Posted by: Daniel Levis
June 28, 2006
Issue WMA #4

Paul Hartunian Interview

An eye-opening conversation
with publicity expert Paul Hartunian …

Dear Web Business Builder:

If you want all the red-hot traffic your web site can handle without paying a dime in advertising, Paul Hartunian is the man who can tell you how to do it.

Using nothing but dirt cheap faxed press releases, he’s been on Phil Donahue, Regis, Jenny Jones, all the major talk shows, CNN, thousands of radio stations, written up in Forbes and USA Today … and capitalized on those appearances to systematically drive wave after wave of pre qualified prospects to his 40+ websites to make a fortune.

Yet amazingly, he says you don’t need any special skills, inside connections, or even anything terribly exciting to say to gain this kind of business building exposure. AND that it works for ANY product or service you want to sell …

I challenged him on that … and got him to spill the beans on a few more secrets that I think he’d planned on revealing … Proven strategies for using this often misunderstood “advertising medium” to explode your online sales!

Check it out …

Daniel Levis: Alright. So let’s get started. Many of the folks who will be listening to this, Paul, or reading this interview, are professional and aspiring copywriters – who I’m sure will be very interested in finding about how they can integrate publicity into their marketing arsenal for their clients. There are also business owners and online marketers out there who have a similar interest, but before we begin in earnest, I’m curious about something. You’re known as the only honest man to have ever sold the Brooklyn Bridge. Tell us that story.

Paul Hartunian: Okay. In 1983 I had been working on this publicity system that I’ve now been using and people around the world have been using for over 20 years. It took me just about 20 years to develop this system and I was looking for a story to test out this new system for getting publicity. I saw on the news that the Brooklyn Bridge was being renovated. I saw the construction worker and the wood that was being taken off the walk way and I called the construction worker because I saw his phone number right on the truck.

I made a deal to buy the wood and then I had it cut up into one inch squares. I designed a certificate myself, and I’m no artist, this is simply laying out something on a piece of paper. I had the wood cut up into one inch squares, I had the certificates printed, and the one inch squares put on the certificates. And then, for the first time using my new publicity system, I wrote a press release, which probably took ten minutes, 15 minutes at the most, and I sent it out to the media to see if this system was going to work. And to make a long, very exciting, many, many years story very short, this has been picked up for well over the last 22 years, now, all around the world and I’m still doing interviews about the Brooklyn Bridge. So, it was actually selling real, genuine pieces of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Daniel Levis: Wow, that’s an incredible story. I guess that proved that the techniques and strategies that you’d been working on were effective.

Paul Hartunian: It did, but I have a cynical friend who thought it was just a little quirk. He said “That’s just a little pet rock. That’s not some new publicity formula.” And frankly, he got me on that one. I wasn’t prepared for that, so I had to test it a little bit more. I gave the formula to a lot of my friends at the time, in all different fields. There was a guy who installed carpets, there were people in insurance and real estate, dentistry, all different fields. And I told them what the formula was, I gave them everything.

I had them try it and sure enough, people were popping up with success after success.
I tried it again in a whole bunch of different areas and it just kept on working. And over the past 20 years I’ve done a little bit of polish, a little bit of fine tuning, but essentially, it has been so successful for people in just about any imaginable business, service, product, issue, whatever it is, the media people want to know about it.

Daniel Levis: Are there any types of businesses where PR is perhaps not as effective as others. You’ve indicated that people from all walks of life are using it, but are there any businesses that are perhaps less ripe?

Paul Hartunian: No, I can’t imagine that. And that’s a very good question and every once in a while people will ask me that general question, “Are there businesses or products or service that publicity can’t be use for?” but most often, people ask me specifically about their business. They may say “I’m a landscaper. Will publicity work for me?” Well, you bet. People want to know a lot about landscaping, even just how to pick a good landscaper.

And then bringing it up to the current day, people say, “Well, I have a website. Will publicity work for a website owner?” Yeah, sure. There’s information on your website that the media people will want to know. I understand people listening to this are also copywriters; advertising, marketing copywriters. Can publicity be used for that? Sure.

Probably for copywriters, the biggest thing that the media people will want to know is “What’s the value of a copywriter? Why would I be paying you a lot of money to write a sales letter for me?” Now, copywriters know that and you know that and I know that; we know exactly why copywriters are so valuable, but the general public doesn’t. So, if I pick a number out of the air, the copywriter said “Well, to write a sales letter, I’m going to charge you $5,000.”

The general public will say “$5,000. That’s phenomenal. Wow.” Daniel, to you and me $5,000 could be a great bargain. That’s what the media people want to know: Why would Daniel? Why would Paul? Why would someone else be willing to pay $500, $5,000, $10,000 to have a sales letter written? That’s good information that media people want to know and that’s a great publicity opportunity.

Daniel Levis: Hmm. But, how does one find the best places to place that publicity or to seek to place that publicity that will provide the kind of positive exposure that’s going to result in sales?

Paul Hartunian: I’ll give you a few examples and during our discussion today, I’m going to bounce all over the place; all different products and services and businesses, to show you how versatile this system is. I’m making these up by the way, we didn’t rehearse anything, I’m just going to pick these things out of the air and then if you would like to just out of the blue, give me a business or a product or a service, we can talk about that, as well, to again show you how versatile this can be.

Let’s say we’re talking about a little bakery in a tiny little town in Kentucky, that may make chocolate chip cookies with macadamia nuts. Where would they want publicity? Well, they’ll certainly want publicity in their local area because they service their hometown area. That’s where their customers generally will be. But, they will also want publicity in USA Today, the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal.

Now some people are saying “I just disconnected here, Paul. Why will a bakery shop owner who sells chocolate chip, macadamia cookies in Kentucky, number one, want a story in the LA Times and number two, get a story in the LA Times?” And that’s the heartbeat of publicity right there, in the system the way I do it. That’s such a valuable and important question that I want to spend a little bit of time on. When people come to a local business or if they go to a local website, let’s say somebody has a local website, just servicing a particular area.

If they get local publicity, that’s great. It gives you great credibility; it gives you some celebrity status. It gets information out; it tops your competition because they’re not doing this. But, think about what happens if somebody walks into that bakery shop and on the wall, instead of paintings of bull dogs playing poker or a velvet painting of Elvis, or something like that, instead of that on the walls of the bakery they have articles about their chocolate chip cookies from the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, from USA Today.

And if these are in the window of the shop and if the shop owner sends these out in mailings to the community and if he puts them in the bag with the chocolate chip cookies, all of a sudden, this isn’t just a little local bakeshop. This is an important bakeshop; so important that the LA Times is writing about it. Same thing with a website. If you’ve got a good website or if you’re a copywriter, and big media is covering you and your story, you have risen so far above your competition that they’re going to have a very difficult, if not impossible time catching up.

Daniel Levis: Let’s take another example. Obviously most people eat cookies. How do you target something that’s a little less generic? Let’s say for example, well, maybe even copywriting is a good example. Something that’s national in scope, potentially, or even global in scope but from an interest group perspective, is somewhat narrower.

Paul Hartunian: Okay. And Daniel, I encourage you to put me on the spot with these examples, again, we didn’t rehearse these, so I don’t even know what you’re going to be asking me. And I’m going to ask you a few questions. I’m not going to put you on the spot at all, these will be questions that you already know the answer to because of what you do. So, let’s talk about copywriters. Between you and me and people familiar with marketing, why would someone want a copywriter? Why do you think people go to copywriters?

Daniel Levis: Well, essentially they go to copywriters because they want to get more value from the space that they buy. They want more return on investment from the space that they buy since it’s costing them, in some cases, much more than what they would pay a copywriter.

Paul Hartunian: Exactly; very good. So they want the best possible value from the space they’re buying in a newspaper or magazine or a mailing they’re doing or something else. Now, Daniel, I’m going to have you answer the question you asked me. So, your first answer was great. That’s exactly why people should go to a copywriter. But now, we’re dealing with the general public and the vast majority of the general public, if we consider the general public small business owners, let’s say; the vast majority of them don’t hire copywriters. And Daniel, who do you think does the copywriting for the local pizza shop, for example?

Daniel Levis: I would say probably the Yellow Page representative.

Paul Hartunian: Right. And how much do they generally know about response marketing?

Daniel Levis: Very little.

Paul Hartunian: Very little, exactly. So now, you just set up a perfect scenario. You set up a great scenario. We’re talking to a small business owner who either does his own copywriting, which often is a disaster, or he depends on people like the Yellow Pages rep or the coupon/mailing rep to write out the – or the magazine sales rep, to write out the ad. Here’s a great story coming up that the media people will want to know.

Daniel Levis: How do I get maximum hit rate in terms of the people that are going to see my publicity and the people that are prospects for my copywriting product?

Paul Hartunian: Yeah, I want you to get rid of the idea of hit rate and the idea of percentage and return and everything like that. Frankly, I think it’s inappropriate, even in marketing, but it’s certainly inappropriate in publicity and here’s why. I’m going to tell you exactly where all the media people are and everything else. Let’s say you’re selling something – a car, a $30,000 car, and you only get one interview, even though you sent out a thousand press releases. Well, that’s a pretty poor response rate, isn’t it? It’s one tenth of one percent; pretty miserable. But let’s say that because of that you got in USA Today and you sold 80 cars, you know, I don’t care. I want cash in the bank.

On the other hand, if you got a 10 percent response rate, you faxed out 1,000 press releases, which is a ridiculously high number anyway, and you got 100 interviews, but you sold no cars. I don’t care about response rates. I care about dollars in the bank. So, what you’re going to want to do will be to first look at your target market. You want to first deal locally, if you do, get the media people in your area. Where do you find those? In the library, there’s two books.

In any big reasonable library, you’re going to find two books. One’s called Bacon’s, like bacon and eggs, Bacon’s Publicity Checker. They will have tens of thousands of media contact people right there, all the information you need. A smaller directory is called Gebbie’s. G-E-B-B-I-E-S. Gebbie’s All in One. Far fewer media contacts, but it’s a very good start. I want people to get rid of the idea that you want to do the biggest blitz possible. And the other thing I want to get rid of, and we’ll talk more about this, I want you to get rid of this idea of “I want to send them out by email because it’s free.” I have very little interest in anything that’s free, certainly not emailing press releases. So that’s where you find them and that’s what you do. I want response rates to no longer be a part of people’s vocabulary. I want it to be dollars in the bank.

Daniel Levis: So let me see if I got this straight. You’re saying you’re going to look in these directories and you’re going to try and find the media outlets that fit or you’re just going to broadcast across a wide swath? I’m not sure what you’re saying.

Paul Hartunian: I’m doing two things. If you know for sure that there are target media people out there that cover your story, sure, you’re certainly going to get it to them, but, also, I encourage people to do broad swath, as you say. If there is even a reasonable thought that a media person would cover your story, I’d get a press release into their hands. Now, it’s gotta be a very reasonable thought; it can’t be silly shots in the dark. So if you have a website on soccer and you are getting your press release out to everybody and anybody, that means the food editor is going to get it and the voting editor’s going to get it, you’re going to wind up in trouble and you deserve to be in trouble because that’s the equivalent of ‘spamming’ them.

You did absolutely no work whatsoever to find these people, and it’s so easy to do that. So easy to find the right people and it takes so little time. And this is a huge mistake that people make. They buy these lists of reporters or their email addresses, which is even worse, and there’ll be 10,000 email addresses. You know how easy it is to copy and paste all these email addresses. Put it into the address section of the email, hit send and 10,000 people just got your press release. That’s a formula for disaster; it’s absolutely a formula for disaster. You’re just waiting to be shut down.

Daniel Levis: So what you’re saying is to target but don’t go too overboard.

Paul Hartunian: Yeah, yeah, on both ends. Target and don’t go overboard on sending it out to people that clearly would have no interest in your story, but also don’t go overboard on your research. I know that there a lots of publicity books out there that tell you before you do any publicity campaign, watch all the TV shows listen to the radio shows, read all the magazines that you’re going to target. I don’t know where these people get all this time.

Daniel Levis: (Laughs.) Yeah, I was just going to say that.

Paul Hartunian: I think that’s a ridiculous thing to say. In fact if you go into the bookstore, you’ll see lots of $20 books on publicity. They’ve been around forever. Look in these books and look for a few things. Number one, look for that suggestion that before you send out a press release do all this, you know, watch the TV shows, total nonsense. Nobody has that much time in their lives.

Number two, if they use the word “hook”, I’m real sceptical right away. They say you need a ‘hook’ for your story. Hooks are for fishing, they’re not for publicity. I don’t know what they’re talking about when they say “What’s your hook?” You don’t need a hook. And here’s the problem with using the word ‘hook’. When people who are just getting going in publicity see the word ‘hook’, they translate that into exciting, unique, different, wild. That’s what they think a hook means. You don’t need any such thing. You just need basic, good, solid, frankly sometimes boring information and that will be just fine.

And the other thing that people should look for on these $20 books, to, in my opinion, prove that these people have very little knowledge about what they’re talking about, when they say “After you get your press releases out, call the reporters to just verify that they got your press release.” The last thing that these reporters want to hear is your phone call coming in. Every day, they probably get 300 press releases, or so. That means if people followed what these books say, they’re going to get 300 phone calls every single day. That’s the last thing they want. Do not call the reporter to follow up. They got your press release. I will guarantee, they got your press release. If you did it the right way, they will follow up and call you.

Daniel Levis: Well, what’s the best way to get to the top of the pile? You said they’re getting 300 a day, how do you become the wheat and separate yourself from the chaff?

Paul Hartunian: The good news is the majority of what’s out there is chaff; there’s very little wheat out there, so that’s the good news. How do you become the wheat? You follow some basic rules of publicity and these are not rules that I came up with, these have been around forever. And then you follow some other rules that I did come up with. Keep in mind, again, that in any reasonably busy press room, 300 press releases a day would not be unusual. Now, in your tiny little community newspaper, they don’t get 300 press releases a day.

They may get 300 press releases a week or maybe a month, but that’s not what we’re talking about; we’re talking about a reasonable press room, again, not the New York Times, they probably get 1,000 or 2,000 a day. So, let’s say 300 a day. This is pretty much how press releases are sorted, and I mean this literally. I’m not exaggerating, there’s no hyperbole here at all. There is somebody in charge of collecting the press releases from the fax machines or wherever else they’re coming in from. This person literally stands over a trash can and he’ll have in front of him a stack of 300 press releases, let’s say. The first thing he does is go through that stack very, very quickly.

He gives each press release maybe half a second to one second, again, I mean that literally. He doesn’t read a word. He just looks at it. Does it look right? If it doesn’t look right, what that’s saying to him is you don’t know what you’re doing. If you don’t know what a press release is supposed to look like, it’s almost certain you don’t know how to do an interview and you don’t know how to do the follow up or whatever else is necessary. So, real quickly, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, watch them go in the trash. Some of them go back on the desk because they look right.

So let’s say we go from 300 down to 220. 80 went into the trash. He picks up the 220, now he reads the headlines and that’s all he reads; he just reads the headlines. The only thing he wants to find out is, does that headline force him to keep on reading? He doesn’t have to have any interest in the story, so the headline may be about crocheting. Well he has no interest in crocheting, but it was such a good headline, he wanted to keep reading that press release. Good. It stays on the desk, the rest go in the trash. Now we went from 220 down to 150.

He picks up the 150 and he starts reading the press releases; he wants to find out what the story’s about. And now he asks himself several questions: Do we need this story right away? Is this press release written in a way that tells me that this person knows how to play this publicity game? That’s the real key, right there. Most people think that a press release is supposed to tell a complete story. Absolutely not. It is not supposed to tell the whole story.

What it’s supposed to do is tell the reporter what your story is about and number two, equally as importantly, it’s supposed to tell the reporter that you know how to play the game. These are the two things a press release is supposed to do, nothing more.

Daniel Levis: Okay, so let’s spin this conversation just a little bit. How can copywriters and professional marketers use publicity instead of, or in addition to, traditional advertising, not for themselves, but to help their client grow their businesses?

Paul Hartunian: You brought up quite a few questions in there and quite a few very good points. So, number one, you had mentioned in addition to other marketing, and I agree with that completely. So many people depend 100 percent on what I’ll call traditional marketing, display ads, yellow pages, sales letters and everything else and zero on publicity. There should be a nice balance there doing traditional marketing, supported with publicity; a perfect little balance, there.

So the copywriter has several things he could be doing. He would be promoting his business or he could be promoting his client’s business or he could be creating press releases for his clients. He could have a whole new business or he could have another arm to his business, not only is he doing advertising copywriting, but he’s writing great press releases for this client, too. That, in my mind, is a dream copywriter. If you have one person who can be writing your marketing materials and at the same time, writing your press materials and getting them out to the appropriate sources, there’s the dream come true, as far as the clients are concerned and also, as far as the copywriter’s concerned because now we have another stream of income.

So what the copywriter can do to promote his client is to start looking at the information that the client has that the vast majority of people would want. That’s what you should always be thinking about, and I’ll tell you exactly where most people go wrong. When the copywriter or whoever is writing the press release starts putting the press release together, he says “What information do I want to get out to the public about my business?” Dead wrong, dead wrong. You’re winding up in the trash can. That’s not the purpose of a press release; that’s the purpose of an ad.

Instead, you should be saying “What information do I have that I want to get out to the public to show them that I’m a great source of this information?” There we go, and hopefully, people listening to that just wrote that down and if not, I’m going to repeat it again, this is that critical. When you’re writing a press release, you think about the information that you have about your business, your product, your service, your issue, whatever else it is. What information do you have that the public would be interested in knowing, that will show that you are a great source of that information?

So, if you own a pizza shop, if the copywriter is writing marketing materials for a pizza shop, again, just making this up, the pizza shop owner will not want to get a press release out talking about how he opened up a second location. Who cares? Who could possibly care? Instead, he may want to send out a press release talking about what ingredients not to combine in a pizza because it’s a sure fire disaster. Or, pizza and appetizers, that’s the word I’m trying to think of. Little pizza appetizers for a summer party.

Daniel Levis: Or what two ingredients never to order if you’re worried about your cholesterol.

Paul Hartunian: Very good. Very good. Now, I’m showing that I’m a great source of information about pizza. Daniel, you and I both know, and everyone listening to this knows that nobody cares about us. Even our mothers lied. People care about themselves. I care about myself, you care about yourself and certainly, in publicity, this is so true. People don’t care about your business. The reporters don’t care about your business. The only thing the reporter cares about is that you will give him information that he can share with his audience to make him, the reporter, look good to his audience.

There’s another important concept. Your job, as a person seeking publicity, is to make that reporter look good to his audience. If you make him look good to his audience, and the way you do that is give him great information, so his readers, his viewer, his listeners say “Wow, Jeff gets so many great people on his show. He’s really well connected with important, influential, knowledgeable people.” How many people are watching Jeff’s show? He’s really exciting. Well, Jeff is exciting because you helped him with great information to look exciting. In return, the reporter will promote your business. He’ll do your selling for you and he’ll do a much better job of selling than you will.

When you try to sell something, when the copywriter tries to sell his services, he’s just a salesman. He’s pitching another product and people get this day in and day out. But when the reporter says, what his talk show host, and I just call them all reporters to make it easy, I mean editors, talk show hosts, anybody, any type of people in the media, when a talk show host says – and you know, I felt the same way, folks, about copywriters, I said “Why am I going to write out this big check for somebody to write a little Yellow Pages ad? The Yellow Pages people will do it for me for free.”

Well, I think we’ve all seen how valuable that is. What an enormous difference it could make to your business, your bottom line and your profitability, so that money you’re spending for the copywriter isn’t an expense, it’s an investment that’s going to pay over and over again for years. “I want to thank you Daniel for being on my show and explaining the value of copywriters, in fact, I’m going to hire you because I need some great work done.”

Daniel Levis: There you go. Here’s a question for you. Let’s generalize a little bit about the types of format. You’ve talked about an interview. I can imagine a reporter would write a story, perhaps. What are the types of format, the kinds of publicity that are available?

Paul Hartunian: Well, it’s generally two kinds: Live and not live. Live means you’re on the air and as you are talking, that information’s going out over the air on TV or radio. Not live means either the radio or TV show is recorded or you’re doing a print interview, so the person is just asking you questions back and forth and re-asking questions or clarifying because this person will take this information and later he’ll then write an article. There’s no better way to do it, live or not live. I love them both.

Daniel Levis: So there’s like two formats. There’s one that’s a back and forth interaction, similar to what we’re having right now, and then there’s a story where I would perhaps take this interview and create a story or an article. Are there any other types of format?
Paul Hartunian: In my mind there is not. Is there something else that you have in mind, Daniel? Another way you’re going?

Daniel Levis: Not really, no. Just a question.
Paul Hartunian: Okay. Yeah, it’s either the information is going out immediately as you say it or it’s being put together in some format. It may be an article in a print publication; it may go onto a website. It may be an article sent out over the internet for distribution. Those are all later, they’re not live. But one serious caution; one thing I want to really caution people on: If you do a not live interview, that doesn’t mean you can be casual and make mistakes and go back and correct them and say “Oh, this is not for publication.” Treat every interview like it’s live.

Daniel Levis: Right.
Paul Hartunian: Only say things that you want to go out there because if you say something and it’s controversial enough, it’s going out there whether you want it to go out or not.

Daniel Levis: Right. What are some the other big misconceptions about publicity that prevent business owners from using it successfully?

Paul Hartunian: Probably number one on the list of misconceptions, incorrect information, myths, whatever you’ll have is that people think that they need some great copywriting ability to write a powerful press release, and that’s not true at all. In fact, some of the worst press releases are written by people with a journalistic background, or a literary background, or a creative writing background. And I’ve heard this from a lot of people: They have a background in creative writing and in fact took some creative writing classes because they want to get better at writing a press release and their press releases are often dreadful because they think they’re writing a drama. They think they’re writing Shakespeare or something like that and they’re missing the point.

Writing a great press release takes very little, if any creative writing ability. What it does take is following a system, following a formula that’s been tested and tried and proven to work. That simply is called modeling. Modeling is true in every aspect of our lives. For many years, I taught medical classes and I would teach modeling to my students and I would use an example of some dread disease that had a high rate of fatalities. Well, in a high rate of fatalities, some people survive. How did they do that? Find those people and do exactly what they did.

That’s what modeling is. If you want to be playing Major League Baseball, why are you in the sandlot with your friends shagging flies? They’re not in Major League Baseball. Start modeling Major League Baseball players. Same thing with publicity. Model a system that’s already been tested and tried and follow it step by step, so no creative writing ability’s really needed. Also, you don’t have to have any connections in the media. You don’t have to know anybody. You don’t have to know producers or editors or writers or anybody like that.

If you approach this in a correct way, and you present this idea or information to the reporters, they will come to you and now you’ve got this nice back and forth. They will simply want to know what you know so you don’t need any connections whatsoever and certainly, you do not have to pay people to book you on the interview, so by no means do you have to pay anybody to book you on these small, local talk shows and newspapers; certainly not. I’ve been doing this for well over 20 years; never once have I paid anybody to book me on an interview. You can do that yourself.

Daniel Levis: What are the best ways to get listeners or readers to actually go to the trouble of contacting you about your business, once you’ve got some exposure?

Paul Hartunian: The basic premise of publicity is not what I call a one shot wonder. Do one shot wonders happen? You bet. They happen to my publicity students many, many times. A one shot wonder means first shot out of the gate, you have a press release, you’ve got huge publicity, lots of business; great. I want people to consider that a bonus but I don’t want them to think that’s what publicity is. Lots of times I have people calling my office saying “My business is failing. I need a publicity miracle to save my business.”

No. That’s not the way you do business. You don’t look for miracles. Instead, what you should be doing is building this foundation of credibility by sending out press releases once a week or once every other week. Now, that may sound like a lot of work; it’s not. When I say send out a press release every week or every other week, I’m talking about maybe five minutes of work to just make a few adjustments to the press release you sent the week before, and you’re sending out quality information.

And let me give you another example, let me just pick one out of the air. Let’s pick auto mechanics. Auto mechanics are a dime a dozen and people are always in a quandary about how to get a reliable, honest auto mechanic. Well, one way for the mechanic to establish his credibility is, every week send out a press release to the local media in his area talking about some aspect of maintaining your car or car safety or something to do with your car. Now I’m not talking about sending out a press release on how to overhaul an engine, that’s ridiculous, but, simple little things. If winter is coming up, you send out a press release on how to winterize your car, what things you should be doing to make sure that your car runs through the winter. And then you can summarize your car, when summer is coming, what do you do to make sure the car doesn’t overheat and gives you the best performance.

So send out another press release talking about high test gas versus regular, is it worth the money? So send in another press release talking about the new systems in new cars that show tire pressure and they prevent blow outs; is that worth getting? So send in another press release talking about whether you should use synthetic oil when you get your oil changed or regular oil; is it worth the extra expense? This is all just building up his credibility as a source of good, solid, consumer oriented information about maintaining your car.

Daniel Levis: It almost sounds improbable that he wouldn’t get some exposure eventually.

Paul Hartunian: Yeah, you’re right. Look at what I was just talking about and let’s use that word ‘hook’ again, which just gives me the shivers. It annoys the heck out me because it has stopped so many people from trying to get publicity because they didn’t think they had a ‘hook.’ Let’s look at these examples for this mechanic. We’re talking about oil changes. Is there anything dazzling or wild or sexy or unique about an oil change? Of course not. We’re talking about flat tires and anti-freeze in your car.

This is all just good, solid information and everyone listening to this discussion you and I are having right now, Daniel; everybody listening to this has good solid information that the media people will want to know. So stop thinking that you need this wild thing. Why else will this mechanic invariably get press coverage? Because none of the other mechanics are doing this. They’re just doing the same old free oil change with every transmission repair; coupon here, Yellow pages ad there. Well, that’s what all the mechanics are doing. None of the mechanics are sending out press releases.

Daniel Levis: Is there anything specific that, let’s take that example and run with it, an auto mechanic for example, could do with his press releases so that when the inevitable happens and he does get exposure that he could increase the odds that people that are reading the stories or the interviews or whatever format it ended up taking, are going to actually call him?

Paul Hartunian: Sure, in fact I’m going to go a little further than your question and give you lots of examples along the way. Sure. So in the stories in the interviews that he does, let’s say, and again, I pause for a second because I’m just making this up as we’re talking; there’s nothing rehearsed. Let’s say he talks about having your transmission serviced, the fluid drained and the filter changed and how often should you have that done? So he sends out a press release and he says “You should have it done every 25,000 miles or every two years.” and then he says “If anybody in the community has a question about this or would like me to check your transmission fluid for you, come on in for free. I’ll check your transmission fluid for free and I’ll let you know if it needs a change and if you do need a change, I’m not going to hold you up and say you have to have here, I’ll just say go to your friendly mechanic and suggest that maybe you need a transmission oil change.” Well, who is the friendly mechanic obviously going to be?

Daniel Levis: Right.

Paul Hartunian: It’s going to be him because he did it for free. “If you have questions, if you’re having work done on your car and if you’re not sure that the person’s selling you the right thing, call me up, I’ll be happy to give you my opinion on what these other people are suggesting you get.” “Should you be getting these fancy new devices in your car? Let me know and I’ll give you my opinion and my experience on that.” So he could certainly put those in the interviews that he does.

Daniel Levis: Excellent.

Paul Hartunian: Now let’s take that one step further. You did not ask this question but it’s a great follow up to that. Once these stories appear in the newspaper and once they are on the radio or TV, what does he do with that? Well, as people are sitting there waiting for their car to be ready, they’re doing an oil change and it’ll be about 20 minutes or so, they’re sitting in the waiting and on TV, the smart mechanic is playing a video of him being interviewed on TV, talking about different consumer traps that people fall into when they bring their car in for a repair. Here’s a mechanic who is in the next room there, in the shop, changing is oil and the customer is seeing him on TV.

That’s pretty powerful stuff. He is now a celebrity mechanic. And when they leave, when they pay their bill, he can give them a little packet of reprints of articles that are interviews that he did with various newspapers. Now, Daniel, remember what we said before? These newspapers will not only be in his local area, but they’ll be national newspapers that will raise the impression that the customer gets. Here is this guy I thought was just a little local grease monkey and here he is, being interviewed by The Chicago Tribune. This must be somebody good.

Daniel Levis: Right.

Paul Hartunian: And all of this is free.

Daniel Levis: Yeah, that’s beautiful; absolutely beautiful. How can internet marketers use off line publicity to generate online traffic?

Paul Hartunian: Every website and I don’t care if that website is simply a sales page, if it’s a one page sales page, every website has information that the general public would want to know. No, not everybody in the general public is going to want this information, but there’ll be specific people in markets that want this information. Get that information out to the media people. What is your product, what are you selling on your one page website?

Are you selling the little things that you put in electrical sockets so kids don’t up their fingers in there? Is that what your one page is selling? Well, don’t send out press releases about your one page website and this little device you’re selling. Nobody cares about that. That’s an advertisement. But you can send out a press release talking about child safety. Great idea. And you could say for more information, for more kits, go to my website and on your website, have some tips, there. Generate lots and lots of traffic that way.

Many people love that, by the way. They love staying on top of the technology, so they love the idea of you being on the radio talking to them about child safety. So now they’ve got the exposure once and at the end of your interview you say, “We’re out of time here, if people have more questions they can email me at –.” And give out your email address, “– or they can go to my website and they’ll see the most frequently asked questions about child safety.” And of course, once they’re on your website, using the regular marketing techniques, you just drive them to the sale of these little things that you put into your electrical sockets.

I don’t care if your website is 5,000 pages or one page, you’re obviously selling something and that something is going to solve a problem. Now everybody listening to this write that down. I don’t care what you’re selling, it solves some problem. If we go back to that bakery, he’s solving the problem of people being hungry and wanting a snack. The person selling the things you put in your electrical socket, that’s solves a problem of kids getting electrocuted. Every product and service on the planet solves a problem. That’s what the media people want to know about: The problems and the solutions.

In return, they will sell your product for you. But if you send out a press release, and again, back to these $20 books, you’ll see lots of them. Lots of these $20 books on publicity talking about “In your press release you should give out your toll free number to order your product or service, the price, the shipping cost and everything else.” Again, that’s death on a stick for a press release. You start putting that in your press release, it’s going into the trash can because again, that’s not a press release, it’s an ad.

Daniel Levis: We talked about radio interviews, newspaper interviews, magazine interviews; is there an online corollary? Are there places on the internet itself where one could generate a publicity touch point?

Paul Hartunian: Yeah, sure, there are lots of them. And I’m going to, again, go a little further than your question was asking because I think it’s a very critical point. You can do off line publicity, the radio, TV, newspapers, magazine syndicates and things like that. There are lots of online interview opportunities, as well. You can get into these conferences they have online, audio conferences, email conferences that are just words. The televised conferences and as technology progresses, probably next week there’ll be a new technology that you can use online. Certainly, you can use all of those opportunities, as well.

The one huge caution I want to add and I think I’m the lone wolf on the prairie, still shouting about this, I don’t want people to be emailing press releases. Do not email your press releases. If you insist on using email for press releases, I demand, I don’t just suggest, I demand that you use a service that does this. There are several services out there that will email your press releases for you. If you email your press release, you are begging for disaster. You’re begging to be shut down; you’re begging for all kinds of serious problems that you don’t want to have. Plus, even if we eliminate all the problems that you could have, all the trouble that you can create for yourself, email is so unreliable right now and your publicity efforts can be so important to you.

Why would you take an unreliable source of delivery and entrust it with something so important to you? That’s what I don’t understand with people emailing press releases. It’s tough enough for me to email just regular messages to my assistant in our office and in her home. Lots of times those don’t get through. Why would you entrust email with something so important as your publicity campaign? And when people do that, when they email their press releases themselves and they don’t have success, they blame it on publicity and they say “Oh, this publicity doesn’t work.”

Not thinking that they violated lots of the rules of publicity and very likely, lots of those emails never even got to the reporter. They were picked up as spam, they were filtered out, a whole list of problems, which is why I am so strongly against emailing press releases. And again, if you decide you do what to do it, you must use a service. Don’t do it on your own.

Daniel Levis: Do you recommend any fax service providers and do you recommend using any kind of help that they would give you in terms of finding out who to fax a press release to?

Paul Hartunian: Yeah, in fact, that’s how I get my press releases out. I fax them out. Now there’s been lots of discussion about the fax laws, the do not fax laws and everything else, and I and quite a number of people have looked at those laws and unfortunately, they’re not written so they’re very clear, but our understanding is that this has nothing to do with press releases, this has to do with unsolicited advertising. If you’re writing a press release, again, keeping the thread going that we’ve been talking about, if you’re writing a press release that is nothing more than an ad for your business or your product or service, yeah, you deserve to get into some trouble that you weren’t looking for.

But if you’re sending out press releases the way I’m talking about, they’re not ads, they’re solid information. That’s what the media depends on for their livelihood. That’s where they get their stories. I do a lot of dog rescue work you may be familiar with. My girlfriend and I started a non-profit dog rescue organization, www.auntmarysdoghouse.com, and publicity drives that work that we do.

When I send out press releases for our local dog rescue organization, I fax them right from my computer or my fax machine, here, because fewer than 50 are going out and I have them programmed into my fax machine. But if I’m doing a sizeable publicity campaign, and to me sizeable is more than 50 press releases going out, I’ll use a fax broadcast service. And if you just search ‘fax broadcast service’ in any search engine, you’ll come up with a long list of them. They’re all over the place. And here’s how you pick one.

I’m not going to recommend one, I’m certainly not going to recommend mine because if I recommend mine, the one that I use, people will go there and it’s unlikely they’ll even understand how to use it because it’s a fairly high tech service. You’ve got to know how to upload and do a whole bunch of different things, so then you will say “Oh, I’m not going to use this service.” The way you pick a service is to go to their home page, and I mean this next part seriously, I’m not being funny at all, if you go to their home page and you don’t understand their home page 100 percent, it’s not crystal clear to you, that’s not the service for you. It’s probably a little more technical than you’d want to handle.

If you understand their home page easily, then you go to what I call their use page, how you actually use their service. If you understand how to use their service, if you understand what they’re telling you to do, how to get the press release to them and everything else, that looks like it’s going to be one for you. Of course, look at their testimonials, what people have said about the service. Ask a few other people if they used them, if they had good reliability, now you’ve got a service.

They all charge generally the same amount, which is ridiculously cheap to get your press releases out. They know how to do it, they’ve established relationships with the media and that’s a very important question to ask a fax broadcast service: “Do you already have established relationships with the media people?” So now, we have no problems with the fax laws, because the fax laws clearly say if you have an established relationship you are fine. And that’s the way to get your faxes out and your press releases out using a fax broadcast service. There are also a few services out there who maintain databases of reporters, of the media people.

Ask them that.
Ask them if they are one of those services. “Do you have a database and do you keep it up to date and how often do you update it?” And they will help you choose the media people. They charge a little bit more, but not much, maybe a quarter per fax, per press release going out, again, ridiculously cheap.

Daniel Levis: So that almost takes care of that other piece of grunt work that you were talking about earlier, going to get these books in the library and what not, you can sort of outsource that as well, is what you’re saying?

Paul Hartunian: Yeah, and to reference something we were talking about earlier, I’m not a big fan of “free”. I generally don’t even want to hear about free things. I am appalled at how many times I’ll go onto a discussion board and I will see people say “Can anybody give me a good source of free accounting advice?” And Daniel, you probably see the same thing. “Can anybody give me a good source of free legal advice?” You want free legal advice, is that right? Great. I’ll see you in court.

Hey, I don’t want this free stuff. I am very fast. I am lightening fast on my credit card. I want to pay people who know what they’re doing to do their job well for me. The same thing with getting my press releases out. Could I do that from my computer? Sure, I could and I know how to do it and I do it very well, but that’s my time not best spent. I want people to do it for me and do it well and take care of any problems that come up.

Daniel Levis: I think that’s two sides of the same coin, you know, that wanting stuff for free and then, doing it themselves and thinking that that’s somehow smart.

Paul Hartunian: Yeah. Yeah, and then these same people you see on the discussion boards, a month later they say “My business is in trouble. I can’t pay the mortgage this month, somebody help me out.” What? You’ve been getting all this free stuff thinking you can do all this stuff and you’re not focusing you attention on what you do best. I do best teaching people how to get publicity. I do not do best when I’m spending my time faxing these out one at a time or something else. Nobody listening to this does that best. The services do it best.

Daniel Levis: Penny wise and pound foolish, in other words.

Paul Hartunian: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Daniel Levis: Okay. You’ve indicated some mistakes that people generally make, but to summarize, what do you figure the top three mistakes, the big roadblocks that people find themselves overcome by when they’re sending press releases, pitching new stories and ideas to the press and executing their campaigns.

Paul Hartunian: Yes. Number one: They didn’t learn the rules of the game. Every game has its rules, whether it’s baseball, marketing or publicity, they all have their rules, and as I mentioned earlier, you’re press release is not only giving out a story idea, it’s letting the reporter know that you know the rules of the game. And the great thing is, the rules are not very involved, they’re pretty simple. The media people will not tell you the rules, you convey to them that you know the rules and they call you and say “Sounds like you have a good story and sounds like you know how to play this game, it sounds like you know what you’re doing.” That’s great.

Number two: People get stuck on this idea that they have got to get information out about what they’re selling. And I’ve stressed this so many times, and that is untrue. You want to establish yourself, and you should think about this. I tell my publicity students this all the time, I want you to think of yourself up on a raised platform, sitting on, whatever you want to sit on, a throne, a big stuffed chair or something else, but you’re up high and people are coming to you and looking up to you for great information. You’re the guru. You’re the Maha Raja, here. Do gurus make sales pitches? No they don’t. They’re informational. Their persona does it for them.

That’s what you should think about when you’re trying to get publicity. You’re the source of this great information. You’re the fountain of great information. Don’t go ruining it by making it a blatant sales pitch. Let people understand that you gave them such great information that they need more of you. They’ll come up with that decision on their own, very, very effectively.

Another benefit of that is that when you give some hard sales pitch, and Daniel, you and I’ve seen this all the time in seminars, these speakers are up there hammering the audience, just giving them this hard sell. The classic is time share schemes when people go to these time share lectures, they are just pummelled into the ground until their credit card falls out. Well, they have great problems with returns and customer service, but when you allow the customer to make that decision on their own, your problems disappear.

Daniel Levis: Right. Gurus don’t come down from the mountain looking for disciples.

Paul Hartunian: Very good. I’m going to steal that I’m not going to pay you royalties. That’s great and that’s right. Everyone listen to what Daniel just said. Gurus do not come down from the mountain looking for disciples. That is correct. You should not come down looking for customers. Customers should be coming to you. Some people got nervous right now, when I just said that. “But what if they don’t come?” Then you’re not doing it the right way. I love the idea and I’m sure you do, too, Daniel, of customers coming, seeking you out with their credit card in hand saying “I’ve gotta have more of these. Your information was great.”

Daniel Levis: You have a tremendous psychological advantage that way.

Paul Hartunian: You do. You definitely do.
Daniel Levis: Alright. So number one, play by the rules … number two, play the guru role correctly. And what’s the third one?

Paul Hartunian: The third one is consistency and this is where a lot of people fall down. I briefly mentioned this earlier, but I want to go into a little more detail and reinforce it again. People will send out one press release and not get a response and blame publicity. Well, you didn’t get a response for a whole bunch of reasons. Number one, there may have been a hotter story that bumped you off. They wanted to call you, but then a hotter story came in, they ran out of time, or ran out of space in the newspaper; they didn’t call you.

More likely, though, you sent out a press release and if you followed my system, you wrote a great press release and you showed them that you know how to play the rules, they want to see what you’re going to do next. You just came out of the blue. They don’t know you. They’ve never heard from you before and they say, “Wow. Here’s this guy Daniel, who just sent me over this great press release. Good story. I don’t need his story right now, let me see what Daniel does next.” And Daniel, I’m going to ask you this question, now: What do you think the vast majority of people do next after they send out one press release and don’t get a response?

Daniel Levis: Nothing.

Paul Hartunian: Nothing. They do nothing. They say, “Oh, this didn’t work. Oh, I don’t know how to do this so I’m going to go back to my Yellow Pages advertising. Well, that’s what the majority of people do and the reporter says “Oh, yeah, just another one of those people who didn’t follow up.” But the smart person, the next week sends another press release, maybe a different headline, a few different little bullet points in there or something else. And the reporter says “Hey, I think this Daniel knows his stuff. Let me see what he does next.” The following week, the third press release comes and the reporter says “I got a winner here. I’ve got to call Daniel up and I’ve got to make Daniel my expert on blank.” Whatever Daniel’s topic is. That’s it.

Consistency is the way to win the game in publicity. It does not take a lot of time. I mean, literally, if you spend five minutes just making little changes, five minutes once a week, that’s enough.

Daniel Levis: That’s beautiful. So, while we’re almost out of time, for anybody that’s caught the publicity bug as a result of listening to or reading this interview, how can they find out more?

Paul Hartunian: Well, first of all, if they didn’t catch the publicity bug with this great interview you did Daniel, I don’t know what we can do. I want to give them several forms of contact. Number one: My office phone number. 973-857-4142. I also have written a special manual just for website owners and everybody owns a website. I don’t care what the website is, what you’re selling, what the topic is. I wrote one just for website owners; it’s so important.

You can find information about that at www.nichepublicitymanuals.com. And there’s a list of about 46 different fields, different businesses on there that I’ve written manuals and website owners is one of them. And in that manual, they will get word for word press release that they can use and headlines they can copy and story ideas, opening paragraphs and I even give them a full one year calendar and for every month of the year, I give them story ideas and headlines where they can get publicity for their website and drive traffic there.

Daniel Levis: Wow. That sounds like the ultimate ‘done for you information product.’

Paul Hartunian: I guess the only other thing I could do is fax it out for them. That’s about it.

Daniel Levis: Well, that’s fantastic. Before you go, I’m a big animal lover, myself and I’m going to make a donation so let’s give out the URL for Aunt Mary’s again for anyone else who wants to help out. www.auntmarysdoghouse.com.

Paul Hartunian: Right. You can read all about our organization. We started it about seven years ago. We have saved the lives of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dogs, thanks to people like you, Daniel.

Daniel Levis: Awesome. I’m looking forward to doing that and I’m going to grab a copy of your product, as well, and I’d like to invite you to come back, at some point in the future, as well, because this has been very enjoyable and I think extremely educational for our Web Marketing Advisor subscribers.

Paul Hartunian: Well, I would love to come back as long as your subscribers tell me about great success stories they’ve had, now that they’ve tried publicity and saw how powerful it is.

Daniel Levis: Well, there you go. Alright, Paul, thanks very much.

Paul Hartunian: My pleasure. Thank you.

Until next time, Good Selling!

Until next time, Good Selling!

Daniel Levis
Editor, The Web Marketing Advisor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE

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No Comments »

1. Comment by Andrew Cavanagh — May 9, 2007 @ 9:22 am

   I wholeheartedly endorse Paul Hartunian\’s publicity system.

   Just watching his video on creating a million dollars worth of free publicity helped me get national exposure on radio repeatedly for several years.

   I would add one warning from my own experience though…

   I have tested it and if you\’re sending prospects from a radio show to a website you could be suppressing your response by 1,000% or more.

   In plain English…

   If you get them to call you on a phone number you\’ll usually get at least 10 times the sales from a regular radio show.

   At least that\’s my experience.

   You can read a few more tips on free publicity at…
   http://www.copywriting1.com/2007/03/6-press-release-copywriting-secrets.html
   http://www.copywriting1.com/2006/07/copywriting-press-release.html
   http://www.copywriting1.com/2006/07/radio-copywriting.html
   http://www.copywriting1.com/2007/03/6-rules-to-creating-killer-press.html
   http://www.copywriting1.com/2007/03/press-release-template.html

   Kindest regards,
   Andrew Cavanagh