Feel like everyone’s in the news except you?
Putting off PR is a surefire way to stay safely unknown.
Get Published in a Week Challenge
Move from an unknown to a thought leader in 5 business days by writing, pitching, and publishing your first guest column in order to grow your visibility. In a global survey of more than 3,000 CEOs, 89% said thought leadership done well enhances their perspective of a company or organization, and nearly 60% use it as a way of vetting buying decisions.
The Get Published Challenge
The challenge begins soon, and each day delivers live video calls with juicy insider tips, special guests and tangible steps you can take to set yourself up for publication in just one week.
The Challenge Results
After five days, you’ll have one finished article and a solid plan for pitching it to a best-fit outlet that is likely to publish you. While ethical public relations pros never guarantee results (they call it earned media for a reason), we’ll make sure you have everything you need to confidently pitch your newsworthy piece to the media of your choice.
Is this for you?
Full Swing PR was founded in 2019 by Caitlin Copple Masingill and is now co-owned by Caitlin and her “work wife,” Holly Conti.
You are a small business owner or intrapreneur interested in growing your visibility and credibility as a leading expert in your field, this is for you.
You prefer to play small, we’re not your people.
If you are comfortable with the fact that just 24% of experts cited in the news media are female, feel free to take a pass.
What You’ll Learn
Signing up is your first step to diversifying whose story counts in the news media.
We all depend on the news media to help us make decisions for ourselves, our families, our schools, our planet, and our communities. But when 6 in 10 newsroom employees are male, and 77% of journalists are white, those of us from historically marginalized groups face an uphill climb.
We have to work twice as hard and be twice as smart to help decision makers trust us as experts and consider us as expert sources. That’s why it’s so helpful to have a squad in your corner, like you will through this five-day challenge.
What You’ll Learn
Each day we’ll cover:
- What counts as “thought leadership” and why personal branding is increasingly important when seeking to grow your business or career, particularly if you are the boss.
- How to get started sharing your unique insights and expertise, including how to identify the right news outlets that will be interested in sharing your article.
- How to generate topic ideas, and our five-part formula for outlining publishable guest articles.
- How editors make publishing decisions, how they like to be pitched, and the five big no-nos that will lead your emails to be marked as spam or blocked altogether.
Meet Your PR Team
Caitlin Copple (she/they)
Caitlin Copple Masingill is a queer single mom and strategic communications expert who founded Full Swing PR in 2019. Her clients have been in The Washington Post, Fast Company, Forbes, TIME, and The New York Times, among others.
At age 28, Caitlin became the first openly LGBTQ person elected to the Missoula, MT city council. She loves helping underdogs beat the odds to build the PR platform they need to make radical change.
Caitlin lives in Boise and has been named among Idaho’s Accomplished Under 40 and Idaho Women of the Year. She loves bougie coffee, rollerblading, and enjoying the outdoors with her kindergartner, Tollie.
Holly Conti
(she/her)
Holly joined Full Swing in 2020 and became part-owner in 2021. She oversees digital marketing efforts to help women leaders be seen and sought after so they can reclaim their power and rewrite the human story.
She brings more than a decade of experience managing brand platforms in digital, television, and print media, and has guided small business owners through dozens of multi-six figure launches. Holly lives in New York with her husband and three-year-old daughter, Eloise, where she spends as much time as possible hiking to waterfalls or on her yoga mat.
5 Days to Make Headlines
Each day of the challenge, you’ll have access to live group Zoom calls where we’ll teach you how to outline, write, edit, and pitch your guest article to a news outlet of your choice. If you upgrade (see pricing options below), you’ll get even more insider access to proven PR experience and insights that clients normally pay us thousands of dollars to learn.
As business owners ourselves, we know that working with the right team has saved us years of time in reaching our big goals. We never would have built a million-dollar business in less than four years, something only 2% of women-owned businesses achieve, if we didn’t have a squad on our side.
The point is, you don’t need to be a PR expert to make headlines. You need the right person or team to help you gain confidence and give you a roadmap to publication in a short amount of time. That’s where this challenge delivers.
Day 1:
By the end of Day 1, you’ll understand what counts as thought leadership, and how to engage in it on your own terms in order to grow your brand. We’ll dive into personal branding and cover the power of thought leadership so you’ll feel confident about choosing a topic and putting yourself out there. We’ll walk you through a fun activity that will help you identify topics to write about that bring your expertise to life.
Day 2:
The second call will cover how to think like an editor. As former journalists, we know how newsrooms make decisions, and what are surefire ways to get your pitch email flagged as spam or blocked in the future. A real editor will join us live for a portion of this call to share their pitching dos and don’ts, and if you upgrade, you’ll be able to ask them questions. By the end of day 2, you’ll have selected your topic for your guest article.
Day 4:
On day four, we’ll help you edit your article draft to make it as newsworthy as possible, increasing the chances it will be published by the outlet of your choice. Several participants will have the chance to workshop their draft live on the call, and everyone will benefit from learning how to put news values and best writing practices into action as you finalize your draft article.
Day 5:
Pitching can feel scary and personal, particularly if you get rejected. We’ll help you understand what goes into researching a pitch so you can be sure an editorial opportunity is right for you and that you don’t make a simple mistake that could prevent you from being published. We’ll give you a sample pitch email you can copy and send, and we’ll spend some time coaching participants through their pitch to make it even stronger.
This challenge will be worth your time because you’ll have everything you need to get published after just five days.
Can’t make the live calls? No problem, catch up on-demand on your own time, or just listen along with the audio-only version while you walk the dog.
The only guaranteed outcome is the one you’ll get if you don’t sign up. You will remain invisible to potential clients and customers who want to support you. You won’t be published in a week. You won’t get the kick in the pants to begin investing in growing your visibility and authority through this quarter and beyond.
Pass on this opportunity and we guarantee you won’t see the kind of results our clients have had in just the past month. Results like:
- Being invited to submit an article to the Harvard Business Review.
- A guest interview secured on one of the top podcasts in your industry.
- A multiple-page feature in a prominent alumni magazine.
- An op-ed that gets you noticed by the people who control the RFP process in your field.
Save These Dates
The challenge kicks off on Monday, Oct. 10th, with daily live calls through Friday, Oct. 14th at 12 PM EST.
Here’s what you can expect:
- 5 days of video calls with PR experts and former journalists, Caitlin Copple Masingill and Holly Conti, whose clients have been in The New York Times, CNN, NPR, TIME, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company and more.
- Our step-by-step guide to outlining your article with our proven five-part formula.
- A deeper understanding of your personal brand and how to leverage it for media attention.
- An understanding of how newsrooms make decisions and how to shape your pitches accordingly.
- One live call with a real journalist on what she looks for when publishing articles by guest contributors.
Maybe you’ve had guest articles published before, or you feel like you are already a strong writer. A guest article in a local publication will not transform your business the way demonstrated thought leadership in a top-tier or industry-specific publication can. And majoring in English or being an amateur poet means you may be quite good at a very different kind of writing than what the editors we work with are looking for. You need to think like a journalist to write like a journalist, and we’re going to teach you to do both.
Maybe you’re on the fence because you’re busy, and we get that. Embarking on your PR journey is kind of like having a baby – there’s never a perfect time, and at some point, you need to bite the bullet or make peace with the timing that has found you. No matter how much you are juggling right now, we’re making it super easy for you to participate on your own time, or upgrade for more individualized attention (and accountability).
Here’s what our past Get Published Challenge participants said….
By the time the sun sets on our five days together, you’ll understand:
- What it takes to write, pitch, and publish a great guest article.
- How to plan and execute bite-size PR wins for yourself and your team.
- How to stop wasting your time with bad pitches.
- The value of contributing guest articles, even if it’s only two to four times a year.
- How real journalists make decisions so that you can shape your content accordingly.
Discover
what thought leadership really means and which outlets would be a great fit for you.
Learn
what real journalists are looking for in guest contributions.
Outline
your first guest article to make it easier to write.
Pitch
what thought leadership really means and which outlets would be a great fit for you.
The Get Published in a Week Challenge comes with three options and prices to best help you meet or exceed your publicity goal.
FAQs
If you want to increase your visibility as a leader by publishing a guest article, you need a plan and a guide to help get you there.
You’ve created a successful business, but that’s just a fraction of the impact you could make. What’s your ultimate goal? Do you want to write a book? Give a TEDx talk? Get paid to speak at conferences? Start a nonprofit foundation? Run for office? Then you need the visibility and credibility that only public relations can deliver.
We cannot change who holds power in our society until we change who holds the mic. You may already be a leader, but if you aren’t sharing your expertise and telling your story to the wide world through public relations, we’re all missing out.
Your story is worthy of telling, and it’s time the world heard it.
