If you’ve always wanted to have your own national TV show, but you don’t have the energy to make all the right contacts in New York or Hollywood, that’s OK.
You can have your own show for less than $400 a month.
Don’t have $400 to spend? You can have the show anyway and actually make a profit by selling sponsorships.
The show can help you drum up more business—from people who watch the show and from guests, like CEOs, who you invite onto the show to interview and who are so impressed with you that they hire you for a consulting project.
If you’re an author, you can create a show that reaches 1 million people a month or more—a way to entice publishing houses to publish your book, now that you already have a platform.
If you’re a speaker, you can create shows and air them in cities where you’ll be holding public seminars.
Author and PR practitioner Robert Smith of Rockford, Illinois had his own business show in seven markets. He interviewed a variety of business people, including CEOs, charged them if they wanted him to promote their products on the show, and ended up with more consulting assignments, more money in his pocket from the sponsorships, and more book sales.
Robert discovered a little-known secret that the cable TV
companies wish you didn’t know about. It’s called leased access programming and it’s required by law. Here’s how it works:
Unlike the public access channel, which lets anyone in the
community create and air their own show for free, leased access lets anyone from any community buy inexpensive air time for a show they’ve already created. In some markets like Cincinnati, Ohio, you might pay only $79 to air a half-hour show. In even smaller markets, you might pay as little as $9 for 30 minutes.
Many people who buy leased access create the standard
infomercials. But Robert thinks it’s far more effective to create an actual TV show in which you’re the host. This builds your celebrity status. Then you can weave information about your own products and services into the script.
You can also invite guests onto the show, interview them, then charge them a sponsorship fee if they want you to hold up their book, or talk about their product or service. A chef can do cooking demonstrations. A dog trainer can teach people how to train their dogs, etc.
Before you start, be aware of the hoops the cable companies will make you jump through before your program airs. For example, many cable companies require you to have a million-dollar insurance policy, and waivers from people whose products you’ll be promoting.
Robert knows so much about this topic, that I interviewed him on “How to Get Your Own National TV Show for Less Than $400 a Month.”
If you’re not interested in your own TV show, but you want to learn more about how to use video so you can embed video into your press releases, or you want to create video products (even if you don’t have a computer), Tom Antion, one of my mentors, can show you how.
Wow, Joan! You come up with some really interesting tips. I’ve never heard of this one before. I’m finishing, not starting projects right now, but I’ll pick up your transcripts on that some day.
It is a great idea and tips. I learned your article. Thank you.