-the-wall publishers, but it’s probably one of the most complete catalogs on off-color books, on crime, on all kinds of stuff. It’s really incredible. They have some great copywriters, because if you get the catalog, you’ll see the descriptions of the books, and it’s called Lampoonics.com. They have an online catalog, and if anyone wanted a great product to sell, there are probably over five hundred books in that catalog. I’ve contacted the publisher personally about accessing quantities of certain books, where you can pick them up for as little as $3 or $4 apiece in quantity and resell them yourself. It’s a great source for these types of books.

Robert: Pay particular attention to what Michael said. If you are thinking about going into a business, or if you want to add a back-end product, or if you want something to up sell, you do not always have to start from dirt and invent or produce your own product. Find something like he mentions on his website where you can get the resale rights, where you can get the license rights, then all you have to do is spend your time marketing. Instead of the research, development, and trial and error of trying to produce a product from scratch, there is one that is already proven. Then if you buy one of the crime books, who is your market? All of the crime publications, all of the law enforcement newsletters, all of the law enforcement websites, all of the television shows, and radio shows that cater to law enforcement. The media is already there.

Michael: I’m going to interrupt again. I’ll give you a specific example of how I used this Lampoonics Company. There was a book in there called “The Secret Science of Covert Inks.” It was written by a top-secret officer of the Jewish CIA of Israel wrote it. The guy is dead now, but he put this book together of all of these secret espionage ink formulas. That’s how I find a lot of my ink formulas for my pens, from this book. It gives you recipes of all the ink formulas. I found this book, and I contacted Lampoonics because I was doing some research on some more formulas, and he told me that the author of the book was dead, but he had the rights to reprint and sell the book. You can imagine “The Secret Science of Convert Inks” is probably not one of their number one sellers. It’s a very niche market book. I don’t think there are too many people interested in it. I am, and I asked him for a price on a thousand books because I offer the book as part of my invisibleinkpenid.com package, and he gave me a price of $2 apiece in quantity. That’s pretty good. I also asked him if I could take some of the formulas in the book and put them up on my website, and he quoted me a price that was a little more than I’m willing to pay at this point, but what I am saying is this publisher is in the business of selling books. He owns the rights to over five hundred off-the-wall crazy books. It’s nothing but paper and ink. It costs him fifty cents to make, and if you go to him and say, “Look, here’s a check for $200. I want a hundred copies of this book. If you don’t think it’s a good offer, send my check back.” Let me tell you, he’s not going to send the check back. He’ll send you the books, and then you have a product ready to market.

Robert: For those skeptics who are listening and say, “Well, that’s great but I don’t even have the $200 to get started.” Well, first of all shame on you for not having $200 and you’re in business. What you can do is send out the press releases defining the books, hitting the pain points of who you are trying to reach. Take the orders that the press release generates for you, and then order the book.

Michael: Or you can have one copy and send out your press release. You don’t know how many books you’re going to sell, but I think legally you do have to have what you’re selling in inventory, but it doesn’t say how many. You can have one copy ready to sell, send the press release, and if you get sales for multiple copies, you’re just going to have to order more.

Robert: Ask the publisher if they are willing to drop ship. That way, you don’t have to keep inventory.

Michael: Absolutely, and if they can’t do it, here’s another tip. On eBay.com, I think most people know what that is, but if they don’t it’s the number one online auction service. They have a new service where you can search on eBay if you don’t know how to put a photograph up on your computer, if you don’t know how to pack something up and send it to the post office, there are people in their homes and offices selling products on eBay all over the country. You can search your zip code where you live and you can find people who are already selling on eBay who, for a small percentage, will put your auctions up on eBay, who will ship your product for you, handle everything for you. All you have to do is type in your zip code, you’ll get a list of people with their phone numbers, what their specialty is, what they charge percentage wise. You can call them, and they can come over to your house and pick the stuff up. They’ll do it all for you. You don’t need to mess with any of that stuff at all.

Robert: It can’t get any easier than that. I did not know that about eBay.

Michael: I just found out about it. I have a friend who is pretty clueless on the computer up in Maryland. She wanted to sell some furniture. She asked me to write the ad for her and do the photos. I said, “I don’t have time, but I’ll get somebody right in your zip code to do it.” I was looking for someone here in the San Diego area to do the same thing, and I made contact with several people, talked to them, negotiated some prices. I haven’t used them yet, but when I’m ready to sell a bunch of stuff and I don’t want to do the day-to-day packing and shipping and writing addresses, I’ll just contact her and give her a small piece of the action. It’s a wonderful service. My father is moving to Mexico, and he has a product he sells online, and that’s exactly what he’s going to do when he moves, contract it out.

Robert: You can’t beat that.

Michael: It’s not only like a contract shipper; you have contract drop shippers all over the country, big businesses that do this. Just like eBay is hundreds of thousands of little garage sales online, you now have thousands and thousands of contract shippers for you. It’s really nice.

Robert: It evens the playing field, so now if you are a small operator, even home based, you can appear much larger. Not only that, but you can do some of the same things on a certain level that Fortune 500 companies do.

Michael: Absolutely, and you can move faster, you can make changes quicker. It is an even playing field now.

Robert: I heard Dan Kennedy say this, if you offer a decent product or a decent service at a decent price, then you are guaranteed some level of success. The better you master or improve the product or service you test different and find the best price for you, and the more you get that out there, the more people who know about you and the more people who can buy from you. Start where you are. Use eBay. If you can find five or ten people in your area, five or ten people in neighboring states to do this for you, now you have your own sales force of people who you are cloning yourself, and they are doing work where they are.

Michael: I tell people the most important thing is to make movement. I’m going to give you a specific example with my fingerprintpen.com. I have the website up there, I haven’t sold one pen yet, but we’re working on that, right Robert? But I got a call from a guy today; he’s with a design firm out of Ohio. He must have been searching, because I have some keywords, and he found my website and saw all the pictures and everything. He contacted me and he has a contract with a large manufacturer of a product that is sold in all of the major Petco’s, the pet chain stores, the super stores that sell pet products. I signed a non-disclosure with him this morning, and I am now thinking that I can’t discuss the specifics of the products but let me see if I can get the general thing. He was trying to explain to me what he wanted. I said, “Can you tell me specifically what it is?” He said, “Well, we’re going to have to sign a non-disclosure,” because he didn’t want me to steal his idea. He had gotten the okay with this company that sells millions of this product to and through the pet industry, and the two inks that I use for my fingerprint pen, that blue ink. If you haven’t seen it, there’s a blue ink that you mark on the paper, there’s a clear ink that you put on your finger, and when you press your finger down on the blue ink, you get the fingerprint. He saw another use for these two inks that he’s been looking for forever he said. He said this would solve the problem. We spoke today, and we agreed that it would solve the problem, I’m sending him samples of the fingerprint pen, which he’s going to test, and I think we’re going to probably come to doing a deal. We’re going to do a couple of things. I wanted to take the blue ink and instead of applying it on the paper with the pen, I wanted to have a printer print the blue ink on a substrate, on a card stock paper, because I was going to create these fingerprint cards so all you needed was a card, or a piece of paper that already has the blue ink printed on it, and all you need is the invisible clear ink that you put on your finger, so it saves a step. What kept me from doing that was the expense. It was going to be around $3,000 to get the printing done, and I was holding off on it. If he wants it, I told him exactly the truth of what was going on, but I think if it works out, I’m going to have him pay the $3,000 number one, I’m going to have him design a set of the fingerprint cards, since he’s a designer, so I get the printing done for free, I get the design of my fingerprint cards done for free, and then, of course, if he wants multiple units from my ink formulas I’m going to make money in the ongoing sale of that. You never know where that next phone call is going to come from. It’s not about getting lucky. The phone is going to ring eventually. It’s about getting off your butt, making movement, and doing something.

Robert: I don’t think most people are as well versed in marketing and advertising and PR as we are, so as soon as you mention that, human nature is, “Well, that works for him but it won’t work for me,” or “I tried direct mail,” or “I tried to write a press release.” The thing is the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it. It’s like anything else in life. If you can find someone who is already gifted, who is already proven, who is already successful at copywriting, at marketing it’s an investment. Look at it as an investment, and not only for your company but for yourself. The lives of the customers who, if you believe in what you sell and you know it’s going to help them in some way, that’s what it is. I get this all the time where I wrote a press release, I wrote my first press release in 1998, and today I have the largest full-service PR firm in northern Illinois. I’m living proof that you don’t have to know everything to get started. You just need to get started, and things have a funny way of happening or unfolding, and you meet certain people.

Michael: We’re at about fifty minutes on this recording. If anyone wants to get in touch with Robert, the PR Doctor, shoot me an email and I’ll put you in touch with him. Robert, we didn’t really have this planned out, but I think this has been a great conversation again.

Robert: They get better each week, and I like how they’re not scripted and we just flow. I like that, I’m learning.

Michael: Yeah, we just let it roll, Buddy. I hope anyone listening has enjoyed it. I hope your tooth feels better and you get over that root canal. Let’s plan on doing a talk in another ten days. Let’s get that fingerprint pen thing going. I want to show a real success, for anyone listening, as it happens.

I want to thank you for listening to this audio clip. If you’re having any problems at all listening to the audio clip online, go to the bottom of the audio clip page and fill out my form for the free CD. I have all of these audio clips on one CD for you to listen to at home without being online. Enjoy the interview.

I want to thank you for listening. This is Michael Senoff with hardtofindseminars.com. If you want to get in touch with any of the people we interview, please email me .

Clip #48G

Michael: Hi, Leanna. Tell me what happened with that press release.

Leanna: I thought I’d try a press release for the invisible ink pens and I sent it out; it went out yesterday morning.

Michael: Did you have a service send it out for you?

Leanna: I did; I had a fax broadcast service.

Michael: Did you fax broadcast to media in your local area?

Leanna: Actually, I had it sent across Canada and to the western states. About 1,500 went out.

Michael: That’s great. What did they charge you for it?

Leanna: It came to about $180.

Michael: So what happened, your phone started ringing?

Leanna: Yeah, all morning. I got about twelve calls in the morning right away and six emails from different reporters wanting to do stories. They said it was coincidental because they were going to do a story on theft and they wanted to include the ID pen.

Michael: Do you have some of the recordings they left on your answering machine?

Leanna: Yes, I do.

Michael: Can you play it?

Leanna: Let me see.

Michael: I love this stuff! Isn’t it exciting when the phone starts ringing? Imagine what happened when my press release went in the Police Magazine, I had over 250 responses, but I did it all by fax. I didn’t want to have to deal with all of the telephone calls. It was a little different because I was offering a free sample of the invisible ink pen to generate a lead and the only way they could get in touch with me was to fax their name on their letterhead to my fax number. So I didn’t get stuck talking to all of these people.

Leanna: That’s a good idea. I’m at home, but I have to call all these people back.

Michael: That’s okay. I’m telling you that is wonderful!

Leanna: There is a lady in a panic today because she wants to do something for Monday. Let me see who I have on the machine.

[Leanna is playing back voice messages from people responding to the press release.]

Michael: All right, that’s great. You have a couple of people trying to sell you ads. That’s excellent, that lady is ready to run a story.

Leanna: There are a couple of good ones on there.

Michael: Absolutely. Do you realize what you would pay for a full page or a feature story in a newspaper?

Leanna: I was listening to your audio clip with Paul Hartunian telling how much more effective it is to do it this way.

Michael: Isn’t this exciting? I’m so excited for you! You have some work ahead of you but I’m excited. I’m sure you’re a little scared.

Leanna: I’m a little apprehensive. It’s something I’ve never done before but I can’t wait to get going.

Michael: I’m sure it’s a little scary, but just tell them how it is. They’re going to ask you questions and just be dynamic. It’s a great product; you can see there’s a real interest and people need this service. Just answer the questions the best you can. You may want to do this. Go back to Paul Hartunian’s site; he talks about making it easy for reporters. You can actually control the interview if you want. You may want to figure out the most common questions that may be asked about the pen and have a canned answer for each one or have an answer for each one. If you would like for me to do this, if you want to figure out all the questions you may be asked, you can call me and I’ll answer them for you and send you a recording and you can transcribe them. Other than that, I think these reporters are pretty sharp and they can see the interest in this. The way you’re going to position yourself is you’re a manufacturer, you manufacture these pens, and you haven’t been doing it long. They may ask you how you got into it and you can tell them there was a gentleman in the United States who taught you the business and you’re bringing it to Canada. Tell me what concerns you think you have right now.

Leanna: I remember reading on your site or hearing that it wasn’t just the press release that was important but it was also handling the interview, or handling the reporters.

Michael: It is important. You tell the truth; you don’t lie, you don’t embellish, you just tell the truth. Let me tell you what happens, when these stories run, they will be published in a newspaper, and you’re going to have your name in there, which is great. If you searched ID2000 you’re going to find all of these media stories that went on my pen. Remember when I sent you copies with the artwork and stuff?

Leanna: That’s right.

Michael: That stuff is there forever, especially with the Internet.

Leanna: You don’t want to be embellishing or making up information as you go along.

Michael: No, you certainly don’t want to lie about anything. The bottom line is you have a tool that gives anyone the ability to mark their valuables. It’s a real simple concept. There’s nothing confusing about it.

Leanna: No, there isn’t. It speaks for itself.

Michael: It speaks for itself; it replaces engravers. Read through the press releases up on the site and have it down and you should be fine.

Leanna: I think I’m going to be okay. I don’t have a lot of trouble speaking with people on the phone.

Michael: You’re going to be fine. What you may want to think about doing before you talk to these people, and tell me what your thoughts are on this, is you may want to set up an 800 number because first of all you want to make sure they give their readers the ability to contact you. You also want to establish a price for your pen at the retail level. They can then say at the end of the story “If you’re interested in ordering an invisible ink pen,” then you have to have a price for them. I guess you could have them come into your home number.

Leanna: Actually I have set up the 800 number. I thought if I was going to send out a press release I’d better get busy. I didn’t want them to have to call my home phone number.

Michael: Good job, so you have your 800 number and you want to think about when those stories run, what is the goal? Do you want to sell the pens retail? Maybe you don’t want to have the editor list a price, but they’re certainly going to ask you what it’s going to cost if someone wants to get one. You may start out selling just one or two at a time, but you’ll definitely get inquiries for larger orders.

Leanna: Excellent; I can handle the ones and twos right now. You have to start somewhere.

Michael: You’re going to do great. It wasn’t too hard, was it?

Leanna: No, it wasn’t.

Michael: If you need any help, if you want me to talk to any of them I’m there for you, I’ll do it for you. Just let me know.

Leanna: That’s excellent. I was going to touch base with your first to see what to do.

Michael: Call these people back right now, especially the woman who has a deadline Monday morning.

Leanna: She’s the first one on my list; I’m going to call her right away. I’ll give you a call back later and let you know how things went.

Michael: If you wanted to, if there is an opportunity to plug my idpen.com website and say that I’ve been making pens out of my home for ten years and that’s how you got involved; you bought a kit to learn how to do this business and you’re doing it in Canada. If you wanted to plug the opportunity and if I get any calls as a result from any of that media I’ll share in some of the profits with you if you want to do that.

Leanna: That sounds okay to me. I’m sure we can work something out. If they want to know…

Michael: Send them to the website idpen.com.

Leanna: No problem, I’ll be glad to send them your way.

Michael: Is your husband supportive of this?

Leanna: Oh, he’s great. He’s blown away; he can’t believe that all these calls came in.

Michael: You could do it every month; that same press release is all about time. The people who called you who are doing stories and it’s a timing thing, you can send that same press release out next month and you’ll get as many calls. It’s going to be work but it’s a great learning experience. Once you understand how this works and how powerful a fax broadcast to the media is then you could promote anything. We’re just promoting an invisible ink pen; it’s just one item with one specific market. You could literally get rich promoting an item you invent or come up with.

Leanna: It was a lot easier than I thought. I thought I’d get one or two calls and still have to do a lot of follow up, which I still have to do but I certainly didn’t expect to get this many calls to begin with.

Michael: Let’s talk in about a week. I’d like to follow up and see how things are going and do a recording of it. Is that all right?

Leanna: That sounds great.

Michael: By the way, you’re going to love this, I did the third recording with the PR Doctor, which is up on the site and I’m going to put another recording from a clipping service. You’ll hear from the PR Doctor interview from last night there’s an add-on to it on a clipping service. I’m getting ready to put that up now; you’ll understand it and there’s going to be another recording there too.

Leanna: That sounds interesting.

Michael: Check that out too.

Leanna: You’re going to give me something else I can play with now!

Michael: Oh yeah, I’m going to teach you a lot of stuff.

Leanna: What I’m doing is what you’re doing with the PR Doctor, following along and that’s how I ended up with the press release.

Michael: That’s great. Do I have your permission to share this recording? I won’t have any of those phone numbers on the recording; I’ll edit them out so no one steals your leads. Is that okay? I’ll let you listen to it before I do anything with it.

Leanna: If there’s something here you can use, go right ahead.

Michael: This is what you should be doing as you think about business; think about the fact that you are actually creating a product. I’ll have this recording for you also; this is your humble beginnings. In the future, if you want to start selling the opportunity to others, you may want to start hustling the opportunity in a way where if someone wants to do what you’re doing and you’re not worried about competition, you could sell them an opportunity. You are a manufacturer of this pen; you have all of the same sources that I have and there is money in selling the opportunity in addition to the pen. That’s something to think about.

I want to thank you for listening. This is Michael Senoff with hardtofindseminars.com. If you want to get in touch with any of the people we interview please email me . You can reach me by phone at 1-800-982-6487 or 858-274-7851. Anyone listening, if you want to be interviewed please contact me and give back to others and thanks for listening.