What is the PR Power Hour?
I always tell people to add just one hour into their weekly schedule for PR. It’s only one little hour—which makes it easy to commit to—and it’s also a powerful amount of time to get your business some media attention.
Honestly, one hour every week is better than five hours at once every five weeks. It’s all about staying relevant and since things are changing all the time, working on PR weekly gives you the chance to keep up.
Think of it as a marathon, you need to be in it for the long haul, pace yourself, and keep going.
Right now (if you haven’t already) schedule a weekly event called the “PR Power Hour.” Now that that’s on your calendar, here’s the breakdown of what you can do in just one hour of PR.
20 Minutes: Look Up 3 New Media Contacts
In 20 minutes, you can probably find 2-3 good media contacts and their contact information.
I think this part is fun because it involves reading publications you are already interested in. For example, if you make organic soaps, you now have an excuse to start reading through articles about organic soaps!
The point of this is to collect the name and contact information for the reporters talking about your industry. Finding media contacts is fun for me, but if you need a little motivation to get started you can think of it as dedicated reading time or multi-tasking PR and industry research.
Not only is this a powerful hour for PR, it can benefit you in other ways too!
20 Minutes: Write One Pitch
Once you have some new media contacts, it’s time to write a pitch just for them.
If you follow my OPEN Method, then you probably have some story ideas ready to pitch. Pick one that generally applies to all three of your new contacts.
I’ll admit that it might take you a little longer to write your first few pitches, but it won’t take long before you get the hang of it and can whip these out in 20 minutes or less.
If you find yourself taking longer than 20 minutes, recalibrate. Review the anatomy of the pitch (which you can find in my Foundations Course to make sure you’re not putting too much into it.
It’s easy to get stuck on perfection, but for this to work you have to be able to get the pitch out. Don’t worry about making it perfect. Just keep it short, sweet, and hit send.
10 Minutes: Send Some Emails
First things first, take your new pitch and send it out to your new media contacts.
I’ll usually take a couple minutes to personalize the pitch for each contact. This includes:
Including their name (a must)
Mentioning why you are contacting them specifically
Tailoring the story to fit their style or publication
Again though, don’t get stuck on making it perfect. Look at where you can make the most impact in the smallest amount of time and effort and call it.
Let’s say sending your new pitch takes 6-8 minutes. With those last few minutes, you can still tackle one more task: following up.
Follow ups are really easy and take just a few seconds.
Squeeze these in at the end and you have completed everything you need to run a professional PR campaign in just 60 minutes!