How a Top PR Strategist Builds Unshakable Visibility for Creators with Lucy Werner

0:05 Good morning podcasting Morning Chat. Today is Monday, November 17th, 2025, and today it's PR and branding for podcasters with Lucy Werner. We dig into finding your voice, leaning on what makes you unique, and building visibility in a way that's actually feels honest and doable. So if you're listening live on Clubhouse, hit the share button top right hand side of the screen and share it. However, Clubhouse lets you. And if you're catching us via podcast, chatter, YouTube, please share this episode with a fellow podcaster. And now give us about 30 seconds and we'll get things rolling. Thanks for being here. Good morning again podcasting.

1:22 Morning Jeff. Thanks so much for being here. I am your host Mark Ronick and currently on stage with me we have my Co hosts, producer Ashley Feller, Matt Bliss, Ralph Estep, Dr. Fey, Sid Meadows and Nick Nallback. Ralph, I got it right. Correct. Thank you. All right, E step, I'm remembering that like e-commerce. That's how I remember the last name. OK. And also here with us today, we have Lucy Werner who we will get to in a moment. Lucy was connected to our community through Dr. So we will find out a little bit more about that connection and more about Lucy here in just a second. Speaking of Dr. First, I want to go to Dr. because she surprised me over the weekend with some fan mail and I thought we should share that here.

2:12 So go for it, Dr. Good morning. This is so great. I was scrolling my emails and you know how when someone goes to your website and clicks on contact, you know who, whatever your name is, contact Dr. and it ping pongs to your regular e-mail inbox And this is what I opened up. I'm Stephanie Graham at some point on Ask the Podcast Coach, which is Dave Jackson's show. You recommended podcasting morning chat to me and encouraged me to give it a listen. I did and I absolutely love the show. I've been tuning in for about 9 months now and I really enjoy it. I wanted to take a moment to thank you for the suggestion.

2:56 I'm not sure how to listen live but I always catch up on Pocket Casts which I just wanted to share my appreciation. Best Stephanie and her show is called Nosey AF and we'll link that in the notes. Nosey AFI took a little listen to it, it's fun. So it's taking all I can not to verbalize the AF because as soon as I see AFI want it to just blurt it out of. Course you do. It was so great to see this. It's so nice. My heart just just leaped up. Yeah, so nice to hear that and and again her name again. Her name is Stephanie Grant.

3:39 Stephanie, thank you, Stephanie, so much. It means so much to actually hear from people outside of the live community because, you know, we have that community joining us all the time. So we get that instant feedback, but we don't hear as much from our podcast audience. So thank you for taking some time reaching out to us and letting us know that you've been listening for all these months. Very. And honestly, I, I don't know what side of the coast she is on. If she's on, you know, California time or something like that, then yeah, this is going to be a little difficult to to, to maneuver this time of day. But if she is central or Eastern, then hey, Stephanie, if you're listening, go to those show notes, Scroll down.

4:22 Honey, you're going to find a link to get to us live. Yeah, one way or another, you can join us live on Clubhouse. Join us live on YouTube. We are streaming live on YouTube right now. If you would like to see the interview with Lucy. Yeah, Lucy's waving. So come join us over here too if you want to actually see the interview. And of course, we will have this available on YouTube after we go live as well. So I think we should just go ahead and dig in and let me tell you who this person is. First, let me just say good morning to you, Lucy. Welcome. Thank you very much. It's actually just a good afternoon for me, but I like the morning energy, so let's go with, OK. Good.

5:05 Yes, because Lucy is in the South of France. Don't let the accent fool you. Yes, she's originally from England but now living in the South of France, and she is APR strategist and author, a creator, and she helps small businesses and podcasters promote themselves in simple, sustainable ways. She's written three books on branding and PR, teaches a course on personal brand strategy, she publishes a weekly newsletter called The Hype, and she's worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs spoken across Europe and built a reputation for giving real, practical advice without any of the fluff. She also runs a creative retreat that gives creators space to clear to get clear on their ideas. And Dr. You connected with Lucy Howe? Because of AI, I'm always looking to expand the services that I do.

6:01 I'm trying to always stay ahead of AII know it will eventually be a losing battle. I know that. But until that happens. And so I wanted to start studying up on how I can offer PR to my clients. And I saw the books. I went searching for books first. That's my first thing. Saw the books and saw Lucy's books. And I just thought she sounds like me. It sounds like me talking maybe with an English accent. So I searched out even more and found that she had A and I'm, I know you're going to be talking further about this. She had a sub stack. And that's how I hooked up.

6:43 That sub stack is something I definitely want to dig into first, Lucy. Yeah, fine. OK. Because your newsletter that's it's kind of your bread and butter, for lack of a better term like that. It's something that you really lean on to connect with your community and to get your content out there. And yeah, you were doing it with Sub Stack and you shared with me on our pre interview that your entire sub stack that you built from the ground up got white wiped out. So tell us a little bit about that. So I'm either a genius or just completely bizarre because I took a user journey in the back end of Sub Stack to delete my podcast.

7:31 I set up a podcast, realized that I didn't have the cadence, the time to keep it going. I think cadence is one of the most important things, whether it's a podcast, touring newsletter. Mark's nodding, so he agrees. Like you need to be able to set a routine and stick to it. And I wasn't so I thought, you know, it was sat on the top of my Sub Stack publication page and I couldn't find a way to get it off that top bar of my newsletter web page. So I thought I'm just going to delete it. Now the first error I made was naming my podcast the same thing as my sub stack because then what happened was when I I read an article on sub stack help because I couldn't find it in settings. There's a lot of complicated settings in the back of the sub stack.

8:12 So I saw this article, which is, you know, find the podcast settings and go to the danger zone. So I searched podcast in the danger zone, found it saw the danger zone type type yourself thought us deleting the podcast actually deleted the entire publication. Now what's subsequently meant from that is I didn't actually get anything pop up to say do you need to cancel your paid subscribers or let your paid subscribers know it. It just went and now they have changed the wording and they have built in a separate step Thanks to me. That means if you want to delete your entire publication, you do have to disconnect your Stripe, so you're slightly more aware of the steps that you're taking. So that was kind of hurdle number one. I lost 220 recommendations from other sub stackers, which was how I was growing.

9:01 I was growing 500 free readers a month through the recommendation tool. Yeah. How many? Total did you have at that time when you lost it? About 13,000 but I hadn't second lesson for all of you back up your data. So I was writing directly into sub stack. I was creating all my content directly in Sub Stack, and when I started I was pretty good at doing a monthly export of my database. You know, life is lifing. I have three children under the age of eight and a bonkers dog. My husband works away a lot. I hadn't backed it up for a while, so I actually probably lost about 700 people from the backup that Sub Stack were able to give me from when I'd last backed it up. I'd also lost 200 articles and I do monthly live sessions. So a bit like we are talking now, it was all hosted on sub stack and all those videos were gone. Luckily for me because I had been recording them on Zoom, I did have a lot of those backed up so I could re repost them but I essentially I had to start from scratch and obviously that was my main income.

10:12 I set it up in my third maternity leave. Previously to that I'd run a PR and branding agency and so I had decided whilst I'm on maternity leave, rather than paying for think if it can MailChimp and all these other systems, I was just going to house it all in this one safe place. So it definitely need kept me a little bit and then a few weeks later I started to see my revenue was going in decline. You can you can see a stats on the back end and somehow in between getting the new publication set up. So I just renamed it the same thing but changed the branding. So it was hopefully obvious to people that it was a new site. The engineering team at sub Sack had accidentally disconnected the stripe and it took about a week to realize that that's what had happened. So in that time, anybody whose subscription renewed were receiving notifications that their sub stack paid subscription have been cancelled. Now luckily I have a lot of my audience I've known for a really long time.

11:11 So a lot of them were instantly reaching out to me to be like, are you cancelling your sub stack? Are you not doing it anymore? Obviously this cancellation notice and that took that probably was actually even harder. I likened it a little bit to like when you have a newborn baby, like everyone comes to you in those first few weeks. Are you OK? Do you need anyone to clean the house? Can we do a meal? And then it's maybe like a few months later when you're really sleep deprived that you need that offer. Actually, for me, it was a few months later when that disconnect happened that I was like, oh, I'm just really struggling here and I lost my my flow. I said that was a bit tricky. That sounds like it. And I know you mentioned the little, little tip there, make sure we we back up everything.

11:53 But is there a big take away that you think that creators or podcasters can learn from that experience? I think researching properly the outlets that you're hosting your content on, because what I did afterwards is I spoke to Beehive, I spoke to button down, I spoke to Ghost to see, could I replicate this problem? Because if you think for an example on Instagram, even if you accidentally deleted Instagram post, it's archived for 30 days, right? So it couldn't quite fathom how all of that content had been gone. And so I actually moved today and we can talk more about what led to the move as well to Ghost, because you cannot accidentally delete all of your content on Ghost. It's a different section.

12:40 And also they do back it up. It's archived for a month. So should I accidentally fall into this same habit that I did before of sleepwalking my way into deleting everything? I've got some insurance there. And after rebuilding everything, what shifted for you creatively? Did that change anything for you from a creative standpoint? Yes. I think I can be very energetically LED. So if I'm feeling like I particularly want to talk about a topic, I'll talk about it. And I hadn't really got my sort of topics in advance prepared as much as I wanted to.

13:20 So then when it all went down, I really did have that kind of writers and creative block of like what to post next. And I was talking about what was happening quite a lot, which to my engaged audience was fine, but to new people. Like I remember one person emailed me and said, I heard you on a podcast that you give PR tips, but all you seem to be talking about is that you've lost your sub stack. I was like, this is a good point. So now I have like a large sort of because the other thing I did when people joined, they would tell me what their PR challenges were. And so I would write posts of subject lines of challenges my audience would face. But of course, when I lost everything, I also lost, I had about 100 in drafts, which I know sounds crazy, but what I used to do is I'd go into my drafts and be like, OK, what feels like it matches from last week, what was everybody talking about at the moment? What's topical and pick one of those. So I suddenly lost my kind of creative database as well. So for me now it's definitely having more autonomy over those creative ideas and having a bit more of a road map mapped out. And, and I think the final straw for me that kind of led me to leave was them connecting to Apple Pay. Because before the whole sort of premise of sub stack was you owned your audience.

14:39 There's a lot of news over the over the last week about Patreon and this as well about whether you can move your audience with you or not. With Apple Pay, you don't in that audience like Apple does and they take 30%. So when I left, I had to individually message any paid subscriber and Apple Pay and ask them to come and restart with me on on the new platform. Whereas with a Stripe account, you can just pick them up and move anywhere. So yes. And now I'm not paying 10% sub stacks. So that's. Nice. OK, that's nice too. I think Dr. has a question for you. Go ahead, Dr. You had said that what prompted Sub stack to do this was because you took a little sabbatical.

15:20 How long was that sabbatical? I was a self-employed person on maternity leave who had just moved to France, so I didn't really kind of have maternity care provided for in France or the UK. But I gave myself three months. I worked, I sort of put some money and savings in the run up of that baby being born to have some income tucked away. And I came off social media, all platforms, all channels for three months to really think about what was my career pivot going to look like, Where did I want to go next? That's good to know for all sub stackers that if you do something before three months passes, so I appreciate that.

16:00 Thank you so much. And let's talk a little bit about some PR now and, and the different types of things you talk about in your newsletter. And one of the things I know we talked a little bit about previously was the fact that a lot of podcasters say they want PR, but you say they often start in the wrong place. Yeah. Where is that wrong place and where should they be thinking about starting first? I think rather than starting with this is my dream media outlet, like this is my dream podcast or my dream publication, I would really be thinking about the very first question you should be asking yourself is what are your business goals? What are you doing your podcast for? Is your podcast to promote your business services? Is your podcast your business?

16:48 Are you trying to get brand deals for your podcasts? Are you trying to grow that audience to then farm them out to your newsletter or another area of your business? Or is this just, you know, hobby? Is it a side hustle that runs alongside your business? And that for me then shapes where your PR efforts should be because if the goal is to just increase your audience, then yes, maybe getting on a few other bigger podcasts or getting mentioned in press might help. But if you're trying to get a brand partnership, then I would be focusing my PR efforts on making relationships with marketing partners and partnership managers of those brands and coming up with a tailored package to them, maybe starting to seed that brand already naturally into the podcast so that you're naturally building that of relationship. I also think we are quite often ego LED and we see people with large follower numbers.

17:48 This could be a podcast or social media or a news outlet. And actually then we can almost be swallowed up within an article because we're a small fish in a very big pond. And I've actually seen for me and for the audience that I work with that some of the most effective sales drivers for people is actually smaller podcasts and smaller newsletters where the audience is hyper engaged on a specific topic. So I think it's also focusing on who is the audience that I want to be working on or whiz to hit my business objectives and where are they playing? Where are they hanging out? How can I get in front of them? You mentioned something you said that you recommend if the goal is to partner with brands.

18:36 You were talking about connecting with different marketing people, different brands. So I know this is a little bit broad of a question, but work with me here. How would they do that? How, What kind of advice would you give for people, podcasters who really want to connect with these marketing people in these different brands? So the first thing I do, which is slightly unconventional, is I do actually like start with a mood board or a vision board for myself. And I actually have one on my desk. And what I do is I put logos of brands that I want to work on on that. And I have it by my computer. So if for a while I haven't been doing any outreach, I'll see that list and think I don't I need to be doing something here.

19:18 On a very basic level, I'd be following those, the brand channels of those brands. So on Instagram or TikTok or LinkedIn, wherever they they are playing. And then I would also be looking at the content creators they're working with already, because that's going to give you an idea if you're the right fit or not. And more often than not, when a content creator has worked with a brand or a campaign, they're going to tag people in that as well that work there. So that's one way you can find those sort of people. But I also love a LinkedIn search, like a gentle stalk, but in a non creepy way, right? So we're looking for kind of brand partnership managers, marketing partnership managers and. I do that search bar look at people first in my first connections to see if maybe somebody else in my community is already connected with them, and I just start that gentle connection again.

20:12 People who are working on influencer creator podcast campaigns tend to share it. So why would be looking to engage with that content? And for me, this isn't like an overnight dopamine hit of sending out a cold e-mail and then having 10 grand land on your desk the next day, right? I think it's a slow burn to build those relationships. And then for me, I would be looking to see if they've got a specific campaign running or a topic that they're working on. So I think for example, like finance and technology normally have a specific product or service that they're pushing any one time. And if you're already using that product or service, I would then start seeding that you're using it and then almost mock creating some creative or not creating an episode or something and sending it to them bespoke, which yes, is a bit of time. But the payoff on that is that you're sending something really tailored to them and they could see what working with you would look like, what the quality of the creative would look like. I think it just sets you apart from the millions of other people who just sent a code e-mail. That's a great tip.

21:20 I love that idea. We talk about that sometimes here about social media. Sometimes, you know, create posts, create reels or Tik Toks that are specifically catered to that brand you really want to work with. And I but we don't talk enough about the idea of maybe even creating like a, a short podcast episode, even if it's not one that you would normally put out, but one that maybe you want to try to use to capture the attention. Of it doesn't even have to be a live podcast, it can just be like a short sample one that you make just for them. I love that idea. And earlier you mentioned you were talking about press releases and big media. And I'm curious, why do you think that those press releases, big media features rarely move the needle for most shows?

22:06 A couple of reasons. I think a lot of the time if we're landing in print media, it's not necessarily going online and that's why online content like other people's podcasts on newsletters work so well for us. Also, the SEO of print media isn't great. So if you Google yourself, you could do it right now in Incognito mode and particularly select images on Google. The things that come up are usually going to be podcasts, YouTube, social media, not print coverage. And I, I'm going to hype myself now for a minute, just say I've been in like every national newspaper in the UK, I've been in Forbes, I've been in Business Insider. But if you search for me online, that's not what's coming up.

22:49 So I can say I've been featuring these things and put the logo on the website and link to those articles for kudos. But actually, if somebody is looking for PR for small business, like Dr. said right at the beginning, she didn't find me through a press article. She found me because I'd written a book. She was looking for books. So I think it's incredibly hard with the shrinking media landscape of print press to get mentions because unless there's like a listicle, for example, of, you know, here are the top 10 podcasts with podcasters, or here are the top ten PR people for small business, it's hard for you to fit in. I encourage people to learn more and telling a human interest stories of finding something that they they can talk about that maybe links to their work. So for me, it might be my business success allowed me to move from the UK to France, for example, or things that actually ended up in the property pages rather than like in small business and entrepreneurship.

23:44 But it's still linked back to my business. So when we are just focused on a press release for our podcast or our book or our product or whatever our service is, it's harder to to get in there. And I think there are so many ways that we can get pressed that are better than that, but it's so much easier to just pitch to somebody else's podcast or somebody else's newsletter. And we know that newsletter to newsletter or podcaster podcast referrals tend to work so much better in terms of driving audience over. So if we're time poor, which most of us are, especially if we're self-employed, why are we spending so much time on something that's not going to work as hard for us as going, hey, actually I'm friends with Mark. I've been listening to his show for a long time.

24:25 I should actually pitch myself as a guest for him. Let me ask you this. I mean, this might sound a little extreme, but based on something you just said, is it then more effective to say maybe write a book than it would be to try to get a press release out on something that you're doing as far as getting a discoverability and that sort of thing? Yeah, 100%. But obviously writing a book takes a long, much longer time than a, than a press release. But yeah, in terms of opportunities that have come to me, I've had hundreds of opportunities that have come to me from books versus yes, I've maybe had a few clients that have come to me through press opportunities, but it's definitely few and far between.

25:09 I've definitely made more income or have more new business leads actually from appearing on podcasts. In fact, I was doing a 1 to 1 mentoring call with somebody on Friday and she did a podcast that my friend had set up. It was a brand new podcast. She did a season of 6, she never repeated it. The audience was very small and somebody who listened to that show one year later just bought a three grand coaching package from her. I was like, that one hour of your time just made you £3000 a year later. And you know, it's the same with dollars or EUR. I think it's never to be underestimated. The Evergreen value of promoting your podcast and other podcasts or other newsletters where there's an audience there who might discover you because they're searching for that topic at a particular time.

25:56 And I want to pause and see if any of the team here on stage has any questions for Lucy around PR and podcasting or PR in general. Yeah, Dr., go ahead. Lucy, I'm scared that if I make my message too clear or too consistent that I'll lose, I don't know, some of that creativity or range that I want my work to show. What do you think about staying recognizable in this AI world while still giving yourself room to be creative? Everything is so cookie cutter now. I guess one of the ways that I do that, as I try to bring in different sides, it's not just information based.

26:38 So I tend to, with the founders and the entrepreneurs and the small business people I work with, give you 3 sort of buckets, right? So bucket number one is your business expertise. And that is the bit that probably AI can kind of take over because people can Google search that. But then you layer that with human interest. And for that, that's the kind of the personal stories of like your journey, you're behind the scenes, the things you like. And the last one is passion points and passion points for me that if you were a magazine, what is the equivalent of your horoscope and recipe pages? Like what do you do in your spare time? What are the things that you like? What are the podcasts you're? Listening to like random.

27:18 Facts. Random fact. What do you like doing outside of work? What do you do that's really weird that maybe only the people who are really close to you know? Like making vanilla extract. OK, shut up, do. You make vanilla extract? Yeah, I have a whole. Collection of vanilla extract that I've made that I've brewed myself. So I would be bringing the story of the vanilla extract into your teaching, into your learning. And also you just never know, like maybe there's a press article or something in the future about vanilla extract. You're going to show up and you get quoted as somebody within that piece. The other thing I do, and this is like a new thing that I'm doing, which is very subtle, but it helps me and my brain. I kind of color code my content.

28:05 So my main work is green. Then I go, right, okay, this is a green thing if if it's a directory or resource I'm creating. So I create a directory of podcasting newsletters looking for guests every other months for my paid newsletter readers. So that would be a blue thing. If it's about me, it's Peach, like very soft and I live in Provence, Provence colouring. And then if it's a free for all, it's yellow. And then that helps me that when I look on my website or my social media, if I haven't done something yellow for a while, I'm like, hey, I need to do something for the freebies. I haven't given something free for a while. Or if it's all green, I'm like, OK, I'm giving them too much to do and nobody wants to be given too many tasks and prompts. So I need to maybe bring in some orange now. So I'm giving some personal stories and the color coordination sort of helps me to bring those different elements of my life together.

28:55 And I think for people who are multi hyphenates who sell different arms to their business, it's a really clever way of doing it. Well, so people's are like, oh OK, it's a vanilla extract day with Dr. and that's yellow. And Dr. But I know you have another question, and before I go to you, I know Ralph also has a question, so I'm going to check in with you, Ralph. Good morning again, Sir. Yeah. What's your question for Lucy? Good morning, Lucy. I'm Ralph. I work with a content creator from the accounting perspective. That's what I do for a living and I have a couple of shows myself. And my question specifically is a lot of content creators get worried when they hear a press release and they hear PR firm and all that. Kind of what's a realistic amount that they should be budgeting for something like this?

29:37 What does this really cost? That's a really great question. I think it depends if you're working with APR agency versus a freelancer and whether or not you're looking at like a freelancer who's got senior experience. For me, a reputable PR agency normally is going to start with a retainer and that kind of like 3 to $5000 a month. So it's a lot they might take on a project for. I know some PR agencies tend to work on more project based things that might start from $5000, whereas if you're working with a really good senior freelancer, you maybe don't need as much time. You maybe need a couple of days with them and again, they might work on a project fee.

30:24 But if it's a reputable freelancer, they're probably going to be in the sort of four to $800 a day thing, which is why as well, I think when there is so much you can do yourself, the return on PR sometimes isn't always there on that traditional PR route. Because yes, they can take the time to write your press release, but they can't guarantee that anyone's going to write about it. So it's a bit of a scary thing, which is also why I've moved away from that kind of PR agency model. And I like to talk about all the ways that you can hype yourself because I can see from a business perspective, it's not always the most effective way to spend your money unless you have a huge income coming in. And that's kind of complicated because, you know, it's they say you pay with your time, you pay with your money. And if you're busy doing other things, you're trying to create content, you know, how do you make that decision that I'm going to outsource this and like, what does that look like? You know, how do you go find the right person? I think asking for recommendations publicly of like have you worked with a reputable freelancer? An agency in a similar field you will get people then pitching themselves or people tagging their friends. Like I accidentally did this the other day and kind of had like 50 comments on my LinkedIn for APR project that I was trying to source a good freelancer for.

31:45 But I think Germany there are industry niche people and it's sort of asking if you're seeing another content creator getting a lot of good press coverage. I'd say like who are you working with or are you doing it yourself and finding out that way? Because more often than not as well, I I'm a big fan of the geeks and their niche. I'm not a big fan of people with huge followings because I don't necessarily think they're the people giving the best service. So if APR person is too busy to promote themselves on social media because they're working with content creators, then I generally take that as a good sign. And I know we have more people wanting to ask questions. So thank you, Ralph, for yours. And let's check in with Sid.

32:27 Sid, good morning to you. Good morning, everybody. Lucy, it's nice to see you. Thanks for joining us today. I'm a geek in the niche, as you said. My podcast is about office furniture and the people that work in the office furniture industry, predominantly in the United States. And I'm curious if you could share your thoughts on why a podcaster and how a podcaster or what a podcaster should use subsec for. As in the office furniture space or any podcast? Just in general, just in general, as a podcaster, why? Why should we want to use Subsac and how should we use Subsac? I think it's back to the business girls question of do you want to monetize your writing?

33:13 Do you want to be taking your podcast to a new audience? Because some people only use Sub Stack for podcasting and they go live on there and they, I think increasingly Sub Stack wants to be like a YouTube. So they want to have live content on there. They want to have people going live on there. So I think one of the ways as a podcast you can do is collaborate with other sub stackers to go live. And they do have a nifty way of after you go live, it instantly sets up as a post that you can then automatically send out to your subscribers. And anybody who's following you can get an alert that you've gone live. So that's quite a nifty way to grow. I guess I would almost throw it back to you to be like, is it sub stack specifically or is it the newsletter format that you want to be using to promote your podcast? Because I I wouldn't necessarily advise a specific platform unless I knew what it was that you wanted to achieve personally.

34:12 That's a really great question. I've never been to sub stack so I hear people talk about it. I don't really know the platform or what it's about. And when I hear people say, oh, you should go check my sub stack, my first thought is oh great, another platform for me to have to figure out. But I published an episode I but weekly should be a bi weekly show. So every other week we publish an episode. For now, I write for an industry magazine. I do publish quite a bit of content, predominantly on LinkedIn. So I mean I'm really active and I don't know what my goal would be for going to sub stack. I know what my podcast business goals are but I have no idea why I would go to sub stacks since I've never been there and I don't use the platform.

34:56 I would say if you're already, if you've already got your systems and processes in place and you're already building nicely and you're growing your audience, then I would stay with you where you are. The only thing I would maybe suggest is I do think it is good to be on on social media platforms, even if you're not proactively using them, so that if your listeners or your audience are on those social media platforms, they can tag you and you can have reached. So I kind of liken it to like billboarding. So I have like an Instagram account for hype yourself, but it's literally just a billboard account. But this is where you go for For more information. So you could have a sub stack account in the name of your podcast and you could maybe just say like, you know, for recent episodes, you could come here If you have a bit of extra time, it could be that you recycle some of the posts on there and you just send out a newsletter once a fortnight to people who maybe want to hear the episode via sub Stack.

35:55 And you could just promote a link to it there and use it as another sort of social media tool. Because for me, it is another social media platform. So it's really how much time you've got and whether your ideal audience is there. But for me, when you're talking about office furniture and being on LinkedIn, I'm like, it sounds to me like you've got the audience match and the the platform quite well matched. All right. So Sid, how do you feel? Any other questions or shall I move on? Just want to make sure you get. No, you can. You can move on. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Lucy. Well, by the way, I should say, if you're vibing with anything that Lucy's saying today and you're interested in her newsletter, her books such as Hype Yourself, Brand Yourself or No Nonsense PR, these are perfect for you to get to know her a little bit better. And we'll include all these show notes for you, all these in the show notes for you.

36:47 And of course, you can find out everything that I've just mentioned and more over at hypeyourself.com. Matt, good morning to you. You had a question for Lucy. Good morning and hi, Lucy. I want to take a bit of a different tack and move away from the technical to something that you've mentioned a bit earlier about kind of having different streams to share different aspects of yourself to build that trust. And it kind of connects to a lot of stuff. I've been hearing from some particular people these days that in particular SEO work, people are starting to divert to AI to get rid of all of their SEM rush and AH refs subscriptions and save 80 bucks a month because some guru on LinkedIn gave them a very generic AI prompt. But not realizing that ChatGPT doesn't have access to all the information that these companies do. I'm not going to ask you about SEO, but more so about how much time and how deep people should be digging into themselves when they're building their personal brand and setting up their feeds that are business and then vanilla essence extract stuff. And I guess how much they should be working with AI as a thought partner to try and arrive at that stuff and what you'd caution people not to do.

38:03 I'm realizing this question is incredibly loaded, so work with it how you prefer. But how little people should be relying on AI for output about their own personal brand and personal stories. Actually, one of the kind of alternative subscriptions that I advocate for is Apple News. Not to like read the news, but I read Apple News every day and I'm constantly reading articles about business owners, about creative entrepreneurs, and I'm seeing the trends in there. And then that helps me with ideas of things that I could be talking about. And like you said, the problem with AI is it doesn't know what your story is.

38:45 So if you really wanted to get into Forbes, for example, you could say what are the Forbes contributors who, and you can go on to Forbes and you can see like what the subcategories are. For example, you could say what the Forbes contribute, who are the Forbes contributors who write about small business, podcasts, creative entrepreneurs, relocation, for example. And then you could feed it like the last 20 headlines that those journalists have written and say, do you could you help me with an example of a headline that could work based on me? And it probably can do an OK job. But the issue is it's not going to know your story, all the nuances about you and everything that's different. So yes, you can use AI as a promotional personal branding tool if you kind of know what the end destination is. And I do think that that's very important. And I think one of the things that people struggle with with pitching is actually refining it into a way that the journalist wants to receive it.

39:44 So I would use AI at that end of it, but at the creator end of it of like, what is my story? What should I be sharing? It's I honestly think it's consuming, which a kind of is alternative advice. It was like you should be creating, not consuming. But I disagree, particularly if you want to be on a particular podcast, or you want to be featured in a particular newsletter, or you want to be featured in a particular magazine. Or a newspaper like have the courtesy to actually understand what they talk about and we've all seen this right We've all been on LinkedIn, accepted a cold connection and then we've received a pitch. You're like, this is nothing to do with what I do and I unconnect immediately and then I don't have time for this. Like this is so terrible versus I remember once I employed somebody when I had my PR agency because they're like, hey, like I've only worked in B2B, but I can see you're working with these consumer brands and I really want to move into that space.

40:39 And here's how I can apply my skills. And This is why I think I would fit really well in your team. And I was like, honestly, that I'd had so many people who kind of sent blank CVS being like, if there's a job opening here you are. She didn't even send me ACV. It was just a bespoke e-mail. And I think there's a lot to be said that it's the same with the press. The problem with the press releases, it doesn't tell the person what the story is really or how they can use it. Like if you sent me a press release about your book, I've then got to read what the press releases to figure out how it's going to fit into my world. Versus if you go, hey, I see sometimes on your Instagram you talk about books or in your hype monthly, you could include links to stuff that you've read or seen with this fit for it, you've already done the job for me. I think AI can maybe help with the shaping of where that could go at the ending.

41:30 But when you start listening, reading, watching, you really get a feel for the types of the stories that these outlets are interested in. And I guess my biggest hack in terms of like press, there's two things. One is the hashtag journal request or Harrow Harrow helper reporter out because it's much easier to get into press if a journalist is putting out a story and you're responding to it. Second of all, I love submitting opinion pieces. So if you see a topic in the news or in ATV show or an awards red carpet and you think I've got an opinion on that, you can literally Google how to submit an opinion piece to the New York Times, The Washington Post, like Modern Love, The Guardian, The Times, like whichever your outlet is. And it will pull out what the requirements are, what the submission details are, how to get in there. And you could then maybe work with AI to tailor your answer to that.

42:30 But the original creative that's got to come from you. That's really great to hear, but the follow up quickly that I'd have to that is just to ask if you've splashed out on your own, you're doing your own thing with the hype and everything around that in exploring your own story. Like the line on your website I think is I'm going to read it now because I don't think it's been read on here yet. It made me stop and do all the things that you're talking about. I think so. This where you introduce yourself. Hiya, I'm Lucy, the author of three books and Co founder of Three Children with a 20 plus year career for some of London's top creative agencies and startups. It does all the things in marketing so well where it leads off with personality. There's a disruptive hook right in the middle that if you pass over too quickly, you're kind of like, hang on, I got to go back and read that again.

43:19 All that is super clever, but I think it's deploying what you know incredibly well about marketing and PR, but at the same time knowing a lot about yourself, because that sentence, Co founder of three children, says a lot more about you than the rest of the the sentence does. So how much internal exploring when you were coming to approach hype yourself, did you do like you were journal or are you, have you been in a bunch of conversations with podcasters and kind of reflected back to them and discovered it that way? How did you do it? I think honestly, part of it is looking at my competitive set and then going what makes me different? Because there's lots of personal brand or PR or visibility strategists and maybe, you know, having three children doesn't necessarily make it different.

44:09 That line actually came because I used to run my PR and branding agency with my husband, but it was my agency, it was my name on the door. So I didn't want to give him Co founder of the business. So I gave him Co founder of the children as his job. So, so that's where it started from. But it does make people giggle. And I guess one of my values, so I talk a lot about if you're starting out your personal brand, kind of know what your values are is fun. You know, I'm fun. I'm also quite direct and sometimes those can both backfire in me as well. But if you know upfront that that's what you're going to get, you know, I'm going to punch you in the face, but make a good joke and cuddle with you afterwards, you know, then it's a little bit easier.

44:49 Thank you for the compliment about the writing. The website is quite new, so I was a little bit nervous when you started to say you were going to read from the website because I know there's lots of breaking links and typos on there. We're still, I'm still bedding in, but I think it is honestly just kind of writing down all of the things that makes you different from any of your competitors. Like what can you talk about that none of them can talk about? And not just this is my signature process. Like it's you. That's what makes you different. That is actually why someone's going to buy from you and not AI because they like how they feel in your company. The similar thing happens in the podcast production space where people want to sell their services, so they say everything that they do that's exactly the same as every other podcast producer does. But having the story in there a little bit about you that makes you unique and makes that person double take on a sentence like that is really good.

45:43 No, I think that's it's so excellent. And I'm always, with what I do in the podcasting space, A proponent for reflection and for people to reflect and re reflect and not just pump stuff out there necessarily, but to think about how someone looks at that feels and then think about that person recommending to the next person and see what they think. And even if it's just in a vacuum, like you get to a sentence like this, I think we could spend the last 10 minutes unpacking what that sentence means to me. But I think that might be a waste of time just because there's so much value to. Say for everyone else, I did not plant Matt as a as a hype yourself cheerleaders right in the realistic we've never spoken for today.

46:26 I will send the cheque in the post after the recording. Thank you. What you can do is add that call to the website if you need a testimonial for your. Work it is. Thank you. You know, Speaking of unique and doing your own thing, I had to. I have to bring this up because you shared this with me in our pre interview. You once commissioned a dress. Yeah. It's over here a very specific dress and I was wondering if you would share about that and also what's the takeaways for creators from that kind of creative promo? So I was going to be on stage at an event in London. I don't get out very much anymore. The three kids, the Royal France situation, being the main driver of that.

47:10 And the talk was going to be how to bring your digital brand to life. And I thought, I have a business where I teach people how to promote themselves. And I also had a lot of stock, which is on my desk here of these cards. If you're on video, you can see it. They were called the 52 PR tips and they were 52 prompts. And it was, I kind of had lots of old stock. And I thought, what can I do with these? Like I didn't want to just walk around the event. And no shade to anybody who's done this. I just didn't want to walk around the event with like postcards with a QR code or something on, like I wanted to do something that really brought it to life. And I really love Repo's Drag Race. I really love drag Queens.

47:51 I really love Repo's Drag Race as an example of marketing and branding. I could actually do an episode on that on the repeat catchphrases, the repeat formula, how it's not changed in 17 seats. Anyway, I could digress. I won't. I do love the drag community and I thought I can't ever be on that show because I have no skills that would make me viable for it. But I could Commission a drug queen or king seamstress to make me a dress out of these cards. So I drafted a sketch, spoke to a friend who's a drag queen and said do you know anyone that could make me a costume? And it was 500 bucks to get the dress made and it was basically a big sort of puff ball dress. I can send a photo after it for the show. Yes, please do.

48:40 I do. I was actually sitting here frantically Googling it to see if I could find a picture. I think it's on my Instagram. I can run over to my my shelf quickly and they grab it. And basically the dress was like lots of bulldog clips with the cards attached. So the idea was as I was walking around, I could be like, hey, what color card do you want? And show you a card from the dress And then you would keep it. It would have your PR prompt that you've chosen kind of like a kooky astrology reader for PR advice, I guess is where I was sort of going. And then I had QR code stickers for the cards, which gave you a discount to my newsletter. And my thinking was I get photographed in the dress at this event and then give the cards out.

49:20 Unfortunately, I basically got not COVID, but like the post flu after COVID thing that kind of went around, you know, everyone, we suddenly all got taken out by this horrific winter fleet. So we didn't make it. So I ended up launching it just live online and sharing it. And then I was doing like a live session where I was giving you live PR tip readings from my dress and just plucking cards off top or bottom to go live. And actually I've still got paid subscribers from that live event. He came, he just stumbled upon me during this live on sub stack and then discovered me and came and joined the newsletter. So for me, I was like, why would I spend £500 in maybe paying for advertising when I can create something that's my own that shows my unique personality, my flair, the things I like and I can talk about it.

50:09 And actually Mark is a good reminder. I'm like, that dress is never going to get old. The only thing that can happen is I'm going to grow out of it. But I'm not planning on having any more children. So I should hopefully still fit into it for a while. And the beauty is that you can unclip the card. So I can always, if I, because I've got the rebrand now, I might make new prompt cards and then I can redo it. But it's very heavy and it's definitely not for provincial summer weather. It's definitely AUK London dress. It's too hot to wear here. It's very heavy. Well, I have found that link, I've shared it here live on Clubhouse and we will share it in the show notes as well. Your Instagram picture of that. Yes. And what's, what's the take away for creators, you know, using that story, You know, how do we apply something like that as a podcaster?

50:57 How do I apply something like that as a creative promo for what I'm doing? Yeah. Do you think I think, do things differently and how can you do it in a way that feels good to you, Right. So for some of you, probably a lot of the men, you're not going to want to wear a dress made out of prompt cards that promote what your service does. But maybe you actually love magazines and you want to create a Zine that you could leave in your local coffee shops. Or maybe you really like to do in person events so you can actually host a kind of annual podcast celebration to celebrate your podcast. Like maybe there's something that you do in your podcast or something about your product or service.

51:42 For me, it was like, how can I bring it to life? How can I visually bring it to life in a way that matches my values that I kind of was like, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to give myself 1000 LB marketing budget. What can I do? There was a brand in there. It's actually UK based one. It was a dating app called Thursday. And they used to send the intern out every Thursday with 25 bucks to be like do a stunt and say once they bought like a projector and projected onto the advertising on the tube or another time they stood with a sandwich board outside like a mainline train station. So I think it's always challenging yourself, like if I only had 50 lbs, what could I do? But if I suddenly give myself a marketing budget of £500, because then when I spent that money, I was like, that's my money. That is money I could have spent on groceries. Now I've got to make sure I'm really promoting the hell out of that stunt to make sure I'm bringing the, you know, the the value back in.

52:37 I also just think there's a lot to be said for creating surprise and delight moments for your audience and doing things in real life. So finding a way that feels good to you to take what you do and put it in a place where it doesn't belong. Yeah. Thank you for that. And Matt, I see you have a follow up. I see Alex had a question as well. Go for it, Matt, and we'll check in with Alex. So all that stuff is really great and I've been unfortunately, a hyper consumer of Rory Sutherland's content. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him, Lucy, but. Yeah, yeah, I know, Rory. I guess you kind of have to when you're working in a similar space, but being a proponent of someone who of the idea of marketing being something different and changing the context to what not everybody else does is one of the biggest things to work that I think is important to stand out.

53:27 So it may not be a dress like I've already seen some of the lads in the chat and clubhouse going. You'll see my next dress at the next event or whatever, but the trick is to think differently. And the, and the major example I hear from Rory most often is when people try to improve the train system in England. They talk about how they can spend billions of dollars to make it 10 minutes faster and get everyone there quicker. Whereas if you change your thinking and you improve the experience on the train by providing champagne and high quality Wi-Fi access, people would prefer and be happy to sit on the train for longer, which is a different approach to solving the same problem. And I think for everybody who has a podcast or a brand or something they're looking to do, that thinking is how you get there. But the problem is the communities in podcasting particularly, they tend to push the same stuff. And if you're doing what everyone else is doing, there's a lot of competition.

54:24 But if you're doing something different, then you're going to stand out. And I think that's something of like what this dress does or is Zen in a mailbox or, you know, something that is direct for somebody but is different than what anyone else in your niche might be doing. There's no question there. I just wanted to applaud you for the dress, really in a very long way. Thanks, Matt. And here's what we'll do. I'm going to go to Alex and then I have one final question after Alex. So good morning to you, Alex. What? What's your question for Lucy? I'm a little upset because you stole my dress idea. I have all planned out with my daughter that we actually do baseball shirts that are hot tank for that same reason, but not to get the fall that you do. I just love how what's old is new and what's new is old with your approach, you know, hearing the word Zen, I haven't heard that since the the late 90s.

55:19 And it's great to hear that. You need to kind of figure out your way, but look back at what you used to do and try to have that independent mindset to try to bet on yourself or whatever you want to call it. Because I just find that so unique when you're in a, in a space that is so cluttered, everybody's trying to be unique. And it's great to see that somebody's unique, actually unique. Thank you, Alex, appreciate that. And I agree, this has been a joy. And I want to wrap up with this question. So also something we talked about in our pre interview, Lucy, you talked about that idea of still wanting to be the popular kid sometimes, right? Yeah, a lot of creators, I believe, feel that way. So how do you how do you navigate those moments? I think it's two ways.

56:12 One is therapy. I'm not even joking. No, I'm not even joking a little bit on that. No, I think, you know, there's there's creators that I've looked up to for the follower numbers and then you get to connect with them and then you realize there's a lot of smoke and mirrors or this can creators that you looked up to. They've got a lot of followers. You get to know them and you realize they're battling just the same amount of demons as as everybody else. And I think it's important to remember as much as I do try and show up authentically and be my real self, it's still not it's still not the real me that you're seeing. And yes, it might let, I've got a successful paid newsletter, but the things that I did to get here are maybe not something that you would want to do.

56:57 And ultimately when I am in the cool club, because sometimes I get invited into a cool space, I get there and I realized I don't actually like it anyway. I that's why I don't work for somebody else. That is why I work remotely from rural fronts. And I'm getting excited about the rain because now maybe I can go mushroom picking again. You know, I'm really leaning into the more kind of weird person that I am. But the more that I share that, the more I share what I like, who I like, what I like doing, the better the relationships are. And ultimately it's never the cool kids at school at one. It's like, you know, Napoleon Dynamite was right. The you know, the geeks will win. And I think my biggest advice for anyone is consistency, which is really boring. And geeks are great at that.

57:44 The cool piss. The cool kids aren't because they're moving with the trends. So consistency and a health amount of delusion, like I think being quite completely deluded about what you can achieve and running really hard for it is a great activity. Yeah, I love that. Thank you. I think that's a great way to wrap up too. And I do want to remind the audience here, go check out hypeyourself.com if you want to learn more about Lucy, if you want to subscribe to that newsletter, if you want to get one of her books or maybe even take her course if you want to join her on one of her 2026 retreats. She's got a lot going on. So please go to hypeyourself.com, check it out, and let's give Lucy some support.

58:24 Lucy, welcome to the community and thank you for being. Here today. Can I come back? This is great. Anytime. I mean, the timing works better for you than it does a lot of our guests. So you're welcome here anytime. Come join us actually on the Clubhouse platform. Yeah, yeah, I was going to say next time I can wear the dress. Yeah, so, well, then we'll have to have you on Riverside then for that. Thank you so much, Lucy Werner, and thank you to the whole team for asking your great questions as well. We are back tomorrow, 7:00 AM Eastern live on Clubhouse, YouTube, Facebook, all the things. So come join us there. And if you need that info, just go to podcastingmorningchat.com. So until tomorrow, make it a great day everybody.

59:07 Take care.