Standing out and getting noticed is hard in a world with more than a million people calling themselves copywriters and content writers. Posting on social media, writing for LinkedIn, or even creating content for Google or Pinterest—all of those things work. But who wouldn’t love to be featured in the Wall Street Journal or Business Insider? You get positive press and a high-value link to your site for SEO. Sign us up. But hold on… it’s not as easy as you might think. My guest for the 413th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is Gloria Chou, a self-made PR specialist. And in this interview she spells out how you can attract those high value press placements to help grow your business. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

Stuff to check out:

Gloria’s website

The Copywriter Club Facebook Group

The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  As you think about your copywriting or content writing business and all the things you need to do to get yourself out there and in front of your ideal clients… there are a lot of options. There’s social media with its various options from TikTok and Instagram to LinkedIn and Twitter and more. You can create a YouTube channel or a podcast. You can show up at events or in groups in places like Facebook. You can start your own groups using tools like Telegram, Skool, Circle, and of course Facebook. You can ask your existing clients to introduce you to their network and build a business on referrals. I even know one writer who had his car wrapped with a vinyl cover that advertised his work and contact information. 

And honestly, those are just the most popular options—except maybe that car wrap. That might be a little more rare.

One of the most effective ways to get yourself out there is to be featured in a major publication or possibly on TV using PR. That kind of exposure comes with instant credibility and potentially, a massive audience of potential clients. What would an article in The Wall Street Journal or Business Insider do for your clients attraction efforts? I’m guessing it wouldn’t hurt. And if you’re like a couple of copywriters I know, it could instantly double or triple your business almost overnight.

Hi, I’m Rob Marsh, and on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I interviewed former television producer and diplomat and current PR guru expert and unofficial hype woman for dozens of small businesses, Gloria Chou. Gloria’s approach to getting PR is a bit different from other experts who talk about it and definitely worth learning about. What she shares in this interview could be just the thing you need to land the publicity you need to take the next step in your business. So stay tuned to hear what she had to share.

Before we jump in with Gloria…

You only have a couple of days until the next guest expert workshop happening in The Copywriter Underground. I’ve shared a lot of details about what The Underground includes on past episodes, so let me just say this. Unlike a lot of other memberships and groups, the underground is designed to make things easy. There aren’t dozens of modules to watch or complicated hoops to jump through. Just the focused insights and ideas you need to grow your business from wherever you are today to that goal you want to reach. We make building a copywriting business do-able. 

So I mentioned the training coming this week. It’s with Pinterest Marketing expert Heather Farris. She’s going to  show you how to use Pinterest to drive leads to your business. And how just one or two posts, can send new clients your way for years after you post on that platform. It’s a workshop that could add a bunch of new clients and thousands of dollars in new revenue to your existing business. And you can do it in about 30 minutes a week. To get access to Heather’s Pinterest secrets, you’ve got to be a member of The Copywriter Underground, which you can do at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

And now, let’s go to our interview with Gloria…

Gloria, welcome to the Copyrighted Club podcast. Tell us, please, how did you become a PR guru and I guess the unofficial hype woman for dozens of small businesses?

Gloria Chou: Thank you so much for having me, Rob. Yeah, so I always say like my alter ego, if I wasn’t doing this, I’m like that person like at a concert, let’s say a hip hop concert, that’s like hyping the crowd up before the main guy comes on. I just love to see people win. And, you know, I was always a person that was like connecting my friends to different opportunities. But funny thing is, is that I’ve actually never worked a day in my life in PR, never worked in an agency, whether it’s marketing or PR, I actually used to be a US diplomat. So I had a very non-traditional path to becoming what I am today. And I just started picking up the phone and cold calling after I got my first PR gig. Because again, I never worked in PR, so I didn’t have contacts. And from just literally, I kid you not, cold calling the operator at the New York Times, starting from the operator, and perfecting that pitch so many times after being rejected, of course, even more times, I picked up on patterns of like, okay, this is what an editor wants or this is how I can write an email to a journalist who doesn’t know me, who actually will respond and say, tell me more. And so I’ve kind of been able to kind of hack it and I come up with my proprietary pitching method that now I teach everybody called the CPR method. So that’s kind of the long and short of it is crazy career transition, cold calling, and kind of always been an industry outsider. And so now I teach other people how to hack their own PR.

Rob Marsh: So I’m really curious how somebody goes from the idea of being a diplomat, which I know it’s probably not as sexy as what it seems like, you know, the James Bond movies or the Netflix specials or whatever, but diplomat PR is a pretty different career change. So what sparked that?

Gloria Chou: So I grew up bilingual, bicultural, I’m Chinese-American, and I studied abroad in South Africa. And so I’ve always been interested in just having a very international life. And so I thought, OK, well, maybe my niche is in diplomacy or something to do with international relations, which is what I studied in school. I ended up getting a scholarship. I ended up, you know being fast-tracked to the Foreign Service and I quickly realized that there are two types of people in the world people who like to stay in the boundaries and kind of just do what they’re told and people who are More creative and visionaries and like to kind of just learn by getting into the fire. 

So I’m the latter type I am NOT the type that’s just like okay let’s just do this because this is the way it’s always been done and so I realized that even though the career was incredible, right? I got to travel, I had the most amazing benefits, still do miss those benefits, that ultimately was not aligned for my personality. And there was also a part of me that wanted to just work with women of color, you know, which is like people like me. And so with all of that, I decided to leave that career and kind of have a midlife crisis, I guess, if you will, give up this very, you know, prestigious quote unquote career and kind of restart my life. And so that’s kind of what I did. And slowly and slowly I started to get tiny little PR gigs. 

I remember the first PR gig I got was my friend who was taking a sabbatical from diplomacy. And he’s like, yeah, I’m working for this FinTech startup. We haven’t really raised money. We don’t have any budget. But sure, like if you can get them on CNBC and Wall Street Journal and New York Times, like they’ll pay you like 250 bucks per feature, which is like not a lot, right? And no one really does No PR agency will do that. They don’t give you any guarantees. 

I had to start from the bottom, so I was like, sure. And so I had no idea what AI, fintech, anything was. And I just started looking at Excel spreadsheets and sitting with their engineers and figuring out, what is the story here and how can I pitch it to the press? And I think just from doing that over and over and over again, I have this skill of finding out what is the storyline that’s really relevant from something that maybe is very complex or maybe not as interesting, and how do we make it interesting to the media? And then I didn’t have any contacts. So what did I do? I had to literally Google the operator and start cold calling. And so I think it’s the combination of getting rejected, cold calling and doing it over and over that now has built my business to what it is, which is a really untraditional way of doing PR an