How do you effectively promote yourself, your business, or your brand? Maria Ngo and Ray DuGray are happily married hosts and producers of a several celebrity talk shows where they showcase some of the world’s most successful and influential people. They specialize in positioning clients through the power of media interviews. Maria and Ray take us on a nice tactical tour of what they do and shared that one of the most effective strategies to get media exposure is to use video as a tool to pitch yourself to the media to get interviewed on TV shows.

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We’re excited to bring a power couple to you. This is a very powerful couple. Their names are Maria Ngo and Ray DuGray, and their company is Vegas Net Media. We’re going to talk about promoting yourself. That’s the overarching subject. We know a lot of you out there have your own businesses. You’ve been told to get on video. You’ve been told to get out there and make sure that you’ve got PR and make sure you’re being interviewed. It’s a very effective strategy to growing your podcast is to get more media interviews and more exposure. That’s their area of expertise, in particular with using video and using video as a tool to pitch yourself to the media to get interviewed on TV shows.

Ray DuGray and Maria are married. They’re the hosts and producers of several celebrity talk shows based out of Las Vegas. That’s a great place to be, because they get to showcase some of the world’s most successful and influential people because they all end up in Vegas. They personally interviewed hundreds of top celebrities. It’s close to 1,000 interviews now. Talk about muscle memory and putting in your 1,000hours or getting 10,000 hours of experience in something. Interviews is their area of expertise. Some of the experts that they’ve interviewed on camera include Stevie Wonder, Imagine Dragons, Sir Richard Branson, Jay Leno, Larry King, The Kardashians, and the list goes on and on. They specialize in positioning authors, business owners, coaches, consultants, hosts, podcasters, and producers as speakers and leading authorities as credible experts in their industries through the power of what they call new media. We’re talking largely video and largely online video as well. It’s not necessarily prepping you for TV interviews, but it’s the same model.

A lot of you are out there trying to promote your shows, promote your businesses, and promote your own growth, and it’s hard. It’s hard to get someone to even want to feature you. I’ve written a whole brochure on how to get more media. When you read it, as a media person, the screens are right there against you. There’s so many barriers for you to get over and to even get that pitch and get it through and get someone to feature you that when they are going to feature you, you better not screw it up. It’s so powerful, that preparation, and all of those things that are involved in that. That’s what they’re going to share with us. This is going to be a lot more lesson than we normally do, which is normally to get to know people and get to know how they work and what they do. In this case, Maria and Ray had been so gracious to give you a peek into their course and how it works and how they teach people these things and give you that right here. You get an on-air lesson. I love that and I appreciate their value that they bring.

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

How To Get More Media Interviews with Maria Ngo and Ray DuGray

Maria, Ray, we’re so excited for you to be here.

Thanks for having us. It’s great to be here. You guys are awesome.

I’m excited to do a video and podcast audio, because we don’t usually do this.

That’s cool with us. When you talk video, you’re talking our language.

You’re the right people to be doing this with and premiering it with. We know you guys for a while, and you have done a fabulous video of us and made us look great. We thought that it would be awesome for you if you helped our audience start to understand what it’s like to get interviewed by the media. When they are promoting their podcast and they are out there on the road and trying to make sure they get enough circulation, that means more media interviews. Hopefully they are doing it live because it energizes what they are trying to say and drawing audiences in. It’s not the same in print media. First I want to get a little background on you. Tell us a bit on how you started and got working together, because you guys are also a couple.

We have been married twenty years here. Ten years ago, we started what was called The Interview-An-Expert. That was on local broadcasting television. We were trying to be the big Oprah production, which we had no clue.

Let’s be honest about it. Sometimes out of the gate, our first chance and our first business doesn’t work out.

We ended up losing everything financially. We were trying to figure out where do we go from here? We want to continue interviewing people on their success messages and on their teachings so we decided to develop, because we’re here in Las Vegas, The Strip Live Celebrity Talk Show. We started getting invited to red carpet events, celebrity events, and started interviewing people like Stevie Wonder and Donald Trump. That got us going. Here we are, almost 1,000 interviews later. We’ve had the honor and privilege of interviewing both of you. Thank you so much for having us. Our passion is helping people get into the media and prepare their message so that they are strong and clear to promote, whether it’s a podcast, products, books, or their events.

It’s so important nowadays. We’re sitting on the cusp of being both interviewed and interviewers, so we have that flipping side of things. There isn’t a depth of understanding of how important it is to plan and get ahead and understand what’s going on in the media so that you are pitching properly to get them interested in you. That’s some of the things that you talk about. You have a 3P program. Tell us what the broad brush 3P Program is. There are three of them. I love it because it’s concise. That’s what you want to get to, that simple conciseness and getting across the important steps you need to take.

The broad brush would be our mentorship program that includes these three big Ps, and it’s prepare, produce, and promote. As a podcaster, it’s important that before you go into the production stage that you know your messaging. You have to do a lot of work. It’s the part where most people go, “Market research? That’s boring. I just want to go do interviews,” but if you don’t get it right, it can change the trajectory of your business. Just a quick example of how powerful this is, we had a client that we wanted to do research on human rights. That was the first term that she started to research, but she realized that the results that were coming back were very dark and very negative and it wasn’t her nature.

We experimented with some different terms and she came up with the term human dignity. The term human dignity felt right for her. It was positive and it set a completely different trajectory for her. She would have gone down a path that probably would’ve been very destructive. It probably would not have created success for her, and now she’s excited. I want to just share an example of how powerful that first P is. Once you got the first P, prepare, out of the way, you want to go out and learn all about production.

Or don’t, because it’s not a part of your core business and just hire great experts like you.

A lot of people feel like there are just so many moving parts and like, “Where do I even get started?” You get started by finding the people that are going to help you through the process. Production is a process. It’s a systemized approach to getting a specific result. It’s important in that big production P, which is so scary for people. Just being able to go on camera or even just go on a microphone is terrifying for people.

Production is a process. It’s a systemized approach to getting a specific result.

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They spend a lot of hours in the weeds trying to figure out what to do. You get caught up and you’re almost procrastinating by trying to learn all these things you shouldn’t learn, so you’re not getting going. That’s a bigger crime. Your voice and your message and that great research that you did, you’re not out there saying it because you took so long to dive into something that isn’t a part of that power play for you.

If somebody is bold enough to go through those first two Ps, we encourage everybody, just take the dive. It’s scary as hell. You just need to do it. You got to go through the valley. What comes out on the other side is the last P. You get through and you have a product. That product now needs distribution and that’s the big P of promote. The three biggest pains that podcasters or any type of broadcasters have or that three Ps. How do I prepare my messaging? How do I get the product actually created? What do I do with it after it’s created? It’s probably awesome if you’ve done the right steps. You have this amazing product, but then everybody struggles with distribution. How do I get the message out to the world so I can make a difference in people’s lives? I’m sure that everybody can identify. That’s what they want. What we do now in this presentation is we start at the very beginning, the first P. We start to look at those little Ps, starting with planning and preparation.

The part where a lot of people’s eyes glaze over because it’s not fun.

We’re going to try to make it fun. We’re going to give you a little bit of inspiration to just take the first step. Once you start moving, you’re going to want to go to the next and next. When you come out on the other side, when you can get over your fear, when you can get some product behind you, when your brand starts to build, it is an amazing feeling. You are making a difference in people’s lives and people need to hear your message.

The promotion is probably the biggest missing link for most existing podcasters. If you’re an upcoming podcast, preparation, production, and learning how to systematize all that definitely is a part of the process. The promotion is all too often an afterthought. They’re like, “All right, we have the podcast, we put it out there. Now what?” The key here is that they didn’t plan that from the beginning. That’s what you’re suggesting that we do, cycle back to that plan side again and we’re planning it for promotion. We planned it to produce it, and that is what most people plan for. They didn’t plan it to eventually promote it, which is totally necessary in order for it to grow at the pace that they would like it to. Let’s go back to the planning stage. We are big on, “Hope is not a plan.” There are lots of people out there who are not planners and so it is that scary stage for them. It makes such a difference in between something working and not working, with something being able to be easy to promote and something being friction in the process.

I want to give some real practical how to stuff. If we take the shotgun approach, which we often do because we’re so excited about our subject, we will tell you all these different apps that you can download, all this crazy SEO that you can do to find, all this wonderful information and build out spreadsheets. In the end, people just say, “I can’t even get started. I’m so confused,” so we’re going to make this simple. There’s no reason why any of your audience can’t do this right now and get world-class results, the type of results that if you were to hire a marketing firm, they would come back with the same data just based on what we’re going to do.

The very first thing is if you want to get your message out and you’re in the planning stage, we’re going to do a little bit of market research. Here’s what I want you to do. Let’s start by writing out a hungry market. I’ll tell you why that is so important. A number of years ago, I ordered a program called Info Product Mastery by Ryan Deiss. One thing in that course that I liked and I almost fell off my chair because it was so profound, is that he said that the majority of the people that go out and create products ask themselves, “What topic should I create a product on?” He says that majority of the people are creating out products based on their passions. They were most interested in this topic, so they’re just going out and writing books and they’re creating products. He said start by asking yourself, “What market should I create a product for?”

Media Interviews: Start by asking yourself, “What market should I create a product for?”

 

We are product people, and we get it every single day. Day in and day out, we get excited inventors and brand product and passion and we hear it all the time, and the first thing I say to them is, “Do you know that there’s a market for this?” I’m a product person. I want great products to win, but it doesn’t happen. Seven out of ten consumer products fail, and that is mass market included. That means that Target’s just as bad in introducing products as your average inventor or your average consumer. It’s not in your favor to not have a hungry market. That’s critical. When you match that product market fit, everything’s easier.

Your product is your podcast. That’s the product. We can just modify that statement slightly and say, “What market should I create my message on?”Not, “What topic should I create my message on?” The distinction is subtle, but it’s huge. It’s the difference between having a thousand books sitting in your garage that are not moving or doing a network out of it and doing the market research. Find the hungry market. That becomes the starting point of everything. If you don’t have a hungry market, go find one. It’s so simple, but there’s a key distinction. You’re creating this topic up for a particular market.

That’s what we have found with a lot of podcasters. We guide them and coach them on is if the thing that you want to talk about on a podcast, if you go search on iTunes and there are no other podcast talking about it, that’s a big red flag. Some people see that as an opportunity, “No one’s doing it. I will have the market to myself.” It doesn’t matter if you have a market to yourself if no one’s listening. This we learned from doing a lot of products. You search on Amazon and there’s nothing in your category. You have to educate people on why they should buy it. In this case, educate people on why you should listen. They’re not automatically searching for it, so you want them to want to consume it. In the podcast market, we find that people consume podcasts around health and wellness hop and try all of them because they’re so hungry for new information.

How many diets have you tried? If you’re looking to lose weight, you’re going to try different things. You’re just going to find that market that is creating that health and wellness product. If you have a podcast on that, then go after that.

The newest idea is to change your mindset so that you’re not losing weight, you’re releasing weight. If I could do with my head, it would already be all gone by now because I have a strong mind, but no. At least if you do this, you won’t fight it. It’s the idea.

If we look in that a hungry market, let’s just make this very practical to the topic that we’re dealing with podcasting, but let me just ask you two podcasting experts. Is there a hungry market for podcasting?

There’s a growing hungry market for podcasting. More and more people are continuing to listen to more podcasts per week. In fact, they’re listening to them at two and three times speed to get through more of them.

We had the same phenomena that’s going on in TV, like the Netflix model of binge listeners we have, just like binge viewers. When they find a podcast that has 100 episodes in a topic they’re interested in, they’ll listen to all of them in a weekend. When you have that rapid consumption, there’s room for more.

You know that because you’re in the business. You already have an affirmation that that’s the way it is. That’s a fact. Nobody can convince you otherwise. What if somebody just had an idea and they needed proof of a hungry market? Ryan uses the example of underwater basket weaving. If you’re absolutely passionate about underwater basket weaving, I have news for you. If you go and write the book on that, you’re probably not going to get many sales and it’s just out of curiosity, because it doesn’t exist. As passionate as you are, you need to find a hungry market. The question is how do you find it? It’s a simple as this. Take that keyword phrase, whatever keyword phrase that you want to enter into search in Google, and look at what comes up on page one of Google. Don’t go past page one because if you go past page one, you start to then dilute the value of the search.

The fact is that things on page one tells you that there are hungry people consuming it. Let Google do the work for you, the market research. If you do a search on a term and you see amazing stuff coming up on that search term and there seems to be a lot of activity, you start to do what I call a deep dive and start clicking and clicking and clicking and go down the rabbit hole. When you go down the rabbit hole, you’re going to realize there’s a whole lot of blogs on this. There are a whole lot of events on this. There are a whole lot of people writing best-selling books on this subject. It seems like there’s a hungry market. You can go back and check that off your list and say we have a hungry market.

Just for podcasters, this is something that we recommend as well. Not only do it on Google, also do it on iTunes. Do it a little bit more generalized on iTunes because people don’t type in quite a long tail keyword. They’ll just type the single word in. You can be a little more general. It’s a little smaller just because of the way that iTunes works, but what we found interesting was is if you see show topics coming up, not just full shows on it, that’s also a good indicator. Start clicking and listening to those shows and see what they’re talking about and how passionate they are. Are these people experts? Deep dive and listen as well as you can to read.

We’re still in the planning stage. The next thing that we want to do once we’ve identified a hungry market is ask yourself who is your target audience. I want you to think specifically here versus generally, because you can say generally it’s entrepreneurs. You can do what many marketing courses teach. Find your ideal customer, your client avatar. Find that that one individual that is your ideal person that you would want to work with at some point. Maybe you want them as a joint venture partner or maybe it’s somebody you want to hang out with. You love their personalities, you love their accomplishments. It’s that ideal person. It’s so important to do that, because what we do later on when you’re doing a media interview, especially if you’re just looking into a camera, you can visualize that person. They’re going to put you at ease and it takes away the nerves. We even go as far as sticking a little picture of the person up by our camera.

Do you do that, Maria? Are you thinking of that exact person you’re talking to?

I’m thinking of both of you. You are so friendly and inviting that I’m going to do a snapshot of both of you and do that for my next one.

I do that when I write my articles for Inc. I have a picture in my mind of what that person is and who that is that I’m writing for at all times. It helps me stay focused. You do that for video interviews. That’s a great suggestion Ray and Maria.

It’s very important, especially whenever I’m in front of the camera. I have issues with that. It must take some practice and getting used to on video.

It does take practice. After the market research, it’s key that you go to the next step because that’s where the fear will kick in hard. “I’m just uncomfortable at looking at myself on camera, I just don’t like it.” People have nerves on both ends. They have nerves as a guest, and they have nerves as a host. We have to identify and accept that upfront and we have to be willing to go through the discomfort. We do that in the practice stage. We practice so that when the time is that you go on audio or you go on camera, you can be natural. You could just be so much more relaxed because you practiced so much. Still in the planning stage, let’s go to from hungry market to target audience, to hot topics.

Media Interviews: Practice so that when the time you go on audio or you go on camera, you can be natural.

 

If you get a hot topic, you’re one step closer to getting a click. If you put it online and you throw a title on it, you’re one step closer if it is something that people want to learn about. How do we determine hot topic? Google search. Take that topic that you think is hot, remember you’re passionate about it, but let’s go back and look at the hungry market. During your deep dive, you would’ve come across a whole lot of topics. Was there anything in your deep dive that said, “That’s interesting. I love that. I could speak on that. That’s awesome.” Write that down. You can have many topics at this point. Just go ahead and just start recording topics. Here’s what I want you to do to put some solid market research around it. I call hot topic a focus keyword phrase. For example, let’s call it podcast marketing. Would that be a hot topic? If I said podcast marketing, would that be something hot?

It definitely is. It might be a little too general though, so the hotness might come from a little angle on it.

We do a long tail keyword. A long tail is just adding more words to it. We’re starting off with a focus keyword phrase, but I’ll tell you how you get your long tail keywords. You’ve searched Google for your keyword phrase. If you go podcast marketing and you start to see what shows up, you’re going to start to see some topics. Those topics are hot. How do I know they’re hot?

They came up at the top of Google search.

This is not rocket science. This is amazing stuff that anybody can tap into to start getting some ideas. Just give me an example of a longer tailed keyword based on that hot topic of podcast marketing.

Right now this hot topic area is about influencers. You’ve got podcast marketing influencers. That’s like a little bit deeper dive, but it’s the hot thing. Then you can go even deeper than that and you can call them micro-influencers.

You lead me into my next point. What do we do with that focus keyword phrase? We start to add other terms to it, just one word that will identify the influencers in your market. Why do we want to identify the influencers? There are many reasons. One is they have hot topics, that’s why they’re influencers, and they are probably running events. They’re probably interviewing people on podcasts. They probably want you as a guest. You’re already creating a list of people that you’re going to partner with later on that you’re going to reach out to. What I want you to do is take the initial focus keyword phrase, podcast marketing, and start adding an additional term for each search. Podcast marketing author, podcast marketing expert, podcast marketing specialist, podcast marketing influencer, podcast marketing events. Why events? Because the people that are running events invite experts to speak at their events. You can end up getting this long list of influencers that are at some point you are going to reach out to. Not only are you finding influencers, you’re getting hot topic ideas.

Let’s now say we thought the hot topic. What would be next before we actually go do an interview or interview someone? Because sometimes you’re going to play the role of host, and sometimes you’re going to play the role of guest. That’s my next thing, hot title.

A lot of people name stuff later. They title it after. I always think of it like a loose title. I will be very specific when I titled later. In fact, sometimes that’ll generate five to ten options on one of my articles or on one of our podcast when I think it’s just not right, but I always do start there as well. Thinking about, “Is this going to draw the right people in by that title?” The titles matter so much more than anything else and getting it to be clickable or viewed or listened to. We do, and a lot of times our customers that we produced podcasts for, they don’t have any idea nor do they want to figure it out, so we end up titling it for them. After the fact, but if you do it before, it’s so much more effective.

It keeps you focused. A hot title is not how awesome or how creative you think you are.

It’s not witty. I discovered that early on. I’ve written 175 articles and I learned early on that, no one reads the early ones.

It comes down to not how brilliant you are and how creative you are. It comes down to what the market is actually clicking on. What I like to do is I like to go in places that are running podcasts or videos or articles. I always search for the top articles. You can go to YouTube and you can see the most viewed. When you see the most viewed, there are many reasons why it’s the most viewed. It’s often because it’s getting the most clicks because it’s got a great title. Take the guesswork out of it. Go to places that have great titles. You can go to Amazon.com, go to the book section, see what the best-selling books are. You can go to any article site, look for the top read articles, and just peruse through hundreds of titles. I’m saying hundreds.

Don’t stop. Just keep going. A title is going to jump out at you and you’re going to say, “That title is in alignment with my topic. That topic is in alignment with my target audience. That target audience is in alignment with my hungry market,” and it will all click together. When you can get that all flow together, everything will work when you go to production. Here’s the problem. Do you understand that if you break any one of those, you’re done? If you do all the great work but put a crappy title on, you have no views. You have an amazing interview but no views. This all has to be done to excellence at the highest level. When we get there, we move into our next little P, practice. Do you have any specific questions about that?

Media Interviews: If you do all the great work but put a crappy title on, you have no views.

 

I’m more comfortable on camera today because I’m more comfortable behind the microphone today. Podcasting helped in making that a smoother transition for me, and it is all about the practice. We’ve done over 550 episodes. When you’re behind the mic all the time, you get comfortable there, and I discovered that it made my speaking better, it made my being in front of a camera better, everything about it, all those nerves are gone and you’re right. Practice just makes that flow better, it makes you comfortable, it gets out all those little confidence things that happen in the back of your head when you’re going, “Maybe my hair doesn’t look so good today.”

Let me give your audience some practical tips on how to get through this and get busy to the practice state. We’ve covered planning, and the next P is preparation. This usually takes more time, but I’m going to simplify it. I’m going to say the term “scripting” and “storyboarding” and a lot of people are going to get scared. They’re going to go, “That sounds very Hollywood,” so let me just simplify that. Scripting is just writing out the actual message, writing it out just or typing it out, and just getting your narration down. Here’s the key. Do not rely on that. It’s only for the purpose of getting you to know your subject very well. We’re talking about just a soundbite. Just chunk every piece of content down into a short sound bite, one to two minutes, and script the essence of what you might discuss. From there, the storyboard is just a visual representation of something. This could be doodle art scratched down on a napkin a picture of the essence of what your message is.

Here’s an example of a very simple tool. If you have Note Pad on your computer, that could be your script. Just type something out. If you have a presentation software, Google Slides or PowerPoint, use that and put a just a graphic in place or a visual representation. The next part I want you to do is bullet point three questions. Bullet point is just a shorter phrase. It’s just a visual cue that gives you the essence of what it is that you’re going to discuss. This can be done from the host’s side or the guest’s side. Just go, Q1, R1, Q2, R2, Q3, R3. That is question one, response one, question two, response two, and so on.

Start with three, and these are three questions that you could submit to somebody to say, “Here’s what to ask me on the podcast.” As a host, these could be your three questions that you want to ask your guests. You can word it differently each time. This is just the essence of the question. The response has to be extemporaneous. Extemporaneous means you just know your subject so well that the language is going to be different each time you explain it. It’s not going to be scripted. It’s not going to be memorized. It’s rehearsed. It’s coffee shop talk. You’re just talking about the camping trip you had. You didn’t script it. It’s just like, “What’d you do over the weekend?”

That is such a good point because the worst episodes happen when you have guests that have been on multiple podcasts and they say the same thing every single time. I think of it like late night television. When someone’s booked on late night television, it’s like “I’m on the Tonight Show, then I’m on Colbert, then I might be on the Daily Show or Jimmy Kimmel,” and they go on and they say the same thing every time. The minute I get through the monologue, I go, “They’re on again,” and the show’s off. You will lose listeners and viewers. It happens all the time. Those don’t make good guests. You have to know about both being a guest and being a host, and how to make them break out of that. That’s when I gooff-script with them. They hate it but you got to make your show better.

I just want to play to that point. You are completely right. If you’re a host and you usually start your podcast off the same, it’s usually background. You can just ask them, “How did you get started in media training? How did you get started with your podcast? What was your background like? How did you grow up?” What happens is you have this toolbox of questions that essentially is asking the same thing, just in different ways. Having a conversation is always better than being scripted from A to Z. Nobody likes a host that’s always looking down at their notes. Engage with your guests.

Having a conversation is always better than being scripted from A to Z.

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The audience can tell if you’re not being real with them, whether you’re the host or the guest. Authenticity is the most important thing. All those things you’re talking about, planning and preparation, all these things are so important to make sure that when you are in front of the camera or on the microphone, that you’re not stiff and contrived.

We have done over 1,000 red carpet interviews. There’s only so much preparation that you can do before hitting the carpet because you don’t have an opportunity to submit questions and you have no control over how this celebrity is going to respond. It’s so important to be extemporaneous. Maria can go with the flow. She doesn’t know a whole lot about them. She may just think they’re there to promote a film, but often that conversation goes very personally. Maria’s done enough research on the interview process and just research on people in general and what our audience wants to know so she’s able to just move and flow with it. All of you will get there too with practice. Over to practice, the best way to do this after you’ve got your messaging down, you have those three bullet points, the three questions and the three responses, now go hook up some technology like this, as simple as Zoom. Go use Zoom Technology or Google Hangouts or whatever it is. Put yourself on camera and go ahead and start screwing up. I call it messing about. Try different things and be okay to suck in the beginning.

Listen to the replay. When you’re doing it, you have a different view of it. Sometimes it didn’t feel as good, but you listen to it and you go, “That actually sounded good.” You cut yourself some slack and that starts to get you more comfortable too. Ray, we have a tip that we use here and I’m curious to hear what you think about this. We recommend that our podcasters just dive in and start practicing by going in and doing the thing that they talk about the most, rather than the hot topic, but the thing that they get the most questions on, because likely it’s going to be a hot topic. Just because they’re the most comfortable talking about that, we recommend that they make that episode one, even if they don’t hear it in that order and they shouldn’t.

We recommend they practice it first and they do that one first. They get on air and they talk about what they’re most passionate about and what they know the most about. Then we recommend that they do a guest interview so that they get comfortable with that dynamic. Then we recommend they go back to doing their introductory episode because that’s sometimes the most procrastination and most uncomfortable we are. What is our podcast going to be about? What is our video series going to be about? We get uncomfortable with that, but after we’ve done a couple of episodes, we go, “We know what it’s about,” and we have this better visual of that avatar as well. Did you like that idea and that model?

Absolutely. We actually do that. We have a showcase called Success Showcase where we start with people, because a Success Showcase follows. The three questions just become past, present, and future. We word the question in such a way to say, “What have you done? Where have you come from?” That’s usually the story of struggle and that’s the hero’s journey. People say, “I used to do this,” and then it brings them up to the present, which is “Now you’re currently doing this other thing,” and people love the success story. They love to hear the struggle story. This is a good place for people to start because it’s natural. They know their own story. They can go extemporaneously very well.

If we ask them, “Who are you? What have you done? Where do you come from?” They just tell the story. That’s the coffee shop talk, and then we’d get to them and go, “Tell me about what you’re currently working on? Do you got some projects going on?” They talk about your business. It’s all stuff that they’re passionate about and they know very well. The last is the future. We ask them, “What are your next plans? What’s your vision? What’s your mission? What are you doing?” A very good place to start in practice is just tell your success story. You don’t have to be this huge, massive success. It’s just everybody’s successful in something. It’s just your life. Tell this story and it becomes a great starting point.

Media Interviews: Try different things and be okay to suck in the beginning.

 

You have a workshop that you put on that takes people through this over a period of time. How long is your workshop? Can you give us a little picture into that?

The workshop that we’re offering is for our paid clients, for our high ticket item. What we’re doing is we’re identifying good quality people that have interest in the subject to come on. I’d like to extend the invitation to the two of you. It is a workshop. Many people hear the word and they often still think webinar. They think that they’re going to get a presentation. They only get a little bit of presentation, but it’s a whole lot of work. We are coming on with video cameras, and we are getting busy interviewing each other and being interviewed, so we are all working. It extends over a period of four weeks. It’s 90 minutes each session. We cover the four Ps that we’ve discussed: planning, preparation, practice, and presentation. The presentation, the fourth week is the dress rehearsal. You look good and sound great with all the technology. We bring that all in, and everybody gets to record themselves. They get interviewed by Maria. That’s very powerful.

Take any of your audience members that you believe would it would be suitable for. That’s all we’re asking for, suitability, because I don’t want people coming on that don’t want to play ball full out. It is a workshop and it’s going to be transformational for people. What they’re going to get out of it is life changing. We do it every month and the feedback we get is so powerful. Because it is part of our big mentorship program, which is the first big P, it’s a natural thing. When people can get over the nerves and they start to develop confidence, the next thing they say is, “I want to go to the next level. I want to go to the red carpet. I want to go to the Los Vegas.” They want the bigger package. That’s why we’ve opened it up to people beyond our clients because it’s such a transformational program for people. I’m looking forward to having you on.

We would love it. There’s a lot amateur video going on. There’s a lot of amateur interviewing going on. We were guilty in the beginning, we didn’t know what we were doing, but it takes a much longer time if you’re doing it on your own for you to start to figure out what’s working and what’s not. When you can learn from someone who’s done a thousand interviews, from us, from podcasting, we’ve done 550 episodes, when you learn from those kinds of things, that makes a big difference. It makes it a whole jump ahead of everyone else.

It is so critically important to getting a fast start. Especially when we’re in a small business, when it’s taking a lot of time out of our day to be marketing ourselves or be to be promoting ourselves, it’s taking us away from doing our critical client work, it has to pay off. The faster we can get to that stage, the better off we are. That’s why I firmly believe in not doing the production side of things when there is something that’s cost effective and available to you. It’s better to have an expert than to learn something new that’s not going to be in the heart space and in the center of what you’re doing every single day and as a part of your core business.

I hope you decide to join us in Las Vegas at the Bellagio for the full meal deal where we can get you on the red carpet and do some crazy fun stuff.

We should experience that and be able to even more accurately share that with others that we work with, because a lot of people could benefit from this. Again, getting the word out is a critical.

A lot of podcasters are starting to realize, especially some of our clients are at that level. They’re going at a fast pace and things are working and dialing in because of our process on that hot topic side, but it’s that promote side for them that is starting to be apparent that is necessary for them to get to the level of audience they want and to get to those goals that they set out to achieve. They may have set the framework in but they’re still not achieving it because that still is a missing link for them. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing so much with us.

Thank you so much for having us. We are just proud of you. I can’t believe how quickly your podcast started and you took off. I turned around and I’m like, “What just happened?” You are now these famous podcasters and teaching people. Tracy, you’re speaking all around the world, and I’m just so happy for you and for all your success.

Thank you so much. You have been very critical in that process. It was helping us on the production side of things. We have to credit you for pushing us along as well. Mutual admiration society here. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Thank you so much. We love you.

How To Get More Media Interviews – Final Thoughts

They took us on a nice tactical tour of a lot of what they do, but still it was only a portion of it. I’m personally very interested to participate in their workshop because we could use it as well. There’s so much value. We clearly know how to interview well here. We’ve been doing it a long time. I also know how to write articles and interview people to do that, so I know how to be the interviewer. Sometimes when you’re flipped on that, how you become the interviewee, it can get difficult for us as podcasters. How are you on the other side of that? Sometimes I see I am being interviewed on someone’s podcast and they’re not asking us the right questions. We saw that on stage the other day with Ashton Kutcher. It was not the questions I would’ve asked. It was not the questions I want to ask. That can be frustrating if your audience isn’t aligned with that with you.

Media Interviews: Everybody’s successful in something. It’s just your life. Tell this story and it becomes a great starting point.

 

That interview with Ashton Kutcher at the City Gala, I thought that Ashton Kutcher was quite astute and did an incredibly good job giving fantastic answers to questions that weren’t asked of him. He took the question, amped it up, and answered it in a completely different way. I love that model of it. If you can be that interview subject where you make the interview or the host look even better and look like they asked you an incredible question even when they just asked you a simple question and instead you answer it in this incredible way like he did there, that is powerful.

There was a video out there and I audio recorded it myself too. No one said you couldn’t. There were people who were Facebook Live streaming it. This is getting to be a common issue. You may be actually being filmed in various places when you don’t even know that you are, so you better be on all the time. Being prepared, being brilliant, and sounding incredible so that someone will livestream you like Ashton Kutcher did, that kind of preparation. These are the things where you’re going to get into that situation both as an interviewer or podcast hosts and as an interview subject, as a celebrity or an expert in your field, and you better be prepared. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to have Maria and Ray. I’m so glad they were able to come on and share so much valuable information. If you’re looking for more of that, we want you to go to FeedYourBrand.co and check out what they’ve offered up and this free course that they have and all this information that might lead you to wanting to have some more experience with them and wanting to have some more one on one, because if you’re ready for it, you know it.

We took a bit of a tangent there talking about this interview with Ashton Kutcher. It happened fairly recently so it’s fresh in our minds. I’m not trying to take anything away from Maria and Ray and the value that they brought us all on this episode. I thank them very much for coming on our show, but it is related. Ashton Kutcher is very seasoned and he’s an actor and he should be performing very well in those situations, but to me how he was on his feet and how he answered the question is a great lesson. People can get a lot out of that.

That’s a strong contrast to someone who’s rehearsed, and I have interviewed those people. He was off the cuff and thoughtful about how he answers the question and he pauses to ponder it and answer it properly and answer the way that he wants to and that he thinks is going to add the most value to the audience. You clearly see that there. That’s a big difference to someone who’s just rehearsed and polished, and that is certainly not what Maria and Ray are advocating. They’re advocating being brilliantly you, but not feeling intimidated by the process. Being practiced, being comfortable, and getting yourself to that stage so that you can do and you can answer in ways that make you even more valuable and make you wanted for the next speaking event and wanted for the next media interview, because you’re going to not answer it with this standard sound bite-only answer.

It was fun to talk about this. I like how we are helping bring to our audience the different disciplines that surround this thing that we’re all doing in trying to grow and market our businesses. PR, exposure, and interviews are an important part of it to be considered.

Media training is what I’m going to call it. It’s so important. Thank you again to Maria and Ray. Please go to FeedYourBrand.co and check out all the valuable information. They’re also linking you up to through that and we appreciate you being here with us. This has been Tracy and Tom on Feed Your Brand.

Important Links

About Ray DuGray and Maria Ngo

Ray DuGray and Maria Ngo are the happily married hosts and producers of several celebrity talk shows based out of Las Vegas where they showcase some of the world’s most successful and influential people.

They have personally interviewed hundreds of top celebrities, entrepreneurs, and industry experts on-camera including Stevie Wonder, Imagine Dragons, Sir Richard Branson, Jay Leno, Larry King, The Kardashians, Christina Aguilera, Dwayne the Rock Johnson and even Bart Simpson!

Ray and Maria specialize in positioning authors, business owners, coaches, consultants, hosts, podcasters, producers, and speakers as leading authorities and credible experts in their industries through the power of new media.

The dynamic duo will help you step into your star power and celebritize your brand with on-camera coaching, online media interview training, and interview segment productions.

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