How to Master Publicity with Jill Lublin

Jill Lublin is an author and master strategist on how to position your business for more profitability and more visibility in the marketplace. She is CEO of a strategic consulting firm and has over 20 years’ experience working with over 100,000 people plus national and international media.   Jill says that publicity is the most powerful and cost-effective tool around to attract and retain customers and clients. It can help your business make its mark in the marketplace and multiply its profits.

In this interview, Jill shares her journey and how you too can become an influencer in your realm of expertise.

Listen to the Episode Here:

Interview with Jill Lublin

My guest is Jill Lublin. She is an author, a coach and a consultant on the area of becoming an influencer if you’re thinking about how to level up with your credibility. How do you take your content and your body of knowledge and create a thought leadership presence out in the marketplace? Jill helps you do that. In this episode, she helps deep dive into what some of the best tactics are creating and generating publicity for your consulting work or your consulting business. She gives a lot of tips that she sees worked within the industry. Jill, thank you for joining us on the MECE Muse Unplugged. How are you doing?

I am so good and it’s great to be here with you.

Thank you for joining us. Jill, we would love for you to take a moment to introduce yourself to the go-getters of the MECE Muse unplugged.

One of the things that I’ve been very blessed is that I have four bestselling books. My latest that are relevant for this is Guerrilla Publicity and The Profit of Kindness, a book all about using kindness in business. It’s always important. I’ve been helping entrepreneurs, small business owners, coaches, consultants, authors, speakers, for over twenty years get more visibility and credibility using publicity as a primary strategy.

I help people get more clients and more prospects by using publicity mostly through what I call my publicity crash courses, which I teach as live Zoom events where they don’t have to travel or live events. I’ve been working with people for over twenty years. It’s been a lot of fun. I help people get book deals, who don’t even have a word written and those who are self-published, I help get foreign rights deals. I work in a number of different arenas.

It sounds like you are definitely a consultant’s secret weapon.

That’s a great way to say it, and I am. I’ve helped consultants who are starting business or growing their business get more clients and get more credibility.

You are the real deal, Jill. I definitely want to talk to you about becoming an influencer for go-getters and consultants out there that want to do that. It would be great for you to maybe take a step back and share how did you get started with the journey that you’ve been on.

I started in the music business, which is great fun. I started consulting with independent record labels and musicians and I’ve always worked with highly creative people. I love that and I’m good at it and I love messaging. That’s how I started, in the music business.

How did you decide to write your first book? Maybe share what led you to believe that publicity is the real strategy to grow and influence a brand.

What I know about the power of promotion is it’s so important to get your name visible. Think about the music business, it’s all about perception and image. Being immersed in that for so long, I naturally found my talents and skill set and I love helping people with their message and get down into the who are you, what’s the core, why should people care. You’ve got to answer all those questions. For me, it was always about the visibility building that came from that and I love that piece. It’s always been special for me and amazing for keeping my visibility building out.

Jill, I would love to hear a story of something that may have happened in the early parts of your career that helped you solidify your core values that you have today.

My core values versus a client success stories. One of the things that I am a believer in is people’s message. I’ve always considered myself a bit of what I would call Messenger of Messengers. With that in mind, what I started doing was delving into the message and, “What is it?” One of my values is serving people and the best way to serve people is find what’s at the core and communicate that well. That’s a skill set of mine. I’m a big believer in use the best skill set.

Use the talents God gave you. For me, it’s the ability to translate people’s messages. That’s what I started doing and loving it and connecting and feeling connected as I do that. It’s been a wonderful journey of supporting others in who they are out in the world as well as myself. I had to go through this, which is what enabled me to do it so well for others. When my first book came out, Guerrilla Publicity, I’m like, “I’ve got to get myself out there just like I help others to do for many years.” In the doing that, I learned what was most important and how to do that in simple, easy ways.

MECE 46 | Master Publicity
Master Publicity: When you have the right thing to say in the right order, it makes a huge difference for how people hear and see you.

What was your most challenging moment through that journey?

It was when I broke both ankles in multiple places and my third book was out, Get Noticed… Get Referrals, which is about using referral networking and marketing. You can imagine with broken ankles it’s pretty hard to do promotion. It’s pretty hard to get excited about much. My income went down. It was difficult to be out in the world in that injured state. I was in a wheelchair for six months. That led to a lot of issues and a lot of major problems.

That was my challenging journey. I had to get creative. I had to be willing to sit in a wheelchair and deliver speeches, which was tough. It also made me very sensitive to perception because people talk to me differently. It was interesting and I had to learn how to be a good speaker and powerful from a wheelchair and that was different for me. I had to learn how to ask for help because when you’re injured like that, there was not much I could do for myself. I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t drive, I couldn’t make food. I couldn’t even get to my bedroom. You can imagine everything changed.

That definitely sounds like a challenging time in your life. I would love to hear the moment that you were able to walk again. How was that moment for you?

I think it was like, “I can help myself again.” I have to say, asking for help for a person who’s used to being a lone ranger, used to doing everything myself, a bit of a super woman type, I have to give all that up. I just had to ask for a lot of help, to receive a lot of help. It was wonderful in that way to learn to seek and receive support.

What was the best career advice you’ve ever received?

Become financially literate and get smart about money. Learn how to read a P and L sheet, profit and loss, know what’s coming in and going out, know what your expenses are. List that. That’s important.

I want to pivot and talk a little bit about becoming an influencer. I know that’s an area that you are well-versed in, Jill. It seems like a lot of people are focused on becoming an influencer, whether it’s on social media or in other mediums. I don’t see a lot of focus or appreciation for becoming a subject matter expert in a particular content area. I would love to hear your perspectives on what’s more important. Is it focusing on building the influence or should it be rarely on the subject matter or a combination of the two?

It’s a mixture. Sometimes your subject matter expert. Sometimes you’re fit in to the news because of something that’s happening in the news. It’s like my client from Haiti. She is a nurse turned helping women now transitioned from their jobs. She wrote a self-published book on top of that, about that. Here’s the cool thing or not so cool thing, but when President Trump said not very nice things about the country of Haiti and Africa, I called her up and I said, “This is your moment.”

There were specific wording and coaching, she got on national public radio and people love connecting to her to ABC, NBC, CBS Radio, and TV networks. We came up with a wonderful segment that talked about being a Haitian immigrant and successful American and that was the story that was interesting. Not the fact of all the other things that she does do that’s fabulous and brilliant. I want to put that up there. You’ve got to be watching and listening to the news and see where you fit in. That wasn’t political. We said two things that were great sound bites. Haitian, immigrant, successful American, that was powerful.

If someone’s a new consultant out there, they’re just getting started, they haven’t built up the expertise, what would be your recommendation, Jill? Should they focus on building the expertise and then the influence element or any thoughts on that? Especially for someone that’s just getting started in their career.

I worked a lot with people just getting started. It’s a beautiful thing wherever you’re at in your business, the point is to take that first step. What the first step is clearly defining your message so that people know who you are and as I like to say, “Why they should care?” When you have the right thing to say in the right order, it makes a huge difference for how people hear and see you. Does that make sense? You’ve got to start with the message.

What would you say are some common mistakes that you see in individuals just getting started in creating an influencer profile. What are some common mistakes you see they make either in messaging or another element?

The messaging. The problem is that they talk too much about what I call ‘I’ language and they don’t do enough ‘you’ language. When you’re messaging, I want you to think about what’s the problem out there and then what solution are you providing. That’s a great way to do it.

Would you say should people focus on trying to be an influencer in a broad space or should they look to create a niche?

I tend to narrow it first. I tend to like that better just because it makes a little bit easier. Go narrow first. If for some reason you’re not getting any response or it’s just not landing for whatever reason, then I would say then get larger and that’s the next piece.

How do you measure success as an influencer?

First of all, are you getting clients? That’s important. I think around what’s focused is that you have the right message. Then you get more and more influencers. You tend to attract more people. You’ve got to give value and benefits. That’s a way to get influencers. It’s okay to make offers every once in a while through your social media or different places, but it’s important to give people great value and benefit.

Would you say with social media, is that a metric? I know it’s the most visible that people see. If someone has a certain number of likes on their content or they have a number of followers on a different platform, is that a true metric of success for an influencer?

There are many metrics of success. There are multiple ways to measure it. Some is what I like to call the upfront of you somewhere syndrome. What’s important is that it’s not always about what you think it’s about, that you’d be willing to be flexible. Even with metrics of success, sometimes people, my clients don’t have huge social media followings but they’re very successful. That’s a key.

I would love for you to tell us a little bit about your crash course. You mentioned that publicity crash course and then the book, Guerrilla Publicity. If you could maybe tell us a little bit about those two, that would be awesome.

MECE 46 | Master Publicity
Guerrilla Publicity: Hundreds of Sure-Fire Tactics to Get Maximum Sales for Minimum Dollars…Includes Podcasts, Blogs, and Media Training for the Digital Age

Guerrilla Publicity is all about getting your word out and creating visibility. If you go to JillLublin.com, you can order it. It will take you through all your favorite places, to Amazon, but go to JillLublin.com. As far as the publicity course, I do a powerful live publicity course. When I say live, you can take it on Zoom with me, so you don’t have to travel anywhere or you can take it as a live event. I go to San Diego, Texas, Dallas, Texas, Florida, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, all fabulous places. Come join me there live, which is great and this is a no nonsense, get it done, publicity, fabulous, roll up our sleeves. Everything you need for your publicity. You leave the course whether you take it on live Zoom or the live event with four documents done and ways to understand how to get the media to say yes.

What I love to do for your audience is if you go to PublicityCrashCourse.com, you can read all about it. When you check out PublicityCrashCourse.com/registration, put in the code Publicity, you’re going to get $600 off and that would be a good thing. Most importantly, get your publicity going much simpler, much faster, and without you having to figure out. I’ll walk you through the whole thing in an intimate course. Not so many people, so that there’s attention on you.

Jill, I appreciate your time. Any last thoughts that you’d like to share with our go-getters if they’re interested in becoming an influencer and getting started in their career? Any last thoughts to share?

What I want to leave them with is, “Your message matters.”

Thank you so much, Jill, for being on the show.

Thank you for having me. I’m so grateful.

Thank you, my go-getters, for tuning in. Here’s to your journey to greatness.

Links from today’s episode 

About Jill Lublin

MECE 46 | Master PublicityWith 200+ speaking engagements each year, master publicity strategist and consultant, and bestselling author, Jill Lublin, consistently wows audiences worldwide with her entertaining and interactive keynotes, seminars, and training programs on publicity, networking, kindness and influence marketing.

Jill has shared her powerful networking and publicity strategies on the stages of Tony Robbins, T. Harv Eker, Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Loral Langemeier, James Malinchak, Lisa Nichols, Richard Simmons, and many others. Additionally, thousands of people have attended her popular “Crash Course in Publicity”, which she teaches live several times a month at locations around the U.S. and Canada, as well as a live online class. Her popular home study system is used by clients worldwide who are ready to create greater success and revenues for themselves and their companies.

Over the past 25 years, Jill has worked with ABC, NBC, CBS, and other national and international media as a highly regarded publicity expert. She has been featured in The New York Times, Women’s Day, Fortune Small Business, Entrepreneur, Forbes and Inc. magazines.

Jill is the author of four bestselling books, including: Get Noticed…Get Referrals (McGraw-Hill), Networking Magic (Morgan James), and Guerrilla Publicity (Adams Media), which is regarded as the “PR Bible”, and her latest book The Profit of Kindness (Career Press), which went #1 in four categories. With four international bestselling books, Jill is acknowledged as the go-to person for building success through influence marketing, networking, and publicity. She helps authors to create book deals with agents and publishers and well as obtain foreign rights deals. Jill is also the Producer and Host of the TV show, “Messages of Hope”, which inspires people to take positive action to improve their lives and create a better world.

In addition to her speaking engagements, Jill trains and consults with executives, sales teams and marketing departments in Fortune 500 companies, as well as in small-to-medium-sized companies. Her innovative influence marketing and publicity techniques consistently increase bottom line results for her clients.

Visit JillLublin.com or ProfitofKindness.com, or call 415-883-5455 for more information. For media interviews or to book Jill to speak contact Jennifer Ellis – jennifermarieellis@outlook.com /