Building an audience can take a looooong time, which is why you want to consider adding using other people’s platforms (OPP) to your marketing strategy!

Remember - you’re an expert with a unique perspective - even if you can’t see it for yourself.

That’s why today Jen interviews pitching strategist & expert Adela Hussain!

Adela’s expertise & laser-sharp thinking will have your brain firing all the ideas of ways you can use what you’re already doing to pitch to the press - and beyond!

Listen in to learn how to know what to pitch,

ways to see the stories you find so “normal” & “boring” are actually what make you special…

and how your expertise is VITAL in helping journalists, content creators, & thought leaders do their jobs better!

Adela takes us through the basics, then shares some of her favorite pitching & story-creating hacks…

And she also goes deep into some mistakes we can avoid and myths about pitching!

Using someone else’s audience & platforms is an incredibly powerful & efficient way to build your audience and get your thoughts & content out into the world.

Find Adela @startupsandco on Instagram and www.pitchtopress.com

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Full Transcript

Jen Liddy

I am so glad you are here today for the Content Creation Made Easy session this week because I am talking to an expert in a field that we all desperately need more information about. 

I want you to meet Adela Hussain, she is the founder of Startups and Co. The reason I'm asking Adela to be on here today is she is a master at helping people pitch their businesses to the people who should know you because you are probably the best-kept secret out there in your field. 

Adela discovered that she has a talent for pitching when she first started doing PR on her own in a fashion tech start-up a while ago, and she got featured in 14 publications for over a year. And then she was also in the Harvard Business Review, and she didn't even pitch to them.

I am actually working with Adela in a mastermind that we belong to together, and I know her personally, and I know her expertise. Once you meet her and listen to her, plus she's got this lovely accent that you're going to fall in love with. She just has this high energy, and she's known for her laser-sharp thinking, which I have experienced firsthand. 

I'm going to have her tell you a little bit about how she got here, but ultimately, you are going to want to listen to how to learn how to pitch yourself, your programs, your services to get in front of other people's platforms, how to do it well, what mistakes to avoid, and how to kind of expand your reach beyond what you're currently doing with your content marketing. 

So, Adela, thank you so much for being here.

Adela Hussain

Thank you so much, Jen, for that beautiful, warm welcome, I feel very honored to be here.

What a lovely introduction - thank you so much!

Jen Liddy

Well, I wanted to have you on because I know personally that using other people's platforms is kind of a way to have wings on your back to expand what you're currently doing, regardless of your current marketing situation. I just know that you can help us expand and kind of get exponential with expertise.

Adela Hussain

Yes, absolutely.

I'm very deeply passionate about helping entrepreneurs get seen, paid, and heard in a way that feels really authentic to them as well. The main reason being is because you mentioned in my introduction that I ran a fashion tech company, and I really saw when I was running what was a very complicated business back in 2016. 

This fashion tech company I ran was both product and a service-based business. For anyone listening who may be from North America, there's a company called Stitch Fix, which curates outfits for women and sends perfect outfits to their door. I was a management consultant, and I was working in the strategy team at Sky back in 2015. And I saw what StitchFix was doing in the US, and I thought, why is no one doing that here in Europe and here in the UK? 

So I launched that business, but PR was something I did from day one. The minute I launched that business and everything went live, I did it from day one. And I saw the immediate effects of doing that from day one, so this is why I'm very passionate about entrepreneurs starting their PR journey from the minute they begin. Because honestly, that is how I manage to pitch myself into the media very fast in the space of 12 to 14 months.

Jen Liddy

I want to put a pin in this question, which is how did you know how to do it intuitively? And if we didn't do it intuitively from the start, are we screwed? Can we go back?

Adela Hussain

I love this. 

This is such a great question - so how did I know how to pitch people intuitively? So this actually goes back to my career, so before I ran my fashion tech business, I mentioned I was in the strategy team at Sky here in the UK, but I was actually a management consultant for a good 17 years before that. Accenture, which is an American company, and a few other smaller consulting firms, and I was working in what is very corporate. So my clients for investment banks, there were companies like Unilever, they were Airlines, and I was working for very senior, mainly men actually, in corporate environments. 

I had to build trust very, very quickly, and at the very start of my career, I was doing quite messy roles, like going in and identifying the teams that needed to be fired. Then taking those teams and those business processes and outsourcing, the real true meaning of the word outsource is like taking that work and putting it offshore. And I was traveling out to India with people that were losing their jobs, telling them to sit next to the person out in India who's taking over their job and managing the process, which is called knowledge transfer.

Imagine if you're doing that from age 23, you're like the most hated person in the office. This is why corporate companies hire management consultants to do this work. I was sitting there with people from Bain, McKinsey, and BCG who don't even do the implementation. They kind of came out with the numbers of people that had to be cut, and I would go and do the actual cutting.

Jen Liddy

You're like George Clooney "Up in the Air" movie? 

Adela Hussain

It was absolutely that George Clooney's film "Up in the Air" was exactly my role. 

Like down to how he dressed! He had a woman - he had a sidekick, right? There was another woman, I think they fell in love? I didn't fall in love with my colleagues, but I was certainly the person with them. 

I was actually doing that role, traveling around the world, and you learn to build like when you are. This is a depressing thing to say, but when you are the most hated person that's entered in an office, you have to learn to build trust very quickly. You do that by building relationships, and so Dave from accountant, from the accounting department, who knows he's going to lose his job eventually. He'll give you the data that you need, but you have to learn to build trust very quickly. So actually, those skills when it came to fashion journalists, yes, they're a tough crew when I was preaching to them, but it wasn't as hostile as what I was used to.

Jen Liddy

It was like a vacation after that kind of a job.

Adela Hussain

Yeah, it was. 

I was in that specific area of outsourcing for seven years, and then eventually, you get tired of not being liked. And then I ended up going into the more sexiest side of management, where you build companies, you transform companies, and you launch products, and you merge stuff. And it's so much more fun - the key thing to really note from that background is whoever you are pitching to, whoever you are trying to collaborate within the name of PR and growing your business, you need to build a relationship first. 

That all comes down to building trust, and people don't talk about trust enough in this industry. They do talk about trust in terms of sleazy selling, but they don't talk about it in terms of growth, I don't think.

Jen Liddy

Yeah, that's interesting.

Adela Hussain

If you can start cultivating trust with people, and you do that from the minute you start your business, even if you're not pitching something, you're just starting to like someone, you're starting to know their content, starting to reply to their emails, you will get noticed. That's how you start building trust, and that is the most powerful thing you have as a CEO, right?

Jen Liddy

Yeah. 

Because in today's world, especially our audience or whoever we're trying to be in relationship with, we're very cynical, we're very smart, we're very savvy. We don't believe that anything is real. We're just bombarded every day with proof that we shouldn't trust people. 

So before you answer the question about what if you haven't done this yet, and is it too late? What are some of the suggestions or your favorite ways to build trust early on with somebody that could be completely cold to you?

Adela Hussain

Yes - I love this. 

The easiest takeaway I recommend people take from this interview is just Google the trust equation. There's a really brilliant equation called the Trust Equation that was actually developed by, I think, three management consultants. There was a book, I think, called The Trusted Advisor, but the Trust Equation is something I actually teach in my own course, Pitch To Press. 

The trust is broken down by several components; one component is reliability, the other component is credibility, and I can't remember the third one. It's all over self-interest, so what it means is in order to build trust with someone, consistency is the third one. You need to be reliable - you need to constantly be reliable. You do what you say you're going to do, so that's component number one. The second one is consistency, you're putting out content, you're putting out the same message, again and again, so you're not just posting about avocados and toast, you're posting about what you genuinely do, and it makes sense. 

Underneath the equation is self-interest, if you talk about yourself, too much trust goes down because people think, well, it's not about us and what we as an audience need. It's actually about them and their hairstyle the whole time or their outfit the whole time. So Google "The Trust Equation", and that is if you really want to understand analytically how to start building trust in your business, there's a brilliant equation to look up.

Jen Liddy

I could talk about that all day because when you're creating content, you have to be reliable, you have to have a consistent message, and it has to be about them. Answer the question, what's in it for them, not what's it about for you - thank you for sharing that. I'm going to make that part of my content, I think. 

Okay, so the question that I originally had is that you had this idea to create kind of a Stitch Fix kind of thing, but across the pond from us, what if we're several years into our business and we have not yet done this piece of using other people's platforms in an intuitive way? Is it too late for us?

Adela Hussain

No, not at all. 

It absolutely isn't too late to start, and actually, the day that you start is the day you start sowing the seed. Don't worry if you're kind of two or three or four years into your business - in actual fact, if you are at that stage and you have got over what I call the 2-year cliff, where most businesses fail at two years, don't they? So they kind of run out of money in year 2, and then the stats show, the data shows very few businesses make it past year 2 unless they genuinely got a strong product or service. 

So if you are in year 3 or year 4, that's fantastic, that shows that people are buying your product or your service and that they love what you do because you wouldn't be in business in year three or four if that wasn't the case. So in actual fact, I would feel more comfortable then and that you would have a strong story to tell by then.

Jen Liddy

Your messaging would probably be much clearer, much more laser-focused at that point, too.

Adela Hussain

Absolutely. 

Because you probably would have experimented so many times in that period. You would have honed in exactly who your client is and how they need to be spoken to, and you would start identifying where they hang out. You would be able to start your publicity on a strong foot by identifying exactly where your audience hangs out.

Jen Liddy

Well, okay, boom. 

Now that we know why we know you're clearly an expert on this, you've done it yourself. Let's talk about why is using other people's platforms a vital thing that we really need to be spending time doing in our own business?

Adela Hussain

Yes. 

The key answer is really efficiency because it is so much easier to dance on other people's dance floors. And actually, to be frank, it's not actually my line, it's a lovely entrepreneur I follow called Jada Salna, who actually came out with that line. I always credit her when I say dance on the people's dance floors, but it's better to dance on the people's dance floors or go where your audience hangs out than build that audience from scratch. 

Starting to build an audience completely from scratch organically is just near impossible these days unless you've got a lot of money to throw at Facebook ads and Instagram ads and all the other strategies that you can use. Whereas if you're producing beautiful content already and you're starting to pitch to people who hold those audiences, that's just so much more efficient.

Jen Liddy

Yeah, I love that. 

Efficiency is vital because you have a lot of other things to do when you are, especially when you're a solopreneur, there's just so much to do, so let's be efficient.

Adela Hussain

It's efficient, and it's easier. 

It's less stressful because people are already following someone, that other individual you may be collaborating with or reading that piece of media already. And so why would you start from scratch? It doesn't make sense.

Jen Liddy

This is a good message for those of us who tend to make things harder for ourselves than they have to be. This is hitting the easy button, and it's not like it's easy because you still have to find the platforms you do still have to pitch, but this is one of the things we can do to make our life a little bit easier.

Adela Hussain

Yes, absolutely. 

The other reason why you would do it as well is we talked about trust at the beginning, and one of the components of trust is credibility. So when we increase credibility on the right-hand side of the equation, we increase trust on the left-hand side of the equation. 

So when you start associating your brand with other people's brands through collaboration, a partnership, or you get featured in a great piece of media, you are actually borrowing the credibility and trust of that brand. If you're featured in The Times, Jen, your credibility immediately boosts up, so that's also your borrowing trust from existing credibility holders, if you like. That's exactly another reason why you would do it, so it isn't just efficiency, but it's actually the credibility markets that they're going for.

Jen Liddy

Because everybody has them. 

What are some of the mistakes or myths, or limiting beliefs that people have about using other people's media?

Adela Hussain

Yes, I love this question, it's such a big one, right?

A typical limiting belief that I hear this day in and day out, pretty much every call I have with someone, is I don't think I'm good enough for media. I'm not ready yet for media, and what that often means is people think I'm not big enough, I'm not famous enough, I'm not credible enough, so they might be starting, but they forget they have to start from somewhere. 

There's a whole piece around self-worthiness, so that's the kind of first limiting belief I see from people. The second major limiting belief I see is that there's this weird sense that journalists or people in the media are like superhuman people that are kind of on this power dynamic and that they're above you in some weird way. 

If you're an entrepreneur working from home, pitching to a journalist at The Times, for example, you're not good enough for The Times. If the journalist replies to you, it's like Madonna replying in your inbox and that you're not worthy of it. 

It is the self-worthy piece, but this is notion that these journalists are gods and they're not gods. That's actually one of my affirmations I teach people to write on a post, journalists are not gods, and that you genuinely keep them in their jobs.

Jen Liddy

Yeah, I never really thought about that without you pitching a story. 

This is a great example, I asked Adela to be on my podcast, and I invited her because of her expertise. There's plenty of times where people are pitching me, and sometimes it's just exactly what I need, or it fills a hole in my content calendar, or it adds a dimension that I never thought of, and it just makes my life as a content creator that much easier.

Adela Hussain

Yes, absolutely. 

This is a piece that lots of people, entrepreneurs at a very early stage or even whatever stage, forget that they are creating a story, and without that story, content creators, journalists, podcasters, bloggers, influencers, other entrepreneurs - they can't exist without those stories. 

People need to post content, and they need to post stories, feature stories regularly, and so you as an entrepreneur are in a really powerful position to offer a story and people forget that. 

I always say when you offer up a story, you're helping someone in their job, and I say that as someone who has unfortunately done a George Clooney on Sports News and sat in the newsroom and had to work out which teams were going. 

And unfortunately, it was a journalist who didn't come in day in and day out with strong stories to their Monday morning planning meetings that often got the chop. It is absolutely a fact that if you do not give someone a story, they can't survive in their job.

Jen Liddy

That's a way to turn it on people's heads, especially because a lot of the people that I work with are highly sensitive entrepreneurs, so they're very concerned about their other people's energy, what other people need and what other people think and they're very heart-centered. 

What Adela just said is very dead on for those of us who are heart-centered and want to help other people, it's a symbiotic relationship, really. It's not a one-way relationship.

Adela Hussain

Yes, absolutely. 

If you want to get even more laser-focused on those individuals that are highly sensitive experts, especially for those business owners, that might have been a field that is helping people in quite tough situations. 

I always say when you're pitching a story, imagine that your customer or your client is reading it at the other end, and they really need to hear your story. 

They really need to know how to work with you because they are in a crisis mode.

Jen Liddy

You are a solution for somebody else.

Adela Hussain

You really are a solution. 

I say this because I currently have clients who are people who help women with trauma, women who are coming out of domestic violent relationships, women who might be coming out of divorces. I have some experts I've worked with, clinical psychologists on eating disorders, when they put a story out there on that subject, it just makes me feel good about the work that I do. But at the end of the day, it's helping someone - it's absolutely helping someone at the other end. So heart centers, people really need to remember that you're not putting your story for your own business and your own ego, you're putting it out there for them.

Jen Liddy

I've heard you tell the example that it's not always these huge heroic stories that work. I feel like it was you who told a story about a woman who wanted to make lunch easier because it's back to school time.

That's not like a deeply moving story, but it's life-changing for some mom who's sick of making lunch for her kids, right?

Adela Hussain

Absolutely. 

Again, it comes back to who are you helping? Right. You don't need to give a deep, earth-shattering hero's journey story when you pitch to the media. It's simply providing a solution to someone for some pain point that's out there. 

The reason that it gets featured in the media is because often, it's hooked into something that's going on. In that example, the timing makes sense because it's back to school, so anyone who works in the field of nutrition or food and health and children would know that they ought to pitch that probably until June time if it was written media ready for publication in September because most magazines work three to four months ahead.

Jen Liddy

Brilliant.

Adela Hussain

Whereas if it's online, it would be a little bit of a shorter time frame.

Jen Liddy

That's another thing to think about. 

You're giving us so many great tidbits to help people kind of overcome these limiting stories and beliefs that they don't have a place in doing this. What are some basics to get us started in thinking about the stories that we could pitch to people?

Adela Hussain

I love this question. 

Thinking about your stories, what I would do, first of all, is I love this strategy called newsjacking. Where do you think about what is currently going on in your industry right now in the news, and what can you actually piggyback on? 

So, for example, it's a really significant example, but one of my former clients is a clinical psychologist called Anna and Anna is very good at getting into the media. What sets Anna apart is that she does it on the back of an existing running news story, so Anna's expert topics are typically things like anxiety, bullying, and eating disorders in children, and anxiety was very high recently in the world, about six weeks ago when there was a war in Ukraine and lots of things happening in that part of the world. 

So Anna pitches the media how to talk to your child about the war in Ukraine, and it was just such a powerful story because she didn't pitch let's talk about anxiety or I'm an expert in anxiety, and here are five ways to get over your anxiety, which is kind of you do see those stories out there.

She actually was on the TV show in the UK, and then it got written off in the Daily Mail, but that was simply because she shared her expertise in relation to what was going on in the media, which is a war in Ukraine, and anticipating that parents are going to be very anxious and wondering how to explain to anxious children about this war. And as a clinical psychologist, she has expertise on that and shares strategies on that, so that's a very good example so for anyone listening today, I would really advise thinking about what is going on in your industry and what you can piggyback on that makes sense. 

How can you add value to an existing story?

Jen Liddy

The other thing I heard you say that I want to make sure everybody hears is Anna had some really specific expert topics that she can always go to. She's not constantly having the radar in her brain just searching for what could possibly be, she knows she's got these three things that she always goes to. 

And then the question with your newsjacking is, how can I make one of these things and make it more laser-focused and applicable to something going on right now? That is a really great tip, and I have to say, you've even got me thinking. 

I just have done a 30-day reel challenge on Instagram, which I hate reels, and I would love to see them blow up, but I have been doing them for 28 days, and just today, I found all of the wins that I had from doing reels, both tangible and intangible, or measurable and immeasurable. 

I could reach out to somebody who's an Instagram reels expert and ask them to talk to me about why getting if you always talk about reels, I could talk about how creating reels could help you do X, Y, and Z.

That would be a way to take something that I'm an expert in, which is content, and then laser-focus it into reals and help them with their content, and it would require me to pitch myself, but just in listening to you talk about that, you gave me a story, and I'm really hoping that everybody listening can kind of open their brain and think about what are my content go to's? And then how can I laser focus that? 

That's an absolute gem.

Adela Hussain

I love the fact that you're coming up with ideas as we're talking is great - it's sparking ideas! 

In what you're describing, in the situation you're describing, there is a perfect collaboration. You're identifying who you would collaborate with and where there would be synergy for that collaboration. What specifically that synergy would be so immediately in your pitch, you know that you would need to talk about reels, and you need to link to an Instagram expert, and you need to explain why and how you can add value to their audience. 

And you've really got the kind of gems for a good pitch there.

Jen Liddy

I love that. 

Even if people who are listening just take those two little basics and start to open their mind and ask, how can I use what I already know and I am an expert in to apply to somebody else's platform. 

That alone, if you stop listening now, that is what we want you to take away from this.

Adela Hussain

Yes, absolutely.

Jen Liddy

Can I ask you about the mistakes that are most prevalent when people are pitching other people?

Adela Hussain

It's my favorite topic.

Jen Liddy

Let's talk about your mistakes.

Adela Hussain

The classic mistake that so many entrepreneurs make, and it's not their fault. Big caveat to this - you don't know what you don't know, so you're just starting out. 

But what typically a lot of people do is they download some swipe copy of the Internet, and they send out a pitch using some random swipe copy, and that swipe copy, whatever they've got hold of, it's just not personal. They call it like spray, there's a kind of funny phrase in the industry of spraying your pitches out, spraying these really impersonal pitches out. 

The biggest mistake people make is they just don't. They send out a pitch, there's nothing personal in that email pitch or voicemail pitch. However, they've sent the pitch, and it could have been sent to anybody, and the person receiving at the other end is just like literally swipe right. Not interested, and I've received those kinds of pitches. Honestly, it just makes me feel a bit icky because I feel like I end up getting on the other side of this. I'm not worthy enough for someone to have done the research and really listen to my content and understand where I've been featured, what I've been written in. 

On the flip side, the best pitch I ever received from someone was someone on my email list who requoted back a story I'd written in the subject line of the email. So I wrote this really quirky story, and I can't remember what I was doing with this email, but I wrote this really ridiculous story about how people steal croissants when they go on holiday from the breakfast bar I was trying to make. I've not seen it so much in the US, but in France, British people have a bad reputation of going over to Paris, staying in a hotel, and stealing croissants.

It's really bad - people go for lunch and steal the croissants, and it's tough. That was me as well, I don't excuse myself from that, I love croissants, and I hold up my hand. I used to steal croissants from the breakfast bar, but I wrote this really funny email, and lots of people replied and loved it. 

But a week later, this woman pitched me something, and she put in a subject line, something along the lines of, you had me at croissants or something. She had taken the line, "You had me at hello," from Jerry Maguire and then twisted it for the croissants. She was a copywriter, and she was just funny and clever, but everything I had in my inbox at that moment when it came up got ignored because of the subject line. 

It was such a great subject line.

Jen Liddy

So personalizing is how to avoid the mistake of going and exploring the person before you pitch them to make sure they're a good fit, saying people's words back to them. 

Those are some easily implementable ways to avoid these mistakes.

Adela Hussain

Absolutely. 

And the requoting is one of the most powerful things you can ever do.

Jen Liddy

It really is so powerful because we are also egoic. 

If you consider when we pitch somebody, it's all about them, but when somebody pitches us, it's all about us. It gets to be all about we're just as egoic as everybody else, so we want to hear our own words and our own names sent back to us. 

So, yes, this is what we learned in the first part of this interview when you are pitching.

Adela Hussain

It just shows that you've done your homework. 

The fact that you're quoting someone shows that you have researched them and, you know their content and, you've done the homework, you know they're a good fit for you. 

So the person receiving the pitch immediately was like, well, if they've done the research, the due diligence and check that we're a good fit. Obviously, they themselves would do it, double-check, but that pitch will absolutely get to the top of their list..

Jen Liddy

Can I add a little tweak that I love to share with my audience for when I'm writing anything? 

I'll write it the first time, and then I'll do a scan on the left side of my margins to see how many of my sentences start with I. And if too many sentences start with, I go in and tweak them to make it not about me, to make it more interesting or the sentence more interesting, or to make it about them, and it takes a little bit of extra time. 

But it is such a game-changer when you're doing your pitching.

Adela Hussain

Yeah, absolutely. 

Count the number of I's, if there are more you's, then you'll know you're in the right place. If there's more I's. It's another equation, right?

Jen Liddy

There's been so much gold in this interview, Adela. 

I love the little actionable things that we can take. How much time do you think people should or can spend a week pitching?

Adela Hussain

I love it. 

This is a really good question - how much time should you spend? It's a hard question because you actually need to know how much growth you want in your business and work back from there. 

So if you're looking to really grow fast and grow big, you could end up pitching two or three days a week non-stop because you might want to be on four podcasts a week, or you might want to be in one magazine per month, and you need to allow the time for that. 

As a good concrete example, for my last business, I was at two events per night for that business, and I was pitching probably nonstop. I was probably doing client customer stuff two days a week and probably nonstop marketing three days a week. It was a lot of work, but if you're growing gradually, it doesn't need to be at that amount of effort. It could be that you dedicate an afternoon to research and identifying pictures. Then what I end up seeing and what I really love is when people get the snowball effect. When people start getting featured on one or two podcasts, they're like, wow, it actually works, and they start getting addicted to that. 

I think you may have had that, and you start seeing the results, and then you think if I ramp it up a bit and I spend a whole day on pitching two or three podcasts a week, suddenly you're booked out for the next four months, one podcast a week so it depends on how fast you want to go.

Jen Liddy

These are very personal goals. 

You have to reverse engineer them, knowing what you want to achieve, and then there's kind of this investment at the front end of putting your systems in place. Tweaking what your content expertise is - there's some upfront stuff, but once you get all those foundations laid, you really can start to gain some traction.

Adela Hussain

Yes, exactly. 

And you can start doing very clever things once you get more advanced pitching. You can start batching your pitches, and you've got one major story, but you're pitching it to multiple media outlets, and then you're working out slightly different story angles. 

Everything is still personalized, but you're doing all that work over one or two days as opposed to doing it in bits, so Batching creates that efficiency as well.

Jen Liddy

I'm a big batching fan. 

You've given us so much. Is there anything else that you think we need to know before we wrap up and find out how we can follow you or connect with you? Is there a nugget that you think we've missed?

Adela Hussain

No, I would just say for everybody, don't be afraid of pitching yourself. 

You just remember that journalists are not gods - write it on a bit of paper, stick it on. If it is media outlets you're pitching to, I like to use the word journalist, but I actually mean other content creators, entrepreneurs, and bloggers. 

I use a journalist as a kind of collective term, but write on post-it notes and stick it on your screen and just keep training yourself to remember that every pitch that you produce is going to be powerful. These people, everyone needs to hear your stories, people need to hear your stories.

Jen Liddy

They want to because it inspires them and it helps them. 

So Adela, how can people connect with you? Follow you, work with you?

Adela Hussain

Yeah.

So you can follow me on Instagram at @startupsandco, and I'm very active on stories. 

Feel free to DM me any questions as well.

Jen Liddy

I want to just say one thing about Adela's Instagram, she has a very fabulous life, and if you want to live vicariously through somebody else's life, go follow Adela on Instagram. 

She's walking around London seeing famous people, and her emails are amazing. 

Adela Hussain

Oh, thank you. 

I tried to keep my stories quite amusing, so I share things I come across, but I am getting lazy on Instagram. I'm not posting enough on my grid, and I'm just putting quirky things on my stories for everyone who's consuming my stories.

Jen Liddy

Follow her on Instagram, and then how else can people connect with you?

Adela Hussain

Yeah, so I actually have a really great little freebie for people called Ten Steps to Get Into the Media.

It's a really great ten-step process flow on a PDF, and it shows exactly how I got into two places, actually, step by step, how I got into Red magazine, which is a major publication here in the UK. We also have a famous influencer called Dolly Auditor, and I followed those exact steps to connect with Dolly, so actually, it genuinely works. 

You can download it at https://www.pitchtopress.com/  and get hold of that ten-step guide. It just shows you exactly how you can get in the media, and there's a real emphasis on going to events and building connections in that perfect.

Jen Liddy

Then I know that you have a course and that you work with people privately also so can you talk a little bit about that?

Adela Hussain

Yeah, so I have a course called Pitch to Press, which is a twelve-week program. 

I'll probably be running the next iteration of that in a few month's time, but yeah, it's a great twelve-week program where every week, a module drops into the program, and people can learn exactly where to start with pitching. You learn how to create your expert topics, and you learn how to create your story angles, you learn how to craft a really solid pitch as well. 

There's support on how to actually start critiquing people's pictures and giving them feedback on pitches. You also get to join the Pitch to Press Society, which is a secret Facebook group I have for everyone that's been on the program, so that's a really lovely program. 

That's a great way if you're really wanting to pitch, but you're thinking I need to start dedicating an afternoon to pitching or half an afternoon, but I really need some accountability, and I also need to learn these skills. 

That's a really great program to join, and I also have a little mini product called Pitch Rockstar. If you're kind of allergic to programs, for example, but love a nice quick guide, then Pitch Rockstar is a really great product for you.

You can just email me at [email protected], and I can give you a link for Pitch Rockstar, and that's a $500 product.

Thank you so much, Jen, for inviting me. It's been a real pleasure, and I've absolutely loved talking to you all and can't wait to see all the audience being featured in the media everywhere.

Jen Liddy

Yes, tag us when you get featured. Let us know!

Adela Hussain

Yes, please do.

Jen Liddy

For those of you who are listening or watching, thank you because I know there are a lot of options for you to listen to podcasts and watch shows, so thank you for tuning in. 

It really means a lot, and if you could leave a review for us, we would love to see you next week. 

Bye.