SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

Tom Antion explains why publicity is one of the fastest ways to increase your perceived value, attract clients, and command higher fees. Drawing on lessons from publicity expert Starlee Murray, he emphasizes that being better known is often more valuable than simply being better.
Key Points
• Publicity raises your value.
o The more recognizable you are in your industry, the more you can charge for your products or services.
o People often choose the expert they've seen in the media over equally qualified competitors.
• Target three different media types separately.
o TV
o Speaking engagements
o Radio/Podcasts
o Each requires a different one-sheet and promotional approach. Using the same materials for all three dramatically reduces your chances of getting booked.
• Clarity beats cleverness.
o Producers and audiences decide almost immediately whether to pay attention.
o Your message must clearly communicate what value you provide within seconds.
o Confusing offers or complicated messaging lose opportunities.
• Simple offers convert better.
o Tom compares publicity to his speaking business, where a single, easy-to-understand offer consistently outsold competitors with multiple confusing packages.
• Publicity eliminates cold calling.
o Instead of chasing prospects, media exposure causes prospects to contact you.
o The conversation changes from "Can I sell you something?" to "Are you available, and what do you charge?"
• Make it easy for producers.
o Successful publicity isn't just about expertise—it's about presenting yourself in a way that makes producers and event organizers want to book you quickly and effortlessly.
Key Takeaway
Being well-known is often a greater business advantage than simply being highly skilled. Consistent publicity, tailored for each type of media and delivered with a clear message, builds credibility, increases demand, and allows you to charge premium prices while reducing the need for traditional sales efforts.

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Episode 1152 – Publicity
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1152 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today we're going to talk about publicity and how it can really, really get you millions and millions of dollars worth of, of publicity. Well, it's publicity. That's what you get. And it can turn into a lot of money. Hope you didn't miss episode 1151. That was simple products. How my simple stuff can make a fortune compared to killing yourself to make complicated stuff that you got to fight to get people to understand. And I think yesterday or the other day when I was doing that podcast, I forgot to mention that your grandmother should be able to understand your product in about 30s. I think I just said your grandmother should be able to understand it, right? But understand it quickly. That's where you make the most money. Uh. Let's see. Hope you didn't, uh, miss my podcast masterclass. You can go to screwthecommute.com/pod, and I'll tell you what the first half is on guesting, which you can start immediately. And then the second half is about having your own podcast and what it can do. The, the doors that can open for you got me invited to the white House. I've got Facebook hacks to get you in front of hundreds of thousands of people and all kinds of good stuff. All right, pick up a copy of my automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Version 3.0 is the latest, but version 4.0 is just that close.
[00:02:01] If you could see me hold my fingers so close together. All right. To coming out. We're just doing the final proof reading, and you can grab that at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And if you want any of these back episodes, you go to screwthecommute.com/episode number. Simple products was 1151. Today's is going to be 1152 on publicity. And of course, check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingtraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org.
[00:02:33] All right, let's talk about the value of publicity. And by the way, I just did an the reason I'm kind of thinking about this now is because one of my mentors in publicity, and I didn't even meet her until I had done 800 interviews, okay. On every Podcasts, radio, TV, national, international news, all kinds of stuff. And she taught me a ton of stuff in the last couple hundred interviews I've done. And you can see that at screwthecommute.com/publicity. We just did a live Facebook about an hour on it. And also she's got an upcoming training if you want to look at that too. But, but it's all basically content and, and tips and so forth on that live thing. Screwthecommute.com/publicity. All right. Now, I did a, I'm attributed to a quotation I came up with years and years ago when, you know, see, I started my career with what I call media marketing because I was an unknown in the speaking business.
[00:03:49] And so I got on radio and TV all over the world, learned the techniques on how to do it, and that started my speaking career. I'll tell you the advantages of that. If you're if you have any interest in speaking. But anyway, the quotation I came up with in those days was that the only way to exceed the average fees in your industry is to become better known. It's the only way, because you may have the same kind of product as anybody else. And yeah, you're a unique if you're a speaker and you have your own stories and so forth. But if you're better known, you can command more money for everything you do. I use the story of there used to be a reality show about cosmetic surgery from some surgeon out of Los Angeles. Now imagine how many cosmetic surgeons there are in Los Angeles. Okay. But people would fly in all over the world to go with this one doctor that they had seen on TV. Now, was he any better than any of the other ones? I suggest probably not. He was just a better marketer. Okay, I don't I don't really know. It doesn't really matter. It's the fact that he got people coming in from all over the world, which absolutely drove his fees through the roof, and it all came from being better known. So that's what we're talking about here. Now there's three major areas.
[00:05:27] And by the way, the celebrity, my mentor in this and the celebrity image coach, her name is Starlee Murray. It's Starleemurray.com. And on this hour long thing, we kind of honed in on three different major areas that you that you'd want to go after. One is TV, The other is on stage or speaking kinds of things. And the other there's two little sections of it. This is radio or podcasts. They're very similar, except radio can be much longer or it can be super short. Podcasts are not generally super short, so there's differences between radio and podcasts depending on what show you're on. And she was talking about how she had literally reviewed thousands of, you know, she's been around else she doesn't look like it, but she's been around doing this for, I don't know, 30 some years or something and been on TV every week for 25 of those years until the pandemic hit, pandemic hit. I said pod Demick like, like the end of podcasts. Actually, podcasts took off bigger during the pandemic. But she said she review these people's one sheets because they thought they knew what they're supposed to do, and they created a one sheet, but they used the same one for these three different major entities. And she said that most of them got thrown in the garbage instantly because it didn't lead with the things that were specific for that particular media, either on stage TV or on air radio podcast stuff.
[00:07:19] So she on this interview that I did with her, she went into the things that why these are bad because you're wasting your effort and you definitely, you absolutely need three different ones for the three different markets. And if you try to just get away with one, you're knocking out 66% of your chances at all. And it's hard enough to get on the media with a good one sheet, let alone and pitch to them if you're pitching generically. So she goes into why that's, uh, that happens. I told the speaking story about how, uh, in one of her whole things is, is that is clarity. And you all know how fast you have to, to attract somebody. Now, the latest things on like what they call hooks on these videos that you see is you got to grab the person in 1 in 1 point seven seconds. All right. Now, that's not necessarily for the long form stuff, but for the short form. And if you want to go viral with millions of views, if you don't get them in that first 1.7 seconds, I mean, check it yourself, get your phone out or whatever. You look at Facebook stories or reels or everything or whatever, and just see how fast you you go through them. Count it. It's really, really fast. All right. So you have to do that.
[00:08:51] And it has to be extremely clear what people are going to get if they bother to stop and watch or read your one sheet or watch your demo video or whatever, has to be very clear. And she's all about clarity. And I related to that because I haven't been beaten in back of the room sales for 25 years. And I and I'm an audience watcher. So I sit in the back of the room and I watch all the other speakers and I watch the audience and they're like thinking, what did he say? What's the gold, silver, platinum, diamond, titanium package? What's. And they're looking at each other all confused. And I'm sitting back there laughing because I'm going to take all the money, okay? Because I got one offer and bam, wham, take it or leave it. Now, it's not that simple because what I have done all the way to lead up to that point led them to that point. But a lot of these divas walk in and they're too good to talk to you, and you better buy my stuff now, because I'm too important and I have to get on a plane and leave. And you're, you know, and you're nobody, so you better buy my stuff, right? So so I take home all the money because my offer is clear. It's simple to understand. They can understand it immediately. See. And so that's the importance of this.
[00:10:12] And this is what we covered for an hour on this Facebook Live that we did. And like I said, I built my whole career in the beginning on this and in getting in the media. And I might have been lucky at the time because I didn't have any training, but I did get some media training along the way, but nothing like I got once I met her. So definitely you want to check this. And, and another one of the big benefits of this is there's no cold calling. And I know some cold calling experts. They're wonderful people. All right. But I made one cold call in my whole career, and I thought I was going to throw up. I couldn't stand it. See, to me, cold calling is begging for work and celebrities, which is I want you to be and you are. If you are known in the media quite a bit, you're a celebrity in your industry. It's not like you're Brad Pitt or something, all right? But you don't have to be to make a fortune if you're well known. But the the whole power struggle of any, any telephone calls or any live interactions you have with people that can give you money changes. So instead of you calling people and begging for work, they call you because you've been seen in the media and the whole power struggle calls because basically they're calling to see they've already been pre-sold and they're calling to see is are you available? And can we afford you? That's the thing.
[00:11:51] And boy, is that a whole different thing than you saying, oh, do you book speakers? Do you do you need this kind of product? And oh, we have a good product. You know, all that crying and begging stuff. See, that's out the window when you're when you're well known in the media. So that's what this is all about. I didn't give you too many tips today other than you have to be specific to the, the genre that you're going after, but I highly encourage you to go over there to screwthecommute.com/publicity. And it's an hour long thing. It's a lot of fun. We horse around together because we've known each other for, you know, ten millenniums. But you will learn the how, the how important clarity is. Because she has been a producer, she has turned down thousands of people that wanted to get on the show she was producing. And so she's turned it around and teaching people how to impress the heck out of those producers and speaker bookers and, uh, you know, producers on radio and TV and podcasts and all that stuff. So, so worth your while to spend an hour with that. And then if you want, she's got this event coming up. I think it's in August, late in August sometimes, but she's just really, really a good person, highly qualified has like I said, she was on TV every week for, I don't know, 20 some years.
[00:13:18] I think it's a world record. Okay, so and not and not being a an anchor hired by the station, she's getting free publicity for her work and all she does by giving tips and everything. And she was just loved and she was on multiple stations. A lot of times people will only have you on one station if you've been on one. They don't want you on the other station unless you're breaking news or, you know, you're some government person. All right. But see, all the stations loved her because she brought these great tips and but she knew exactly what they wanted, exactly how to please them. I think she called it chewing their food for them. She made it so easy for them to book her. See? And that's what she teaches you. So check it out at screwthecommute.com/publicity and go ahead and watch that hour long thing. And then if I can help you on other stuff, you know, I helped her with many things internet wise, but I highly encourage you to watch that hour long. Like I said, you'll laugh and have a lot of fun with it, but it's teaching a good lesson. All right, screwthecommute.com/publicity and I will catch you on the next episode. See you later.