How to use Convertkit as a PR tool to automate the heck out of your PR strategy

What are you saying? You don’t have time for PR and free publicity? I strongly suggest you make some time because you can see great results with only 30 minutes (to an hour) a week! The secret? Schedule, automate and have the right systems in place.

One of the questions I get all the time is what are the systems I can use for my press attack? I talk about them in my Ultimate Guide To PR & Free Publicity and courses Oh My Press and Master the Media but one simple start would be Convertkit. I’m pretty sure this is not common at all, but it works like a charm. I wrote about Convertkit, the email marketing software I use, before and since then, I figured out a pretty nice automated PR system, which I’ll share with you.

psst… and the best thing, Convertkit is free!

How to use Convertkit as a PR tool to automate the heck out of your PR strategy

I hope I made you enthusiastic about PR and free publicity, aka the best way to promote and market your business for FREE. Whether you’ve already started your press attack or you’re planning to start soon, read this guide! Because I’ll show you exactly how you can use Convertkit in your PR strategy to automate the heck out of your press process.

First, sign up for Convertkit and import your press list. If you don’t have your first media contacts yet, I strongly suggest you follow my course Master the Media, because I explain step by step how to find your first press contact without having any contacts in the industry, how to write the right press release that journalists will love and more.

Start your automated PR strategy now!

First, sign up to Convertkit in order to walk through the steps with me and actually set up your automated PR strategy. When you open Convertkit, you’ll see the standard menu.

We’re gonna create a sequence that involved three (or more of course!) press releases, for a launch this can be something like: pre-order now, it’s launched, and one after that shows how the launch went. For example, if you finally reached 1.000.0000 unique visitors or another milestone, that’s definitely something you should not only celebrate, but also tell others! To grow your biz showing others how well you’re doing is so important. It’s difficult, and especially something that’s really hard for me as a non-American and nonMale but I try my best! Hopefully you’re better at this, I find bragging always a bit difficult but after a few years I do get that it’s important to show others your success. If you’ll be adding more and more press contacts from now on, I also suggest you set up a more ‘evergreen’ sequence that new press contact will receive after some time. It involves some general information about you and your blog/biz, so you know they’ll hear from you at least a few times – even when you don’t have time for a full press attack. If you’re unsure how you should write press releases journalists will love, this might be something for you.

You can easily upload new subscribers by adding them one by one or by uploading a CSV file. To sort all your different types of subscribers, you can add ‘segments’ or ‘tags’, they work as groups. I suggest you create two ‘tags’: journalists and journalist leads. We’re gonna use the journalists tagged group to send the sequence to, and the journalists lead group to see who clicked the ‘more information’ link, because they might be interested. You do this with automations. I find it SO useful to track your clicks, it’s definitely one of the reasons I love Convertkit for email marketing! https://nonimay.com/convertkit

After you’ve set up your sequence, you can add journalists to the sequence in order to send your press release to them. If you want to follow up with the journalists who showed interested, I suggest you do that with a ‘broadcast’. This is how Convertkit calls it ‘newsletters’. You select the second tag you created, the ones with ‘lead’, because they click your information page. With broadcasts you can see who opened the email and if they didn’t, you get the option to resend your newsletter. How awesome?! This is ideal for a PR attack, because journalists receive waaay too much emails to weekly (or at all) read them all, so this is a sweet way to not irritate journalists who did read your press release (and just weren’t interested).

Short note: you can create a custom template for your press strategy, so your email appears to be different than your regular newsletter. I suggest you create a template without a header, so it just looks like a regular email. The only reason you should use Convertkit over your normal email (Gmail?) is  the fact that you can easily track who opened your emails, who clicked the links and the automatic sequence option! The longer you work on your PR, the more press contacts you will get. I have a couple of thousand names + addresses from journalists worldwide! But sending emails with my normal email client, didn’t gave me the option to actually track who opened my email or not. Or clicked my links, besides the ones who replied. You pay per user if you use Convertkit, which is a good motivation to clean up your lists to say goodbye to people who never unsubscribe but never interact either. Very impressive, a few thousand email addresses but if your conversion is very low, it’s not really a positive thing for your biz, declutter people!

You might also like to read:

• 7 reasons why your PR efforts + strategy shouldn’t cost you money (+ FREE PR Checklist)
• Common PR myths that are NOT true
• How to promote your business or blog better in the new year
• Why using email marketing is the only way to grow your online income
• 5 Signs You Need A New PR Strategy