You don’t publish a book without starting publicity. The reason is to create an engagement and gather collective feedback on how the book should look to pivot and improve it. How will you create that publicity? In this episode, Jacquie Jordan, the founder and CEO of TVGuestpert, gives us media and visibility training to help promote ourselves and our book online. She provides insights on why a news hook is important, how to develop it, and how you can make the most out of interviews. Further into the conversation, Jacquie shares her thoughts on how you can get your name in digital media. Tune in as Jacquie breaks down crucial information to help you leverage media and publicize your book (even before it’s finished)!

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Media & Visibility Training With Jacquie Jordan

This is another one of our training. This one is a media training with Jacquie Jordan. If you would like to see her slides, she goes through this presentation. I invite you to go over to our YouTube channel, Superbrand Publishing, and watch over there. Otherwise, stay tuned.

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In this talk, you are going to get media training from one of the best media trainers out there. I will introduce her in a moment. Before we get started, instead of me doing a spiel for welcoming you to the show, I’m going to let Kris Johnson tell you about two workshops she has coming up in August 2023.

I wanted to do something fun for authors in the summer. There are two workshops. The first one is for non-fiction writers, which is on August 5th, 2023. It’s all virtual via Zoom. We are going to go dive into how you structure your book and get people started with the outline process and how to do it. When I say that, I don’t mean outline the way your English teacher meant it, so let that go. That one’s on August 5th, 2023.

The Fiction Writer’s Workshop is on August 19th, 2023. Again, it is Zoom. People underestimate the power of structuring your story. They want to dive into the characters and dive into the plot, but you have to have the structure in place first. We are going to establish that, and then once you have that, you can do anything you want and have a lot of fun with your book.

We are going to have a lot of fun, very hands-on live with me. We are going to have fun with it and get everybody going on their projects. It’s CrushYourExpertBook.com. We are shifting over to a new CRM, so give us a little time to get that all moved over. It will be live probably within a week. It is CrushYourExpertBook.com. The workshop links are on there. It’s only $47. It’s a no-brainer for what you are going to get.

I’m very excited, too. I’m taking the fiction workshop even though I have written six fiction novels because I have one in my head. Poor Kris has been hearing about this for years and I haven’t gotten off my butt to do it, so I’m doing it with her. Our guest, which I’m super excited about, is Jacquie Jordan.

Jacquie is the Founder and CEO of a fifteen-year-old cutting-edge media and content development and promotions and booking platform, TVGuestpert. It offers full-service promotion, marketing, business strategy, and media services for her clients, partners, and collaborators, TVGuestpert Publishing, a New York Times best-seller publishing house, The Guestpert Academy, an online program offering visibility and media training, and TVGuestpert On-Camera Training. She’s going to talk about that and make you guys an offer at the end. She is also a 2-time Emmy nominated TV producer, 3-time author, and host of Front & Center Podcast with Jacquie Jordan, a broadcast podcast. Welcome, Jacquie.

Thanks so much for the generosity of having me here. It’s great to see, everybody. Thank you so much. Let us talk about messaging to impact outside influencers. It’s getting more difficult and complicated in a weird way to get our messages out there, whether we are promoting our books, stories, products, companies, businesses, or ourselves. I find that to be challenging, but mostly because I find that most people are distracted. It’s not that they are not interested or not seeking the information. There’s so much distraction and noise coming at us.

It's more difficult and complicated in a weird way to get our messages out there because there is so much distraction and noise coming at us. Click To Tweet

I have been paying attention to that as I work with clients, guestperts, and authors and trying to navigate them through the clutter, especially business owners, in getting our message out there. What we do at TVGuestpert is take business authors, experts, and owners and work on a media development strategy. We do PR. We do public relations as a tool.

What I feel distinguishes what we do at TVGuestpert from traditional PR is that we are looking to grow a business and leverage it based on the opportunities that we create. It’s not enough to create the opportunity. It’s about media training, the client, and then leveraging the exposure to get the result. That’s what makes us different than a typical PR. We are going beyond creating the opportunity. We are going to say, “How are we going to leverage this and get the exposure?”

There is a psychiatrist, Dr. Gayani DeSilva. She’s been a great author expert with us. She started, green and fresh several years ago. She’s got a platform where she’s in demand. She has published two books with us. A Psychiatrist’s Guide is the brand of her books. She was featured on Elizabeth Vargas’ iCrime, a national show. She’s in demand for it. That’s what we want to create. I have to be honest. It took her and us together about six years to create that national demand where we don’t have to seek publicity for her. It seeks her. She worked hard for it. As authors here, we know the value of books, and she’s got two of them.

At TVGuestpert, we feature a variety of different experts in different fields. It’s about the content. It’s not about the expertise or the product. It’s always about the content. That’s the exchange that we work with when we are working with the media. Juliet did one of our company podcasts. She said exactly what I would have said, but coming from her, it was fantastic. We appreciated that.

TV on-camera training is a big part of it. Since COVID, we have gone online with the Guestpert Academy. We are launching our first course. We broke down media and visibility training, which is different than doing the on-camera training and in-person workshop setting. What we are realizing, especially for us Generation X women, business owners, authors, and young Baby Boomers, is that we are not the Millennials. The Millennials were born with the camera prenatal. They are the first generation when they had a selfie in the belly.

We didn’t come that way. We were the latchkey kids. We were left behind at home. We fended for ourselves. We are very resourceful, but we are not necessarily the in-front of the camera generation. We are different that way. We rule the world, but we do it from behind the scenes. As of social media, LinkedIn, and all of the platforms, we are being forced to come out of the closet and be the face of our business and our work. That’s quite different. Not everybody’s comfortable with that. At the Guestpert Academy, we are taking the process for our experts even through the very beginning of the process to warm people up so they feel good about doing it.

Juliet brought up Tara Reed, one of our company authors. She’s a great example of someone who’s been attacked and trolled, needless to say. She is a really good example. We are not at the Tara Reade level, but none of us want to be attacked for putting ourselves out there or trolled. Brené Brown is somebody I talk about in the Guestpert Academy. She did two big Ted Talks on vulnerability. When she did her talk on vulnerability, the trolls came after her for her weight, her look, and her age. None of that feels good. At Guestpert Academy, we even start there with our visibility and media training, warming us up to remembering why we are putting ourselves out there. It is not about being seen.

I have to be honest. For as much as I’m out there myself, I’m never personally comfortable with it. I have done it as a means to an end and I have desensitized myself towards it, but ultimately, I still have to take a deep breath. Even when I send the company newsletter out, I take a deep breath. When you have big mailing lists and big audiences, you are going to get flack. It is the nature of it.

On our TVGuestpert Instagram, I was told I was a narcissist and I was as fake as the Botox in my face. That made me laugh. I thought, “Maybe I’m famous. Maybe this means I have made it. I have got haters.” With our upcoming Guestpert Academy visibility training, we start there because, in this social media world, people have gotten a little bit meaner than they are allowed to.

In this social media world, people have just gotten a bit meaner than they are allowed to. Click To Tweet

That’s what we are doing at Guestpert Academy with our program, Reality Bites, Bite Back. It’s specifically geared towards Generation X women like us and young Baby Boomers, not the older Baby Boomers. We are on the cusp of the Gen X group. We are forced to be coming out from behind the scenes or behind the curtain at midlife. It’s a weird place to have to do it. There is vulnerability.

At the same time, we have so much hard-earned wisdom. We can’t be hiding behind the scenes anymore because we have the wisdom. The younger generation don’t. They are trigger-happy with their thumbs. They have the confidence, but they don’t have the wisdom. Confidence without wisdom can be dangerous. We have an important role to play in visibility. I’m a big advocate of it, and Juliet’s been a big advocate of me being a big advocate of it. I appreciate that. Our TVGuestpert publishing company is Write Your Legacy or TVGuestpert publishing books. Juliet and I both are extraordinarily passionate about the books that we get to put out for people and do it.

Confidence without wisdom can be dangerous. Click To Tweet

There are several misconceptions about media. Juliet talked about it in our podcast. One of them is you publish a book and then you want to start the publicity. It’s one of my favorite misconceptions. You want to start the publicity long before you even finish writing the book, in my opinion. It’s like why throw a parade for a party and then not invite the guests? That’s what you do when you publish a book and then start the publicity.

The other thing about starting publicity ahead of time or while you are still crafting the book is that you get real-time collective feedback about what the book is or needs to be so that you can still pivot it. A lot of times, we create in a vacuum. We download an idea. We go to work by ourselves, but we don’t test it. The problem with that, especially if we are being downloaded from the zeitgeist, is it often means that a lot of times, other people are getting the same information, too. The problem with that is it is not the first who gets it out of their wins. The first with the biggest muscle who gets it out there wins. A lot of times, that’s not us.

By promoting yourself ahead of time and getting your publicity and message out there early while you are still in the creative process, you can start to create the hooks and the framing that you might not have considered when you were initially doing your work. That’s why the next thing we are going to talk about is about developing your hook.

Much about what we do, as I say to a lot of my guestperts, is not about you. I know it looks like it’s about you, but it is not about you. Here’s an example. I will be candid because this is Juliet’s show here. We have a fabulous guestpert and he has an app that is clever. It is called Hoover. You can travel the world through his app in real-time, like going for a walk with someone in a different part of the world. He’s promoting Africa, which we know a lot of us don’t know a lot about. His app is great.

Apps are very difficult to promote. Books are easier than apps. You don’t see a lot of people promoting apps on TV or in the media. I have to pay attention to him and listen to his story. The story is he’s a veteran. His story is the app helps connect people in different parts of the world to each other. It’s like Uber, but it’s on foot. You can go for a walk with someone in a different part of the world.

We had to develop a hook that was worthwhile. We were doing Military packages because Hoover branded Military packages that go out to veterans. That’s how we have developed a hook to promote his app that wasn’t about the app. We are always backing into stories and developing the hook. What I mean by that is that the media is on target with their agenda for what they are going to tell. I call us narrative busters, but in order to bust the narrative, we have to back into it. We have to reverse-engineer our content. Developing your hook is one of the best skills where you have to have mastery to do it. This is why publicity ahead of time matters in terms of promoting your book because the hook will change. It will change 1,000 times.

I will talk about one of my classic stories. It is on our TVGuestpert YouTube channel. When I was promoting my book, Get on TV!, no producer is going to put me on TV to tell you about a book that’s about getting on TV. I did a national tour about eating chocolate. I’m not a chef. I’m not a nutritionist. I talked about the value of eating raw cacao and losing weight. It landed me on the cover of Women’s World and I had a national book tour for my book Get on TV!. It’s not about what it’s about. It’s about developing your hooks. That’s a little tip there when we go deeper into the Guestpert Academy. Tips like this are also on our YouTube channel. It is also on our Get on TV! book.

Here are a couple of hooks to consider that will help you prompt for your hooks. Timeliness is always a hook. What is the time period? We are going to go into the Equinox. We are going into college graduation. We are going into high school graduation. That’s the timeliness that we are looking at, but we are probably going more in terms of timelines of bookings.

It could be anniversaries, current events, historical significance, cultural significance, holiday season, or summer. Everything’s summer. It could be the beginning of the summer, summer travel, summer clothes, summer vacation, or summer activities. Anything pre-summer is going to be part of the conversation here. Our nutritionist, registered dietician, and physical therapist, Karen Owoc, did Healthy and Frightening Halloween Foods. That was the hook that she used to promote timeliness. That’s the way TVGuestpert approaches to content.

Another hook is the study or a statistic. This is our financial guide. What’s interesting about Daniel is that he’s not your traditional financial guy. He’s a day trader. Those are harder to book because it’s an expertise. The credential is not recognized in a lot of media. We used statistics in order to get him booked, like, “The latest job reports show employment bounces back.” The reason this hook made him viable is that he was able to speak about his day trading, an alternative job within the financial industry. That framing of his expertise allowed us, at this point, to use this news hook to get him booked for television. He was on vacation in Amsterdam at the time we got his news booking for him. This is an example of a news statistic or hook.

Celebrityism is anything to do with celebrities. I, myself, get booked all the time from CNN International to Newsmax to Cheddar Television all about dead celebrities. I get the go-to calls on dead celebrities. I have done everything from Prince to Regis Philbin, Queen Elizabeth, and Ivana Trump. God rest all their souls. When it comes to tributes of dead people, I get a celebrity invitation for that.

Usually, I have a personal story having known or crossed paths in one way or another. For example, Betty White was on the Donny & Marie show, but I got to know her because I would pass her to the veterinarian with her dog. I was there with my dog. She had a Golden Retriever and I had a Corgi dog. We got to chit-chatting.

I have these little stories that work in my bookings for a celebrity, but we do the same for our clients with the news hooks. We have attorney Alexis Rosenberg. She’s talking about the Johnny Depp defamation case live on CourtTV. Since she does insurance law, an insurance company sues her over Depp’s suit. It’s a perfect match for her type of expertise.

We are still talking about news hooks here. One of the most popular news hooks but not recognized news hooks by experts themselves or authors is their personal stories. Most people end up going into their field revocation because of a personal story. This is expert Jeanette Yoffe. She was a foster child. She is a therapist who works with children of adoption, adults with adoption, and foster children.

We did a booking with her on a national lifestyle magazine show where she told her personal story as a lead into her expertise. Your personal story is part of your expertise. It’s also part of your news hook. Does anybody have any questions at this moment before I move on here? Do you have anything to ask about news hooks here or anything about the topics?

Why the dead celebrities? That sounds so morbid. The guy from the doors walks away and Jacquie knows where he’s at.

I have done Marilyn Monroe. I lived down the street from her old house. I used to bike ride past it. I have done Dick Clark. I used to work for him. What a legacy Dick Clark left behind. Who’s the millionaire guy who came to your door with the sweepstakes?

Publishers Clearing House. He was a great guy.

I did his tribute. I worked with his daughter for a brief time.

Ed McMahon?

Yeah. I don’t know how I have been doing it for a long time, racking up the dead celebs. It’s a funny thing to put in my resume. I did not get a call about Tina Turner though, but I did get a call about Lisa Marie Presley. It was quite fun and interesting. Let us talk about building a platform. One of the reasons we create products is we are building a platform. Building a platform for me and my clients and advocacy is about building credibility. That’s why I’m a big believer in books.

I know that people will challenge us and say that people are not reading books and that people are only going into short-form content. That might be true for younger generations, but for people like us and experts and professionals like us, it is very important for us to memorialize our stories. It is important for us to memorialize our expertise. It’s important for us to memorialize our legacy or our lifetime of experience. I’m a big believer in it.

You can take the long-form content and then short-form it out on social media. What we have earned, nobody else has. We owe it to ourselves and to our communities to put our legacy into book form. It does build credibility. In terms of media, we have all seen it. People go out there and they promote a book. The problem with books and Juliet can probably attest to this, too, is books sell, but they aren’t going to change your life. As I say to everybody, you don’t wake up the next day after you have published a book and you are a different person and living a different life. Clients go through the book process expecting that.

Several years ago, I could say, and I have been part of it, “It’s happened.” You go to bed one day and you wake up the next day and the book has changed your life. It’s not like that. However, I would say that all my authors end up living a different life within a year from the time they published a book. Who touches that book, who gets that book, where that book goes, and who finds that book are opportunities that otherwise would not exist in your sphere of influence. It is impossible. There’s a way that a book goes out, and it’s the dissemination or the transmission of your information. It will create opportunities for you that you otherwise would never have had had you not done a book.

A book is a business card. It is a calling card. When it’s approached from that perspective of, “I’m going to invest this time and money into creating my book,” you are committing to alchemically changing the point that you are at in this point in time and space to another time and space based on opportunities in whom you will meet.

I have done three books myself. I’m saying, having been a published author and an author with an agent, I have been through every piece of publishing. Books will change your business. They build credibility. As anybody here has worked on books, it’s a single-focused task, even in 2023. You don’t do other things. You do not multitask when you are writing a book. It is single-focused. It is a complete discipline. Nothing’s going to change that. Even ChatGPT isn’t exactly going to change that part of what we are bringing to the table with books. It does create credibility.

We all know that anybody who has written a book, especially a published book by a published author, what that means is the book has been vetted. The difference between a published author like Juliet’s publishing house and TVGuestperts’ publishing house is the book has been vetted by professionals. Self-publishing runs up against the credibility of not being vetted. We have all seen that. Building credibility is important.

That younger generation you are talking about, the Millennials, I realized that they don’t put the book in their hand as we do as an older generation. Do they tend to listen to the audiobooks more?

I do not want to offend anyone who’s a Millennial, but I bypass that generation to pop right down to the next generation because Obi-Wan Kenobi, “They are our hope.” That twenty-something generation has a lot more values aligned. This is based on research that I have learned from my own TEDx Talk from other books that I have published from other authors of ours. Generation Y and Z are a lot more tactile and tangible. They are going back to the roots. Millennials went all AI. They went all in AI. That’s part of our fault because when they were born, we were like, “Here’s an iPhone.” We got the results of that. Audiobooks are popular. Kindles are popular. I don’t know if I answered the question.

I was curious. My daughter’s 24.

She’s a Millennial.

They gave her a book to read and she said, “I will never read this book.” I downloaded Audible and voila, it was consumed. That’s why I was curious about it.

She did long form, which is great. That’s still a long-form. However that gets in, I’m all for it. I love audiobooks. A lot of people are doing audiobooks. We have a CIA retired policeman operative. We got this picked up by RadarOnline. You don’t think these are significant, but his RadarOnline quote got him the Entertainment Tonight television booking by the end of the day. People don’t think that digital media counts or counts for anything, but these are the direct results of getting your name out there. The producer saw the RadarOnline response. We got the quote out super-fast and then was picked up on Entertainment Tonight. That’s how that translates. I find that to be awesome.

Branding and imaging are very important to me. We have our before and after headshots. They speak for themselves. The reason headshots for me are so important is because when we send our pitches in an email, it thumbs up as a delete. We are going to make an impression on a producer or a journalist based on your picture before they ever read anything else. Before they look at the video clips or before they research you, they are going to get hit with the image that we put in. We do a little tiny thumbnail. That’s it. That is the first impression.

 

I’m a big believer in spending money on good photographers. We will send a photographer to you. That’s how passionate we are. Especially for us as mature women, what we are looking for is great lighting and good makeup. A photographer that understands the craft of lighting and a makeup artist that understands deal photography is important.

What we are seeing with photography and image development is that a lot of people are relying on Photoshop to take pictures. We saw that with Martha Stewart on the cover of Sports Illustrated. It shocked the heck out of me. I was like, “Are we supposed to be looking at an 81-year-old woman? I’m all for that, but is that what we are looking at? It’s not what I’m seeing.”

Having been on the cover of Women’s World magazine wearing a blue shirt and then it coming out with me wearing a green shirt, they will change anything. I’m not a big fan of photography that relies on Photoshop. We lose our distinction of appearance and the authenticity of our expression. I am picky about who shoots my women. I want to know who you are on the impression that I receive. When it’s highly Photoshopped, I can’t read the authenticity of the image.

I’m a big advocate about how, for us mature women especially, I don’t think anybody should shoot us or can shoot us. When you are looking for photographers, you want to see pictures they have shot of women our age. It doesn’t have to be an old-fashioned camera. Maybe they can shoot great with an iPhone. I don’t know. I’m looking for great lighting and great expression here. Your image is where your money is going to come from and when you are putting yourself out there. With some of these original images, I’m like, “I can’t do anything for you.” My starting place sometimes in many places is working with someone and getting their image done. Thank you for letting me share that.

Here’s a little pathway for what TVGuestpert does and how we approach things. There is a good friend of mine and author, Darren Campo. We are co-writing a book together called Artificially Intelligent: Smart AF in an AI World. He’s an NYU professor and a former television executive. We got him to co-host a TV show called Better Living on NBC. We have done several sci-fi books for him. That’s why he’s the appropriate person to write artificial intelligence books. We have done multiple sci-fi books for him and promoted him. We have also handled the web design of his book. You can see the style of the branding through the architecture of his images.

He’s been a client of ours and an author of ours for 15 to 20 years. When we were promoting his sci-fi book, we started promoting him with that news hook on artificial intelligence before we hit this epic tipping point. He’s been an expert in multiple media accounts over artificial intelligence for a long time. That’s what good positioning, good branding, and good news hooks will do to give you a platform and credibility. I always say the longer someone’s a client of ours, it goes to show you that what we are doing is working for them. That’s Darren Campo.

Good positioning, branding, and news hooks will give you credibility. Click To Tweet

Moving on to topics here, let us talk about interview styles. We are going to cover this at Guestpert Academy. You should sign up for it. We should know the different types of interview styles for media. We are getting accustomed to Zoom, and I will talk about that in a minute, but when you are on set or in-studio, the traditional interview style is a sit-down interview style. It’s called traditional live or live-to-tape.

We had Christy Whitman on the Hallmark Channel. She’s done The Today Show. She’s our New York Times best-selling author. She has done multiple books. She does a lot of live sit-down interviews. We call this one, the old-fashioned way of saying, the electronic news gathering piece. That’s the old vernacular. It’s also known as a field piece. The reason you want to know the difference is when they come in and they shoot you. I haven’t gotten an electric bill since Hurricane Ian. The local news did an ENG or a field piece. That’s typically what you see on your news shows at night.

Another interview style that is important to know is the demo segment. This is not to be confused with the demo reel. A demo reel is your demonstration reel of all your appearances. A demo segment is a show-and-tell segment where you set a table and you do your Vanna White all the way across the table. It’s a different type of cadence, style, and methodology for delivering. Go for it.

That is something you need training for because there’s lighting. Your food can melt. It’s intense.

Four minutes goes fast. Usually, in a demo segment, you are going to get to an end result. You want to make sure you hit the steps to get to the end result. Those are fashion segments or demo segments. It’s very popular. It’s the easiest way to get booked because it’s the best visual for a network or a show, but it’s the hardest to execute if you have not properly trained.

The other hard one is a satellite interview which we are becoming more accustomed to because of Zoom. I did CNN. I will describe the situation. I was at the CNN studio. They have these little tiny rooms and you sit at a little tiny desk. They pop a little thing in your ear. The show’s not happening in your space. They will pop an IFB in your ear and put a microphone on you. You have to stare as we do in Zoom. You stare at the little camera for as long as you can and not blink, and then it is like, “Go.”

With Zoom, we have had to ante up to that level. I do a lot of news television appearances. I do it the same way as I would a satellite interview. I put the headphones to my ear. I use hardwired headphones because I don’t want Bluetooth going out. I don’t want interference. I got tiny ears. I don’t want the earbud to pop out, so I cover it with my hair. I wire it to my computer and stare at the little dot. You cannot be distracted by what’s going on on the screen. That’s the mastery of a satellite interview. I’m looking back and forth more here, getting your visual feedback than I am staring in that little circle. That might be distracting to you. Watch me, watch you. It is distracting. You don’t want to see that on TV.

Let’s talk about Skype and Zoom here. I like Zoom better than Skype, but a lot of media uses Skype over Zoom. Here are my three examples. The first one is great lighting, good eye, proportion to head placement, fantastic eye-to-camera contact on the computer, and a fantastic visual background. In this show, because of Juliet, I’m way more intimate in my space than I ever am in a broadcast interview. I don’t show markers of where I am or where I live. It’s very professional and neutral. I give no clues away because this is Juliet’s invitation. I am doing this in more of the approach of we are talking amongst a specific community about our business work and our authorship. I’m more casual than I would be.

When you say that, you are talking about having the green screen behind you or having a good background and that type of thing.

You don’t have to have a green screen. I wouldn’t even go as far as a green screen. Using Robin’s example, it’s a colorful background. It’s nondescript. She could be at her office. She could be in her conference room. She could be in the second bedroom of her house. That’s what I mean by nondescript. We don’t know where she is, but it’s easy to look at.

The next one, and this is with media psychiatrist Carole Lieberman, the lighting is poor. The lighting looks suspicious. It makes her look like she’s suspicious. The background is terrible. I’m not a fan. If you can’t get a good background, don’t go in a flat wall. Go into a corner. Create your look from a corner. Most television appearances will not do blur-outs or virtual backgrounds. You have to create a set. You have to create your environment. TVGuestperts will tech-rehearse you through your background.

In the last one, I like that he’s in a corner. He’s got the right setup, but his angle is off. His computer’s off his height-to-eye ratio is off, and then his eye contact is off because his camera may not be. With the iPad, I can’t use that for television because of where the camera is on the iPad. It throws my eye angle. The angle is off. Not all media devices are equal. I use a MacBook Pro Air. The camera is in the right place. I bought a webcam. When I use the webcam, it throws the eye line off to where it is supposed to be. Eye line is everything and good background.

My last guest in this montage has the right style of background. The corners are good. The corners give depth, but his camera is off and his eye line is off. When those things happen, honestly, you lose credibility. It’s an impression of credibility that happens to get lost. I was watching Tara’s interview with Megan Kelly. She looks to the left and she looks to the right. It is her inability to hold eye contact. People may not recognize it but it subconsciously or non-verbally decreases credibility.

I am somebody as a speaker who has had to work so hard to train myself. I would do an eye movement because I would grab my thoughts from the ceiling of my brain and then pull them down and shoot them out my mouth. When you watch me in the media for a long time, every once in a while, I will still do it. I would go like that because I’m grabbing my thought and then I’m pulling it down.

I have had to train myself and work so hard to break that habit that I will stare at that dot as my life depends on it. It’s also forced me to slow down my words in order to hold that contact. When I hold that contact to you, you feel connected to it. When I’m doing this or when I’m doing this, it changes the whole entire way that you are relating to what you are watching. Contact is everything. Since we are forced to do it on Zoom, and we have never been forced to do it before, it means everything. I’m not doing it here because I am watching your reactions, but when I’m doing my business groups, I am all about the dot. I stare at the dot.

The older you are, the more practice it takes, too, because we are used to relationship-building. I like to see your face. I like to see how you are receiving it. You have to practice more as an older generation because we were more relationship-based than tech-based.

We are looking to connect. You are right. I am telling you, for me, one of the hardest things to break was looking up and grabbing my thought. I had to work hard on that. Mean what you say and say what you mean, but don’t say it means. In one of my stories, I was Punk’d by Sacha Baron Cohen in the movie Bruno. I was asked to do a media consultation for a German television pilot. I got vetted for it. I have done this before, so professionally, it wasn’t something that was unique.

I went to the focus group. I showed up at the focus group and this flamboyant man was trying to get me to drink champagne at 10:00 in the morning. He’s making fun of my clothes. Everything was off. I had no idea what was going on. It was very chaotic. They asked if they could film it, which was a clue that it was the wrong vernacular.

I woke up on The Truman Show and realized that I was in the middle of a movie scene for Sacha Baron Cohen’s movie, Bruno. I had asked myself, “Should I stay or should I go now?” I had already taken the money. I stuck with my content boundaries, which I go into in the Guestpert Academy in a big way. I stuck with my content boundaries and stayed. For two hours, he pounded me, trying to break me. It turns out that I was not in the final cut of the movie, but the scene was. They edited me out. They put someone in who had a meltdown. The actual scene was there, but the cutaway was not me.

I always tell everybody if I can handle Sacha Baron Cohen in a movie that I didn’t even know I was in, then there’s no reason you can’t handle everything based on good content preparedness and content boundaries. They’d be like, “How does that look?” Here are a couple of tips for our speaking when we are doing interviews. Don’t repeat your speaking points because you want to make sure you have enough content to fulfill them. Remember to use the camera’s anchor’s name if on camera. In this conversation, which I consider more informal than a formal interview, I have referenced Juliet several times as my host to this invitation.

 

The other great line is, “I don’t know about that, but what I can tell you is.” That’s the line that gets you out of thinking that you are supposed to know everything about everything at any time, which is not true. It happens to me a lot. I will go on the news and stare at my little dot. I’m already with my headphone and proper position. I got my Zoom, my outfit, my hair and makeup, and my lighting, which we will go into another time.

They go to introduce me. They show a clip and it’s not the topic I was booked for. I am four seconds away from going on television live on a topic that they are throwing at me at the moment. I roll with it. When the stump the chump moment comes up or sometimes, it’s one of those gotcha moments, I simply say, “I don’t know about that, but what I can tell you is as a media consultant who’s worked with so-and-so.” That line has saved my butt a million times. It could also be that I will use a framing of, “In my experience, what I know.”

When it comes to promoting ourselves, we don’t have to promote ourselves. We incorporate storytelling. It is like, “What I learned about while writing my book, Get on TV!,” or, “What I learned from writing my book, Heartfelt Marketing, about people who sabotage themselves right before success is.” That’s the line we use where we don’t self-promote. However, we contextualize.

The requirement for any media broadcasting is professional hair and makeup. We can send that to your house no matter where you are in the world. We have done it. It could be the strangest of places but we will find a broadcast hair and makeup person. That’s how serious I am about it for you. For a video monitoring file, a file is different from the link. Gen X, we don’t know these things. Everybody else does, but we don’t.

If you are on The Today Show and the producer sends you The Today Show link, that file lives on The Today Show website. If they change the link because they drop it because they don’t need to carry all that data, you lose access permanently to the clip. What we are providing is a service where we give you the file and you house the data of the file. You can put it on your YouTube, Vimeo, and then, therefore, your website.

If you put all this energy into creating these opportunities, you want to have the collateral in the end. That is how you leverage. The producer is not connected to the backend of the web process and master control, so it is on you to make sure that you are getting the files, not just the links of your programs, and their services for that.

I was in Women’s World magazine. I’m wearing a green shirt. They dressed me. At the time that they shot that, they put me on the grass in a green shirt with green jewelry. I was in a green shirt but they changed it to blue. I say that to show you the level of Photoshopping that goes on. That’s my tour for promoting the book Get on TV!.

The other thing I could say about the Get on TV! book is that the opening soundbite is your real estate speaking point. When you do an appearance and you are introduced to a conversation, you always want to contextualize who you are. The actual clip that I’m speaking about is on our TVGuestpert YouTube channel.

 

The way I was at my opening speaking point here is because chocolate has nothing to do with the book Get on TV!. The way I did my opening sound bite was as a behind-the-scenes producer who has a book coming out called Get on TV!, I asked myself, “Am I the image that I wanted to portray?” M&M Popper, I wasn’t going in the right direction. What I learned was that if I rate raw cacao instead of chocolate with processed chocolate, I could stay healthy and therefore be the image that I wanted to project.

In that opening soundbite, I connected why I am talking about the topic, what I’m plugging, and why the viewers are watching me as an expert. The art of that is you can get that through the Guestpert Academy, the Get on TV! book, or we have the ultimate on-camera training guidebook. These are big skills that make the difference between why you sell a book in a television appearance and why you won’t sell a book in a television appearance.

We have a format for how we write segments for speaking points. This will all be in the Guestpert Academy. I’m not going to overwhelm everybody with this. There’s a formula for how we do speaking points. We write craft segments by remembering to define your expertise and why you are the expert in terms of talking about your segment.

I always say it’s not in the question. Don’t blame the host. It’s always in the answer always. I never want to hear a guestpert say to me, “I didn’t have enough time. They didn’t ask me.” If you are doing the homework and you are doing the work, this is the work right here. You will never miss a beat in the real estate of it. I’m not going to go into the clips here. They will be in the Guespert Academy later on. Don’t blame the viewer for it.

We will also, in the Guestpert Academy, go into what happens if they say the name of your book wrong, what happens if they say your name wrong, how we handle those types of situations, and how to look good on camera. I love Mark Zuckerberg sweating. He’s sweating probably because he is lying. It is not just only because he doesn’t have professional hair and makeup done. It is making sure that you look good on camera. The difference between good hair and makeup makes a difference.

For men, we call it grooming. Quite frankly, they got the nose hairs going. They got the hairs coming out of the ears. We don’t want to see that. We don’t want to see a man sweat. I had one gentleman on. We talked about camera positions with your body, which become very important depending on what parts of your body that are being shown. I don’t believe you are too old for TV. I have a good example of all my fabulous older, mature people. Why are they on TV and not other people? It is because they have great content. We are never too old to be famous, and I can attest to that with my clients.

We will go into what to wear. I’m big on bright colors, cool tone colors, staying away from subtle prints, and busy movements. What I always say with what to wear is to always bring an extra outfit. Bring an extra outfit. Why? It is because you don’t want to be the third person wearing white. If you bring an extra outfit to your appearance, you have the opportunity to change it. It makes you stand out because it’s about the real estate for you.

I won’t go into the rest of these details, but there are all these different places where you can find us and stay in touch. We are always doing tips. Juliet did one of our podcasts with Aria Tejero. We have a whole entire series with folks and experts like Juliet talking about how to niche new ways to be successful in the media as Juliet offered us. It’s been a real privilege for having us here. Please stay in touch and let me know what I can do to support you.

For a moment, on your website, TVGuestpert.com, you have courses over there.

The Guestpert Academy.

Go take a look at these. They are very reasonably priced. What’s important here, and I even found myself doing this on Jacquie’s show, is I went on too long. You need that. I knew it in the middle of what I was saying but I couldn’t stop. This training is so important. I have had people on my show as well that they go on and on and I don’t get to my questions. You do need this training in order to understand how an interview’s going to be structured, where you come into this, and how to come in professionally. You won’t get asked back if you are a bad guest.

Also, it is to know the difference between a 3, 5, or 20-minute interview, and as you offered me, which was extraordinarily generous, having enough content for a 1-hour interview. They are all different. There are all those content points. Those are all skills and we cover it all. The more we can teach you, the more opportunities we can create. I’m only as good at creating the opportunity as the client is at handling the opportunity. The more they get better, the more opportunities come, and then it becomes momentum. Thank you very much.

You are welcome. Go over to TVGuestpert.com and check it out. For those of you who have read this episode but perhaps want to see all of the slides and all the examples that Jacquie gave, this will also be over on our YouTube channel to go through as well. Where can we find you besides TVGuestpert? Do you have an email for the audience that’s reading and not seeing this?

Yeah. It is JJordan@TVGuestpert.com. You can email me. That goes right to me. I’d love to hear from you. Thank you so much.

Thank you, and thank you to all of you guys for showing up. Thanks, Jacquie. Thank you, Kris, and everybody who showed up.

Thank you.

 

Important Links

• Jacquie Jordan
• Superbrand Publishing
• CrushYourExpertBook.com
• Front & Center Podcast with Jacquie Jordan
• Get on TV!
• Heartfelt Marketing
• JJordan@TVGuestpert.com
• A Psychiatrist’s Guide

 

About Jacquie Jordan

Jacquie is the founder and CEO of the 15-year-old cutting-edge, media and content development, promotions and booking platform, TVGuestpert that offers full-service promotion, marketing, business strategy and media services for her clients, partners and collaborators, TVGuestpert Publishing – a NY Times Best Selling publishing house, and The Guestpert Academy – an online program offering visibility, media training and TVGuestpert On-Camera Training. She is also a two-time Emmy nominated TV Producer, three-time author and the host of Front & Center with Jacquie Jordan, a broadcast podcast.

 

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