-Andrew:	How do you do PR, on a tight, tight budget?

We're going to learn from Stella Fayman of FeeFighters. FeeFighters.com is the site where credit card processors compete for your business. 

I'm Andrew Warren, founder of Mixergy.com. Where proven founders teach. 

Stella, can you give my audience an understanding of what's possible? What were you able to do, with what you're about to teach us? And while you say that, I'm going to put in my earphones, I want no echoes, I want to make sure we have a really crisp conversation for people to listen to. 
So what can they do with what you're about to teach us?

Stella:	PR is not a rocket science, you don't need an expensive PR firm, to help you get press for a business and links.

We've been in TechCrunch, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, Forbes, The Atlantic, Nashville. And a lot of that is just from being scrappy. 

Andrew:	So all the press, I see that press FeeFighters.com/press is not loading up quickly for me because I've got all these tabs to show the audience. But all the press including this great Business Week article on FeeFighters, you guys did internally by being scrappy and working at a tight budget. 

Stella:	We actually had experiences with PR firms. So we actually went through three PR firms in a year and a half. And most of the great links that we've got came internally. 

We had a lot of pressure from the outside. People wanted us to have a PR firm, because it would mean that we're more legit. But we quickly learned that doing things ourselves would get better higher quality link. Like the one's you see. Yeah. You can look at our press page it's really impressive. Especially for a company of our size.

Andrew:	Yeah. We're talking about Bloomberg Business Week, TechCrunch Inc, Entrepreneur Magazine, the Globe and Mail, Open Forum, Consumerist, Chicago Tribune. All these different sites, look at this great one over here, Mixergy, you guys got in too? I love it, I love seeing my name with all those sites. 

All right. We're going to teach people how you did it on a really super tight budget. But my audience is going to assume that you've got this naturally. Some people just have the gift, I see the look you're giving me, I know from the conversation we had before, you weren't blessed with some kind of gift at birth. 

Tell me what was it like before you figured out what you're about to teach my audience? 

Stella:	So I joined FeeFighters out of college. I have a degree in psychology from Northwestern. I had no experience in PR. I've never worked at a PR firm. I just kind of started doing PR on my own, and learning from different people. In the beginning I would email, personalized emails, to persons and reporters, that got zero responses. So I've learned the hard way, and I'm looking forward to sharing some of my experience.  

Andrew:	OK. That's painful by the way. You didn't just take collections of emails addresses of reporters and blast them the same email and put them on BCC, which I get those all the freaking time. What you did was, you personalized it, you said, 'Hey, whatever, New York Times reporter, hey Nick Bilton, have you heard of our company?'. And nothing. And, 'Hey this', and nothing. None of that worked. You've got the system, you're about to share with my audience. And that's the whole goal here, so that they don't have to suffer the way that you did. They can just get the results, by learning from the pain that you had. 

All right. I want them to get this as quickly as possible. What's the first step that the person's watching us right now, what's the first thing that he or she needs to do?

Stella:	So you need to figure out the different ways that your company is news worthy. That's not what you think, or why you think you're news worthy, that you have the best product X, Y, Z, out in the market place. Even though obviously you do. You need to find angles that reporters will find your company interesting. 

So I'll give you a few examples of ours. I'm a woman in technology, I leverage that all the time. We've got MBA's on our founding team, we use that, as should you if you should have an MBA. And another great resource is HARO, we are always looking at ways to get links from HARO. 

That was one, a great one from BeatMap, we made this, we're talking about creative ways to keep your stuff healthy. We made a funny video, about us all working out together. And we got hundreds and hundreds of views, from that. It was literally 30 second video. 

Literally anytime a reporter, reporters are always looking for sources for different quotes. If you can be first and if you can provide interesting information, you will get links and you will get [inaudible].

Andrew:	OK. So you're saying, the first thing is you want to look to find those things that make you newsworthy. Now, I'm looking at this, and what is it, specifically? Let me scroll to the top of this page. I don't know why it's not going up. This BNET article about the way you exercise, what exactly is newsworthy about that?

Stella:	You know, again, we don't necessarily think it's that newsworthy, but this reporter was looking for, you know, cruising HARO for interesting ways that companies keep healthy or have healthy tendencies. So we're able to not only respond quickly, but also have this funny video that we made in 30 seconds that differentiated us from the probably hundreds of other responses she made. 

Andrew:	Got you.

Stella:	Yeah, it's about being, figuring out what makes you newsworthy and the different angles that you can have, but also being scrappy and thinking about ways that, you know, you can be newsworthy, or trying to apply yourself in as many different things. I'll give you an example of another article in Crane's. It was about whether or not tech geeks are sexy, whether geek is the new sexy and we're quoted in that just because I responded and had an interesting conversation with the reporter. So it's not necessarily just Fee Fighters, Fee Fighters all the time, credit card processing, it's whatever reporters are looking to write about.

Andrew:	I see. So you saw on helpareporterout.com, right? On HARO, you saw that this reporter, Elise Craig, was looking for some story, she was researching a story on businesses that are healthy. And you said, "Well, she's probably going to get a whole bunch of responses from everybody via e-mail and they're all going to be text and they're all going to be same about how great we are. We're going to just take a video camera, probably the iPhone, and we're going to shoot our guys training. We're going to do it kind of funny and we're going to send this to her and give her something that makes it a little bit more interesting than the average response that she's going to get from everyone else. That kind of scrappiness, just being subscribed to that free e-mail newsletter and being creative about the way you responded, got you in this and that shows the attitude that you guys have had towards everything that you do in the press. 

Stella:	Absolutely. 100%.

Andrew:	You look at those opportunities and then you're looking to go a little bit extra and we're going to show people, guys, we're just getting started. You're going to get to see that she has a list of reporters, how she's developed and how Fee Fighters has developed beyond this initial waiting for HARO to send out a request. But even that basic thing, from what I've heard, and what I've learned by talking to Stella before this session started, has gotten them a lot of press.

Stella:	Yeah.

Andrew:	All right. So, the next thing . . .

Stella:	I will just say real quick, that responding to HARO has gotten us more links and some better sources than having a PR firm for a year that we paid a lot of money to every month did. I can say that with confidence.

Andrew:	So just HARO. Help a reporter out. OK.

Stella:	HARO, yeah, Reporter Connection, those kind of things.

Andrew:	OK. And forgive me, I've actually said I jumped the gun here. The first tactic is "be noteworthy, not newsworthy". We're going to go into newsworthy in a second, but you want to be noteworthy, you're saying does. Find that little thing, even if it's just shooting a 30-second video that's going to make you stand out. All right, now, I jumped the gun, as I said that's the first tactic. The second tactic is, you say, "look for something newsworthy that you can connect to". And you have an example of how you didn't do that once and then how you did do it to show us how it's done poorly, when you're not understanding this tactic, and how it's done really well, when you get it and we're going to see the results. Let's talk first about when you didn't do it right. And I know this is a little bit painful, so I'm going to bring it up on my screen here for you. What am I looking at here? This is on feefighters.com, on your own website. What is this?

Stella:	It's an infographic that we made about the restaurant industry. So we found some reports and we thought it'd be interesting and so we made this infographic. Not only is it painful to look at and it's painful for me to look at, but it's also not something that people are that interested in, it seems. Like, we didn't do a lot of research about who was writing about the restaurant industry or whether this information would be interesting at all. We kind of just went about this getting the data for the infographic and assuming it would be interesting, so that was a big mistake on our part.

Andrew:	OK. So you just said, infographics are hot, Mashables seems to be copying and pasting them on their website, reporters are actually linking to and talking about infographics, not major tech revolutions but infographics. We're going to jump in on this and you thought that you'd get all those links, but what you discovered was, "Hey, there's nothing topical about this." Do you know how much you spent on this because it's really well designed?

Stella:	Really? Oh, gosh, wait until you see the next one. I don't think we spent more than $1,000 on this.

Andrew:	OK. But we're talking about $500 to do this.

Stella:	We hired an outside designer. Yes.

Andrew:	OK. 500 to $1000 and time to put this together. So you said we made a mistake here. It's not all infographics that stink, it's not we as a company, FeeFighters that stink at getting press, it's not that we don't have a background in it. It's we did something wrong, and what you figured out was, be newsworthy and here's what you did afterwards. Let's, this now is not on your site.

Stella:	So we sat down...

Andrew:	Yeah, tell me about this.

Stella:	So we sat down and we're, you know, I'm, we're seeing - this was back in, I think March or April or May that everyone was talking about this tech bubble, but we're actually a really nerdy, geeky, data heavy firm. So we love these kinds of infographics and we didn't see a great one out there. So we actually partnered with Kiss Metrics on this one. And did some really interesting research about whether there was a tech bubble and compared it to the dotcom bust. And so this one got snatched up by Mashable, so you're looking at Mashable here. It's beautiful, it's beautifully designed. Which we can thank Kiss Metrics for, who we partnered with. But we did all the data and we compared it to what was already being, you know, talked about in the press. It's a lot.

Andrew:	So when you say you partnered up, you mean KISSmetrics.com, their designers designed this, but you put together all the information in-house?

Stella:	Yes.

Andrew:	You, Stella put together the research for this.

Stella:	Our FeeFighters marketing team...

Andrew:	OK.

Stella:	...myself and our business development Sheila.

Andrew:	OK. All right. So you put together all this data and you said here's how it's different. Guys, get KISSmetrics, you design it and we'll both promote it and we'll both get our links back from this. So yes, I see this now on Mashable. The first one I saw only on your website. This one, we're showing off on Mashable, we also have an Atlantic article here. Atlantic, this is one of the premier magazines, reported on your infographic and copied and pasted it in?

Stella:	Yes.

Andrew:	OK. 

Stella:	Very good link juice.

Andrew:	Very good link juice. Oh, we're going to get into that, too. You don't just want publicity. You want a certain kind of publicity. And I'm going to talk about that. You know what? Should I, no, I'll leave this up. It seems to be OK. And then GigaOhm also, very good link juice. Link to it, let's give my system a chance here to catch up. You know what, actually? I'm going to - I think the audience gets that this thing has appeared in lots of places and you've gotten lots of press off of it. 

Stella:	Yeah.

Andrew:	I got to shut this off because the info - every one of these sites has imbedded your infographic which is killing my resources. OK, so...

Stella:	So the interesting thing is that now, as the result of this infographic, a lot of people think that we consistently make great infographics or that we're known for that. But literally, this was the first one that gained widespread attention. And we have a whole list of other ones that we made.

Andrew:	OK, and as an inside bit of information for the audience, the very first thing that I pitched Stella on was, I said Stella, I see you everywhere. Can you please come and teach my audience how you guys do infographics and how you get all this publicity. And you said, Andrew, I hate to tell you this. We're not the infographic experts, but we are pretty freakin' good at getting publicity, and we can teach your people how to do it because we learned the hard way and we've got a system here. And you do this for everything. Tell me, we don't have a visual for this, but give me another example of how you use a newsworthy topic to pitch FeeFighters to the media.

Stella:	Well, we always, specifically in our industry, it's really hard to make comparisons between, like let's say Square versus a merchant account which is what people shop for on FeeFighters. So we notice that when Square came out, and when they update their pricing, people are always questioning. There are always articles written about Square, and people question the pricing. So we actually created a calculator that lets merchants really easily compare, you know, Square versus a merchant account. And we, anytime that Square updates their pricing, we send it to reporters, the link, and it's very, very often linked to in articles about Square.

Andrew:	I see, OK. Let's make sure that I explain to people what your company does. FeeFighters is the place you go when it's time for you to take credit cards from your customers and you don't just want to take your brother-in-law's or your friend's choice for a credit card processor. You say, who's going to give me the best deal, because I need to make as much money off of - I don't want to spend a lot of money on credit card processing, right? So you go to FeeFighters...

Stella:	Yeah.

Andrew:	...you do the search, you find a list of credit card processors organized by how much money they're going to take from you and you get other information on them. You're sitting there saying look at all this publicity that my competition at Square is getting. When most of us would see, then frankly I might, too and feel like why aren't they talking to me. You're thinking:	how do we capitalize on that. The way we capitalize on that is saying we're going to create a calculator that let's people compare us to them or our merchants to them and every time the get publicity we're actually going to feed off of that which will make it into a good thing for us. All right. I don't even . . .

Andrew:	Yes. Exactly.

Stella:	. . . bring that up. One of the things that I like about you is you really do your homework and you loaded up my computer with so many tabs that it took me, you saw, a half an hour just to make sure they all loaded up and didn't eat up the resources. But people can go to Stella/blog, I think, and see that, right?

Andrew:	Yes.

Stella:	OK. So, the first thing, being noteworthy. The second thing, being newsworthy, the third tactic you say is create a press list. Now, I'm going to show your . . . 

Andrew:	Yes. . . . press list just the part that we're allowing people to see. Tell me, what is a press list and how do you put this together and how do you use it?

Stella:	A press list is essentially what you pay a big time PR firm for work that you actually pay for a press list or whatever or pay for a data base like Vocus to make these creative press list for you. But it essentially is another piece of news you want to know who's interested in it or who would be interested in it, so, for every piece of music we have we make a targeted press list of reporters who have written about this topic. Let's say we include [??] to the publication because we don't want a pitch to bad trashy Blogs. 

I should say that good Blogs wins from them [??] are worth more than news sources and bring more traffic, actually. We can talk about that later. The press list is really a great tool for you when your doing your outreach to make it more curated and relevant to the people who are more likely to pitch you or to include you in their articles. 

Making a press list is a huge pain. Literally you have to be really good about how to find email addresses. It's becoming more and more difficult to find contact information for reporters. They get contacted [??]. You have to be either really [??]. One thing that I do which is probably a little different is I hire people on Odesk and I give them specific instructions about the kind of reporter or the kind of topic that we're looking for.

Instead of paying thousands of dollar to a PR, this press list which was, I think, 50 to 75 different reporters. I paid for $40 to a worker and for a [??]. So, you're scrappy, your start up, I think it's a really good tactic to take.

Andrew:	$40 bucks, you're saying to someone on Odesk, "We are in the personal finance space. I want you to go out there and look for personal finance writers and give me their email address, too?"

Stella:	Not even that. Literally, I say, "Go on the Google news search or here's a list of a top 100 blogs or publications [inaudible] some data base." And I say, "I want you to find the reporter who has written about Square." Then I would say, "In each of these piece the link in and find their email address . . .

Andrew:	I see.

Stella:	. . . and then also put in the page rank."

Andrew:	And put in the page rank, OK. So, you have this done. You say find out who's reported on Square, my competitor. Then you personally internally, you or someone at FeeFighters will contact that person and say something, I guess, about the article because you've got the relevant link and you'll say, "You should also be aware that we have the calculator that helps people decide." And that's it?

Stella:	Yeah. Absolutely. The less it is about you, the better. So, that's exactly the thing. You've written about Square in the past. Here is a great resource that your readers would find interesting. Please let me know if you have any questions or you would like to talk to our CEO [??].

Andrew:	All right. Unbelievable. OK, actually, give me that again. I don't have a screenshot here to show people, but if you can just describe to me what you say, I think it'll be helpful for the audience. I think the person who's sitting there had a blank email, I think the person who's sitting there is in his inbox getting ready to send something out would be helped by you just saying, "These are the elements that I put in a message." What are those elements?

Stella:	The first element is to keep in mind what the reporter wants. They want a short email. They want the information. They want a link and [inaudible] topic or subject line that will draw their attention. So, hi so and so, you've written about Square. We are going to make the comment about even better, something in their article about square. Whoever it is.

Andrew:	OK

Stella:	Here's a resource that I think your readers will find interesting. Check it out. It's a calculator that compares square with a merchant account. Please let me know if you'd like more information or would like to speak with our CEO, Eppitt [sounds like].

Andrew:	All right. You know what this is so short that it doesn't even make sense for me to make sense for me to write it down. Hit rewind. I was going to type this all out as you said it. Then I realized well by the time I get the second point out you're done with it. OK. We just want to keep it that short. You've pitched my Fee Fighters before, and I've brought up the fact that you've pitched me better than anyone else that I can remember has pitched me. What I've noticed is you keep it really short. How short do you go? Do you have a fixed number? Like I try to stick to three sentences or less. Are you like that? Or do you just keep it short without being specific?

Stella:	No, keep it short. I look at emails. Everyone answers emails all day long so the short the better. If it's an email that I would feel annoyed reading then I don't send it. 

Andrew:	OK. And by the way ...

Stella:	You can be your point across in 3 to 5 sentences. It shouldn't take you more than that to get your point across, and I think that's a mistake a lot of people make especially in PR. They think that their message is so important that they have to get out every detail. That's no something that I have found to be successful.

Andrew:	They really do. All right, and by the way what people saw earlier was a list of links here. I was worried we would lose the connection. This is the full list of links. Actually no it's a partial list of links, and I will give this to Andrea [SP] who will include it with the course so that you don't have to copy and paste all the URLs that we are talking about here. You'll get it as part of your package. OK, so build a press list. The next thing you do is build relationships with them. Should I be showing this next tap here with the better business bureau or do you want to hold off on that?

Stella:	We'll show the ones from the Ink.

Andrew:	Got it. OK. Just tell me about this. How does this Ink article relate to building relationships? 

Stella:	When I was getting started with PR [TD] ... was annoying me. So relationships with reporters because that the most ambiguous thing you can say, and it's something everybody will say. So I'm going to tell you what it actually means. 

There are really easy was to build relationships with reporters without even being in [inaudible] because I have done them personally. I notice that whenever someone has a typo or an error in their article I email them right away. That's something that I think reporters find really useful and helpful. Then they have goodwill for you. That's something that I do, but you can think of something you notice or whatever. 

You can retweet them. I think Twitter is still a space that reporters will find you on that's not been saturated. So if you retweet them, if you start retweeting often and messaging and commenting tweeting their articles, they notice. They have to. It's Twitter. It's going to pop up in their stream. Especially for smaller reporters.

Andrew:	Now I 'm going to write it down as you're saying. So you're saying that you find typos, and I don't want to say that people have to do exactly what you did, you also will retweet them. Retweet, that matters to a reporter?

Stella:	It shows up in their feed. So they're going to get some sort of name recognition.

Andrew:	OK.

Stella:	Especially if you do it multiple times. 

Andrew:	What else?

Stella:	I think with the found typos kind of a better way of saying that is find a better way to be helpful to the reporter. Or say, "Hey, B. You know, I have a great contact you should talk to this guy." So you want to build that relationship where they'll want to do something nice for you in the future. 

Andrew:	OK. What else? 

Stella:	And comments, comments [TD].

Andrew:	Comment on their articles.

Stella:	Comments and tweets on their articles. Yes.

Andrew:	OK. Anything else?

Stella:	A lot of things take a lot of time. So you're not just going to email them once. You're going to email them five or six times over the course of six months. And just try not to be annoying, but just helpful. Do it at a time when you don't need anything from them. Then when you do need something their much more likely to publish something about you. 

Andrew:	All right. Let's give this a moment. I told you that the resources on my system are going nuts, and it paused. It's paused. Let's give it a moment to catch up here. 

Stella:	So the article that you're seeing right here is by Howard Greenstine [SP]. I literally just met Howard at a party by South by Southwest. He wasn't that interested in Fee Fighters, and he kind of added it to the list of 20 business cards in his pocket. I followed up with him many times, and I saw that he had a small business toolkit on his site, that he thought it was going to be a good edition for. So I said that, I emailed [signal cuts out], I think the important thing is to be persistent but not annoying. I think reporters appreciate style of emails that are not annoying. Don't say, "Why haven't you written about me?" or, "Pay attention to me!" But you'd be surprised at how many people actually do that.

Andrew:	[laugh]

Stella:	Maybe not you, Andrew. But [giggle].

Andrew:	I wouldn't be surprised, because they do it with me too, sometimes.

Stella:	I would absolutely say, and I just wanted to . . . I just wanted to say, I was just following up with you. You mentioned Fee Fighters might be interesting. Check [??] in the next few weeks, are you busy right now? Or something like that.

Andrew:	Got it. OK.

Stella:	So it took us a couple months, but he finally wrote about it, and I literally just met him at a party.

Andrew:	There we go. So we lost the connection there for a moment, but I see how you got into ink. What's the next thing that we need to understand? Want to take a look at the press releases, right?

Stella:	Yes.

Andrew:	Let's bring that up.

Stella:	So press releases, it's the traditional form of communication there's a lot of debate over whether they're even useful. We found it to be not that great, and there are different services for releasing your press release. Some are more expensive than others. We've actually [signal cuts out] kinds of ones like Business Wire, and PR Newswire. And then we've used less expensive ones like PR Web. The difference here is $800 or $900, versus $200, $300. I can tell you that there's not a discernible difference, at least in our case that we've seen between paying that extra $800. I'm sure a lot of PR people would be screaming right now, but I'm just saying you know, in our case . . .

Andrew:	So which are, these are the services that will take, either you have a press release written or you write it yourself, these are the services that will take it and send it out to reporters?

Stella:	Yes. On the wire.

Andrew:	What are the two, and what are the prices for each?

Stella:	The more expensive ones are called PR Newswire or Business Wire. They have an annual subscription fee, and they cost around, I think around $800 the last time I checked. The last time we used PR Wire, it was $200 or $300. We had the same results. Don't expect stellar leaps from press releases, they're just a necessary evil when you're doing PR. [laugh]

Andrew:	OK, all right, I like that you're saying "I'm about to teach you how to do this, but don't expect stellar results. You just need to know it."

Stella:	You just need to have one. So what reporters will do is use it as a reference to whip off information, if they're going to write about you. I have two examples. The one that you're looking at now is the last press release we had for Samurai, which is our new [signal cuts out].

Andrew:	It's a new payment, it's your own payment gateway, Samurai.

Stella:	Yes.

Andrew:	OK.

Stella:	So this is the press release that I wrote, and I use a tool called Press Release Grader. It's released by Hubspot. Andrew can show it later when you go through the . . .

Andrew:	Actually, let me see if I can show it right now. This is pressrelease.grader.com. We've got a list of tools here that we're going to talk about in this session, and give to people. But this is what you use to write your press release? . . . I think I might have just lost you here . . . Let's give it a moment. . . .

Stella:	It's what we use . . .

Andrew:	Oh there we go, sorry. Yeah, what do I do with, we lost the connection there for a moment.

A:	Okay.

Andrew:	What do I do with pressrelease.grader.com?

Stella:	So you put your press release through here as a filter, to make sure it's 100% ready and optimized to be put on the wire. So do you have the right number of links, are there buzzwords, do you have the right structure for the press release? It's a really great tool. And you can see your score out of 100, so you can know, and has suggestions to improve your press release. So the last time we had a press release, we had our PR firm write one for us, and it cost around $300. I think you, what do you have up right now?

Andrew:	This is the one that you had written for you, the one that's about Fee Fighters launches, oh no, this is the one.

Stella:	This is the good one.

Andrew:	Wait, is this the one that you had a PR company write for you?

Stella:	Yes.

Andrew:	This is. Okay, tell me . . .

Stella:	No, sorry. This is the good one. The one with our logo is the good one.

Andrew:	OK, do you want to show this one first, or do you want to show the, which one do you want me to show first?

Stella:	This is fine. The first one. So the things that make it good, or the thing that makes it better, and when you run it through the press release grader, it's actually the other one.

Andrew:	I see, the one with the Fee Fighters logo. This is the one that you wrote, tell me what makes it good? 

Stella:	Right. Your contact information is right there at the top, it's in red, when it's going out in the wire, your logo is there. Within the first paragraph there is a quote from the CEO. It's really easy to read. I won't go into the content, but you can see even the structure itself is much more manageable.

If you go to the other tab, which is the one that the PR firm wrote for us that you would've paid $300 for. There is no, it's just one big blob of text. The information for contacting the person is all the way on the bottom, the reporter is just not going to find that, in an easy way. So, yeah, the press contact is all the way at the bottom.

So it's a nuance but it's something that really resonates, I think, with reporters. 

Andrew:	So, is there a frame work that you use for this or book or service that you recommend that we take a look at, when we're going to write our own press releases?

Stella:	I would just Google the companies that you admire and respect within your industry, and see the kind of press releases that they have written, and try to include a little bit of flavor, we have brand, we have ninjas and fighting. So I try to include that a little bit into the press release. A funny story, we actually wrote a press release in Haiku for Samurai, because we thought it would be fun.  

But I reach out to a few of my friends who are reporters, and I ask them, 'Would this be interesting to you? Would you cover this Haiku press release?'. And they said, 'Absolutely not. This is such a gimmick. We want the information, we want it in an easy, accessible way, that you can put that on your blog'. So we didn't end up sending it out to reporters.    

Andrew:	Got it. OK. I see and that's your email address right here. Are you the official person at FeeFighters? I know everybody, it's a young company, which is very scrappy. I know everyone does everything. But are you the person who will have that title, if that title existed? 

Stella:	More or less. I mean, I do PR, I do marketing, I do business development, I do customer service, typical startup, wearing of hats situation. 

Andrew:	OK. All right. So what we got is, we see the two different press releases. The person is watching us right now can basically go to your press release, and follow the format that you've used, then they'll go to Stella and it'll include a link to that too, so they can have their press release graded. And they can use other's as models, just look at companies that you admire. 

What's the benefits of having a press release? 

Stella:	You just have to have one. And it delivers the information in a succinct way that reporters recognize. What I would do when you email reporters with press release, is embedded in the actual emails itself, include it as an attachment. It's a piece of advice a reporter gave me, because a lot of them are looking at it on their phones. And it's just an easy way for reports to get that quote from your CEO about this new release, for whatever, without having to email back and forth. .  

Andrew:	I see. OK. I'm not like a New York Times reporter. I do interviews but I got to say that I hate press releases, but I also can not use them, because it does have, if they're good, it has the information I need, to example write the intro for an interview with the founder, who's press release I'm reading.  

OK. All right. I got a sense of this. And of course when you write, quotes are so freaking helpful. They make an article more interesting. And what you want to do for the reporter is, create the quote for them.  

Stella:	Exactly. Just want to make their life as easy as possible. That's the number one goal of PR. 

Andrew:	All right. Take a look at the next item on the list here. Work on messaging for outreach for reporter. No, we've covered that. Let me show, can I show people the notes, we're reading it off of? 

Stella:	Sure. 

Andrew:	Yeah. This is Jeremy, our pre-interviewer put this together. I have this on the side of my screen, so people can see this now. And I'm just going down on the work that you've put together ahead of time. So, offer exclusive on news, pick the top three and then offer them dibbs. 

Stella:	Yes. So one thing to make your news stand out, assuming you have to have real news. So in the example of let's say, TechCrunch. TechCrunch only covers for the most part, unless you're a big company or a hot company, let's say, funding and new product launch announcements. 

Andrew:	Funding and what kinds of announcements?

Stella:	And a new product launches. 

So we know that when we launched Samurai, that TechCrunch will be the place that we wanted news out. And we offered an exclusive to them saying, I e-mailed Lena and I said, Hi Lena, we have this news, it's going to go out on the wire on Wednesday at noon, but we'd love to have Tech Crunch cover it first because you guys have our target customers. Here's the press release embedded in the e-mail. Please let me know. And offering the exclusive is one way to really make sure that you'll get covered. If you don't over and exclusive, especially to a publication like Tech Crunch, they won't be interested in covering your news because everybody else will.

Andrew:	OK, and I see here that it says, so why is Fee Fighters launching a payment gateway, CEO Shawn Harper says that many and so on. Did she talk to Shawn, did Lena, she did not, she's just saying.

Stella:	See, that's where the press release comes in.

Andrew:	So, she's using it as the quote in the press release that you sent and she's just paraphrasing that and it feels to me like she's talking to Shawn, like she did the groundwork, but what she's doing is research by looking at your press release and that's why a press release is a necessary evil. I see you're squirming, is it OK that I say this, I think everyone knows it?

Stella:	No. It's actually, a good friend of mine is a blogger at the Next Web, and he once to described to me the lifestyle of where you know you have to pump out an article every fifteen minutes and you have to be an expert on that article and that's just, you know, that's what's expected of bloggers. And so, that's why, you know, you have to make it easy for them to cover the news. And I don't, you know, I wouldn't expect her to talk to our CEO, it would, I mean her job would just be so much harder.

Andrew:	This is great, but all she did was get your e-mail. She didn't talk to you even, did she talk to you?

Stella:	No.

Andrew:	No. Isn't it great to be a Tech Crunch writer, because you just get this stuff in an e-mail, someone who's giving you an exclusive and that alone gets you 552 Tweets.

Stella:	It's not that easy though, I mean, I know Lena gets a ton of e-mails every day from all of these companies, and it's a challenge to weed through what is actually important and significant and that's where having that social proof from all the other press that you're getting is really important. And, yeah?

Andrew:	I was going to say, how did you have Lena's e-mail address?

Stella:	I met Lena in an elevator at South by Southwest. So, and I had a great conversation with her and we actually took part in the accelerated program, which is an incubator in Chicago, we met with her for five to ten minutes there and I kept in touch with her ever since. So, literally chance meeting in an elevator developed a relationship and she's covered our funding and product launch.

Andrew:	Well, alright, OK. Capitalize, and this is the final one and then we'll go into tools. The final point that you've got for my precious, precious audience, I want them to get all the value that they can and the final point that you're sending away with is, capitalize on social media by engaging interested parties. You want me to bring up the PDF for that?

Stella:	Sure, so, one thing.

Andrew:	Let's give it a moment here to load. Whoa, now it just took over the whole screen, I will zoom out, it'll take me a minute here, let's pop it right there so it doesn't have the best placement but you guys can see what it is. Yeah, so tell me about that, tell me about how we use social media properly.

Stella:	So, all of the people who ever Tweet our news articles or show interest in Fee Fighters, we try to send them a personalized Tweet and a lot of times what we'll do is include a link to our e-book, because they've shown in interest in our company, we love our e-book, we feel that it's a great expression of our brand and it's also very informational for business owners. You can't really find anything else like this on the internet that I've seen, so, and I know from just experience that people are impressed by it. 

So, I Tweet, I say hey, that's for Tweeting the Text Crunch article, or, you know, you're business looks so interesting, something more tailored than that. And then I would include a link to the e-book so that they can download it and use it as a resource and then I would hope that when it's time for them to search for a credit card processor they come to Fee Fighters, or they share this with their friends. Pretty viral.

Andrew:	Let me see if I understand this, you're sending this to the people who Tweet an article like this Tech Crunch article?

Stella:	Yes.

Andrew:	So, if I as just a viewer of this Tech Crunch article, one of the 552 people who Tweeted this, if I Tweet it out, you say, hey Andrew, thanks for Tweeting this out, if you want to know more about what credit card processing is, here's a free e-book. 

Stella:	Yes.

Andrew:	That's it?

Stella:	That's it.

Andrew:	And do you do this 552 times?

Stella:	You know, in a perfect world, we would, we tend to be a little bit more selective just because we don't have the resources to sit there and Tweet all day long. So but we try to do it as often as we can. If it's somebody who could be a potential partner we would Tweet after and say, you know we should talk, or something like that. We know that with a Tweet that they've heard about us now and they've engaged somewhat and (inaudible) their engagement by tweeting back something relevant.

Andrew:	By the way, how much did this cost you to create? This looks beautiful.

Stella:	Thank you. I actually wrote all the (inaudible) on the team wrote the content (inaudible) designer. I don't think it cost more than a couple of thousand dollars to make.

Andrew:	A couple of thousand dollars. You had a designer. Where did you find the designer who did this?

Stella:	She's a good friend of mine.

Andrew:	Got it, okay. I use a company called E-book Cake. It's just run by a one guy, one man operation and the guy has an incredible eye. And it makes something that would look kind of ordinary in text, in a word doc, just look like a valuable asset. Like, you know these notes right here that I'm using. I bet you if they took these notes and put them in here, people would consider them valuable. Alright, so, you just create a product and you use this as a free gift for the people who've tweeted out. This is what it looks like.

Stella:	Yes. We want to establish our domain expertise, make them like us, make them think we're friendly, engage with our brand. All from a single tweet.

Andrew:	Okay. And this is, it's not about your company. What you've created here is how to be a credit card processing ninja. What you are giving them is a free e-book on processing credit cards and it just happens to have been created by the experts at it. And this reinforces it.

Stella:	Yes.

Andrew:	Alright. You were going to show us, and we couldn't show your screen, we instead showed mine. You were going to show us Hoot Suite. Is that what you use to keep track of who's tweeting?

Stella:	We use Tweet Deck and we use Hoot Suite. Hoot Suite's a little better when you have multiple users, but we like Tweet Deck because it's just, it's more real time. 

Andrew:	Okay.

Stella:	We have heated internal debates about the merits of Hoot Suite and Tweet Deck

Andrew:	I'm personally a Hoot Suite user but I know that a lot of people prefer the other. Hey, out of curiosity, before I show these resources. Your founder, Sean, was on Andrew to do an interview. Did he, and you and I went back and forth a few times about how, you asked me if he could come on and I said it's not a good fit. You came back again you said with a gentle prod, you said maybe this is a may to make it work, maybe this is a way to make it work. We finally found a perfect way to make it work, I got a lot of traffic off of it. I think it was even the hot interview for the week. Did you guys get any business off of that?

Stella:	It's hard to say. We definitely got people who called or who e-mailed because they had seen us on Andrew. You know it's really hard to understand (inaudible) because you never really know where the person is engaging with your brand for the first time. Is it because you know they saw us somewhere else and then they saw us on Mixergy? I definitely know that we've got a lot of inbound interested people from Mixergy but I don't know how many.

Andrew:	But, so you can't measure this stuff. You can't tell for sure how many people come from Tech Crunch, you can't tell how many people come from Inc directly?

Stella:	You can tell, but there are, you can tell traffic wise. And honestly if you do that then you will never do PR, because the traffic that comes from PR surprisingly is very little. Like that Inc article that was a profile on FeeFighters, I think we got less than 150 to 200 views which is astounding. What's more important is the fact that I can put Inc now on my home page as a company that found us.

Andrew:	See, there it is, I got it. You've got social proof. You've got the co-founder of Stack Exchange and Fog Creek Software saying something nice and you also have the Inc article reference to you, and that's what's great about PR.

Stella:	Yes.

Andrew:	So then, and there's even more. So then, as a scrappy start up, and I'll show the tools in a moment, as a scrappy entrepreneur how do you know that this is the right place to spend your energy? Why this and not SEO. Or why this and not something else?

Stella:	It's a mix. I think PR is important to. Because first of all a lot of it is easy. There's a lot of low hanging fruit. There's local reporters that you can easily develop a relationship with. Especially if you are doing something interesting. And then there's a lot of the credibility that comes from doing PR. No credible website that I know doesn't have links to at least let's say five or six great publications on it. It's just something that you have to do and there are different ways that you can capitalize on PR as well. One thing that we do for all inbound traffic and especially PR is you do the targeting. So any (inaudible) to our site (inaudible) FeeFighters ads for the next 30 days and that's going to very, it's a cheap, easy way to get customers.

Andrew:	Got it. OK. Re-targeting is phenomenal, I've got to do that. Re-targeting is where you buy an add that only appears to people who have been on your website or a specific part of your website and because they've seen your site and now they're somewhere else seeing an add for your site, they're much more likely to click and register and of course you can start being everywhere they are on the web and it feels like you're buying a ton of adds to these people.

Stella:	I would also say we've been doing PR since almost the very beginning and trying to get into publications and having an emphasis on that I think people think that our company is a lot bigger and has [??].

Andrew:	Yes. I agree.

Stella:	We've been around for two-and-a-half years. We have eight people, four to six months ago we had three people working on the team. It just felt like a more credible company and our industry that's something that is really important.

Andrew:	Before we get into the resource, let me tell you something. The way you're positioned on camera, because you're a little bit closer, makes you look like you own the conversation and I'm feeling really small. I like to have a little space over my head so that I'm framed right, but now I'm looking really small and it's like Stella's running this show. I've got to remember that whenever I'm positioning my camera, maybe I need to be a little bit closer, like that. Then I've go to look at the camera.

Let's take a look at these resources. We talked about pressrelase.greater.com and we explained what that is. You told us about Odesk and gave us an example of how you use ODesk. What else are you using ODesk for?

Stella:	ODesk, there are so many great applications for that. If you need SEO optimized content that [??] high quality for your blog, you can use it for that. I actually found, I don't remember if it was ODesk or ELance, I found several really high quality bloggers that will blog on our blog. In terms of PR, I use it, majority for press lists. Press lists are such a pain to make and they're very expensive to buy.

Andrew:	OK.

Stella:	[Tout] is my new obsession. I love Tout.

Andrew:	Let's hope my screen is able to show it. Tout is actually created by a long-time Mixergy fan. I love this site too. We got to be able to bring, I'm going to shut off ODesk and see if we can make this all work here. I want to do Taut justice, let's come back to Tout. You want to tell me about [Muck Rack]?

Stella:	Yes. Muck Rack is a website that is all about journalist on Twitter. You can pull up different verticals and all the journalists tweeting their most recent feeds, all of those things. 

Andrew:	I see. So I can go into business, politics . . .  I'm sorry go ahead.

Stella:	Yeah. You can make targeted lists and in Twitter, based off of Muck Rack, reporters that you want to build relationships with. It's a really great tool.

Andrew:	OK. I'm going to shut that off too. Did you see, by the way, a moment ago when my screen showed that issue with Chrome? It didn't show up on your site? OK. Great. What's bite-sized PR?

Stella:	Bite-sized PR is actually [??]. He created this . . .

Andrew:	It's by who Ryan?

Stella:	Ryan Evans. He's actually a very big Mixergy fan.

Andrew:	I know. He was supposed to sponsor here and I just didn't have a spot. I had to apologize to him, but I know what it is, tell the audience what this site is. This is such a clever freaking idea, it's such a clever idea.

Stella:	It's very clever. If you don't have the time to monitor HARO or any of these other reporter driven sites. Bite-sized PR will do it for you and create pitches and pitch reporters. It's really like $90 a month. If you don't have, personally I prefer to do all [??]. I know that . . . 

Andrew:	You prefer to do what, sorry?

Stella:	I would prefer to monitor HARO myself because only I specifically know all the different angles that I can help reporters with Fee Fighters. If I didn't have time, if you're time strapped and you don't have the resources and I would spend $90 bucks on Bite-sized PR.

Andrew:	All right. So what they do is, they say right here, it's only 90 bucks a month and what they do is monitor those kinds of sites like, help a reporter out. They pitch on your behalf and then they help you get mentioned. Great. I see my computer is picking up speed again. Let's turn off Bite-sized PR to make a little more room and Tout, what is Tout?

Stella:	Tout is a great tool. It's every, anyone who sends a lot of emails, it's your dream. You basically get to create, so you take that press list that you made and you make a template for all the reporters want to send that blast too. Then what you can do is you can customize it. You have that skeleton template but then you can add in whatever [??] information it tracks who's viewing the email's, if they're even clicking on them, if they're seeing them. It's a great, great tool for sending targeted emails to specific lists.

Andrew:	I see. So you get a list of reporters and we talked about how you put that list together. You want to send each one of them a personalized message but you can't really do it, you can't spend time sending it to hundreds of people, this helps take a standard message and personalizes it for every reporter you're contacting?

Stella:	You can do that. You can use that base template as a [starting point] and adding for every reporter something personal. The thing I love about this though, is that it let's you track and see the [??] so you know. Let's say last time we had, I emailed a New York Time's reporter, obviously he didn't respond to me, but I know that he not only opened the email, he viewed, and then he clicked on the link that I had for the resource. So I know the next time that this reporter has already somewhat engaged with the [??].

Andrew:	I've watched [??] this site out. It's really helpful. So you can template, track clicks, schedule email delivery and it auto updates your CRM, you're Contact Management System. I think that's the end of all the resources here. We will have somebody here internally at Mixergy pull together a list for everybody out in the audience so that you guys can have this. I'm going to minimize this, I'm going to come back to Fee Fighters.

We've left people here with a lot. Let me ask you this. What's the one thing that the person who's watching us who feels overwhelmed, who says I've got a lot of great material here, I'm going to go back and watch this over and over again, what's the one thing that they can get started with.

Stella:	The number one this is to think about different ways to make your company interesting to reporters. Not just what you think is the most important thing, but what's so great about your product that will make people write about you. I actually wrote down, my three rules to PR, not rules, but what I think has made us be more successful. The first is to be creative and be scrappy.

Andrew:	Look, I brought up my notepad again, I'm going to do that. You guys in the audience, tell me if this is useful for you if I write it down. So first is be creative.

Stella:	Yeah. Just be as scrappy as you can. You're a start-up, a link from Mashable is worth a lot to you [??] in ways that can make it happen. The second is to be persistent. Follow-up with reporters. Don't assume that they're looking at your email. Be persistent but not annoy. Like I said before . . .

Andrew:	Before you continue from be persistent, before you go beyond it, you send out a link to, or you send out a pitch to a reporter. You don't get a message back, how long to you wait before you send a second pitch?

Stella:	I would follow-up and ask that they confirm a day later. Then whenever we would have the next relative news, I would email them again.

Andrew:	I see. So you send out a message to, let's suppose Tech Crunch is who are pitching with this exclusive. Sent out a message to Tech Crunch if you didn't hear back, the next day you say, hey did you get this message that I sent yesterday, that's it.

Stella:	Yeah. Or even later in the day. PR people, which I'm not a PR person, they will tell the times of [??] let's say your issue is not relevant right now or your product. Even though they don't respond to you right now, let's say in two months you email them again, it may be relevant and you'll get picked up. That's why you have to be persistent. The first time you email a reporter you don't get anything back, I wouldn't hesitate to email them the next time you have something relevant, even if they didn't respond.

Andrew:	Got it. Be creative/scrappy, be persistent, and what's the last one?

Stella:	The last one's to tailor and personalize as much as you can. We've gone over that before. The more personal you can make any sort of pitch or email, the more likely you'll get covered.

Andrew:	OK. That's the big piece of advice here. 

Stella:	Just to emphasize again, it's not rocket science. What may work for me, may not work for you. PR firms claim to have it all figured out, they don't. They're doing the same kinds of things that you're doing. They just have more time and energy to spend on it than you do.

Andrew:	All right. We also, you have a list of do's and don'ts about PR firm, how about this. Somewhere in here is your email address. Can I tell my audience that if they want that list from you, they could just shoot you an email and you'll send it over to them?

Stella:	Absolutely.

Andrew:	OK, great. And if they want this document, we'll include the document. We'll include the document, but, Stella, I've got your website here. Let me get the email address. No, I don't have it here.

Stella:	It's just Stella@feefighters.com.

Andrew:	Stella@feefighters.com. And just keep an eye on FeeFighters, the blog. I think you're going to get a sense of how they build up their audience and build up their community around, really frankly, Stella, this is not a product that anyone would expect to have a community built up around. I mean, we're talking about a business tool. Right, it's not exactly like having a big community over protractors, but, you know, we're talking about a tool, and you guys have built this community that I see you on Hacker News being discussed, I see you used as a calculator that people refer to. 

You guys have this great calculator about whether businesses should - help businesses decide whether they should use PayPal or a credit card processing. It's just phenomenal. And if anyone could take this product, credit card processing and make it into a hot product that people talk about, that reporters talk about, then the person listening to us should be able to do the same thing, and you really helped us do it, and I appreciate it.

Stella:	Absolutely. Thank you so much, Andrew. And if anyone literally has any questions, feel free to email me. 

Andrew:	Cool.

Stella:	I'm happy to talk.

Andrew:	I'm also going to ask for this. I keep saying this because every time I ask for it, I get it. If you've taken this session and you've done anything based on this, I want to see it. And if you've got any results which often happens, I want to see it. And in some sessions, Stella, I will actually have people pause in the middle, take a specific action and get results within, like, an hour and then they shoot me an email and they say, Andrew, here's a screen shot of what I was able to do. 

I don't think with press you're going to be able to get results that quickly. But I do want to see the progress you're making and I do want to see the results and I'm looking forward to cheering you on and hearing about it. So come back and let me know, and of course, contact Stella@feefighters.com. Thank you. Go use this.