How to Promote Live Events Mindfully With Gorgeosity With Clare Barry

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How to Promote Live Events Mindfully With Gorgeosity With Clare Barry

Welcome everyone to the Be a Media Darling Podcast. My guest today is Clare Barry. She is a London writer and the founder of Urban Curiosity. That is creativity and wellness brand that helps busy people like all of us, slow down and spark ideas. You can find her at Urban Curiosity.

I met Clare when we were both on a retreat in Bali with Andrea Scher and Juna Mustad Milano. I fell in love with her immediately. I was intrigued by her and her vivacious personality. She has a great combination. You do, Clare, have such a great combination of being both bubbly and grounded. I love that aspect of you, indeed. I invited her and we just then discussed what we could talk together about on a podcast which is how to promote live events mindfully and with gorgeosity.

Here we are. Thank you for having me.

Let’s start off with your Urban Curiosity. When I opened your website, I wanted to go because that’s a fascinating tour of London. Since this is a podcast focused on publicity, let us talk about what your event is and how you get publicity for that event.

Urban Curiosity Walkshops came about because I was a city slicker running around living life at 100 miles an hour. I was working hard climbing the career ladder, not sleeping very much, socializing, and traveling, living life fully. At the same time my lumbar spine decided that it did not like this pace of living. It was trying to tell me for a number of years that I needed to slow down. I ignored it. I stuffed medication in my mouth, I had physical therapy, I spent days laid out flat. I had epidurals and all sorts of treatment but fundamentally the thing that I needed to do, which I did not do, was to stop.

Eventually, we know where the story ends, eventually my body did that for me. I ended up having a major back surgery. While I was recovering, my rock star neurologist told me that I needed to take a daily walk. So I did. For the first time, in really the longest time, I walked slowly, less hurriedly at that point. I walked without a smart phone in my hand. I walked without my mind filled with thoughts about the future, or thoughts about the past, I begun to notice things that I walked past every single day in my journeys around the neighborhood and around this city, London, my native city.

I got really excited about the details that I saw in the architecture, the cityscape, the colors and the patterns. It helped me make connections and it sparked ideas. I came rushing home, as fast home as you can do when coming back from back surgery, because I wanted to get my pen and my paper and start writing. I had been a fiction writer. I wrote a couple of contemporary women’s novels during this time of living at this full tilt. I wanted to get back to that sense of feeling creative that I had enjoyed as a young child and as a young adult that had been abandoned for a number of years while I was climbing the career ladder. In some way I was satisfied with my fiction writing but I was not totally satisfied by that outlet.

At a certain point I realized that I was missing something. This way of walking slowly, breathing deeply and noticing what is around was something that I needed to share with other people. It helped me reignite my creativity. So I created Urban Curiosity Workshops with a number of routes throughout London with different themes. I guide people on these two hour walking, creativity, mindfulness, and digital detox sessions. They are fun. We would love to have you come on one.

I want to. I love this digital detox. I really respond to what you are talking about, getting back to the tactile universe. The digital world takes us away in way puts us in our heads and we forget about our bodies and the beautiful smells and the visual treats that we get when we walk. I walk every day and I meet puppies, old dogs, and children. Sometimes I know more about the name of the dogs than the people. But being able to sniff the flowers and take the time to enjoy and pick the kumquats in the trees. I think there is really a craving for a digital detox.

I think so. It’s not necessarily about being creative but allowing a space in your day for thoughts to occur. For instance, for years while I was working in my old corporate life I suffered from insomnia, because I crammed every waking moment of my day with stimulation and information. And so, when I collapsed into bed exhausted at the end of the day, really desperate to fall asleep because I am physically tired, my brain was wired.

It is really not surprising to me now that I was unable to sleep in those times. I did not allow the thoughts that bubbled up when I was trying to go to sleep to be processed throughout the day because I was standing in the coffee queue looking at my smart phone or I was standing at the platform waiting for my train on my smart phone.

I was afraid of being with my thoughts, afraid of letting myself daydream, to let my mind wander and make a connection. To make a connection, maybe have a space to make eye contact with that barista and say, “Hi, good morning.” To have a moment to make a meaningful exchange. Which is something that is parallel to the creative piece, which is equally as important, if not more so.

To have a time for those thoughts to occur, as you’ve said, is so important in the creative process. It is also really important when you think about how you want to publicize and market what you’ve got because often times it’s not about – well yes, sit down and write a marketing plan. But it is then in those relaxations when you are like taking a shower or eating your lunch while actually enjoying it, that there is this space for those thoughts and creativity to occur.

For those ideas to occur is indeed fantastic light bulb moments just like when you are in the shower. This is because, for most of us, the shower is the last place where we get to go without our smart phone.

Yes, they don’t make them waterproof!

I’m sure there is a case out there that does that job. But yes, is the world going to stop turning because for a few minutes you are not online?

I was in Hawaii, and I saw someone who was in the ocean with a smart phone. I wanted to like tackle the guy. I do not want to hear you talking on your smart phone on the beach in Hawaii in the water! It is insane.

It is insane. I do have one thing I want to make clear, my life had been changed for the better because of mobile technology. I think this technology that we have is fantastic. It is allowing us to speak today even though you are in the west coast of the US and I am in London. This is fantastic as it allows us to work in different ways as well as connect with each other in different ways. That is positive. I don’t really even like the term detox in digital detox, but I prefer digital mindfulness because to suggest that my smart phone is toxic is not true. This is perfectly good and a helpful piece of technology. It is how I allow myself to interact with it that can become not positive to me if I’m not deliberate about it.

If I’m mindlessly scrolling through my Twitter feed right before bedtime, well what’s that all about? I’m searching for something, I’m craving for something. It’s like the same as when I open the kitchen cupboard and I’m looking for cookies, that are still not there because they weren’t there the last time I looked. That’s a kind of boredom, a desire, a want in me in that moment. It has nothing to do with what Twitter is going to tell me. It’s about being in tune with your body and your mind, and that’s a long answer to why I’m not crazy about the detox in the term digital detox.

Yeah, and I know you are going to be running these online events but right now you are running these live events. I think you’ve kind of answered that question why you run live events, but let’s chat about that for a minute on how to promote live events mindfully.

Yes and let me expand on that, I started them with a little experiment. I felt like if it helped me it might help somebody else. It got me so excited that I decided to leave my old corporate life and embark on one of creative entrepreneurship and writing. That is partly because I reached a point in my life where I needed to be fulfilled differently. I wanted greater flexibility with the way I worked. I had had this terrible shock in my physical self and I also had family tragedies that clarified what it was that I wanted to do each day.

This experiment was not terribly strategic at first. In essence I got excited about these certain neighborhoods, I decided to make things thematic according to where I was and what was coming up for me, and what was intriguing to me. I created these routes, and I had a blend of quotes. For instance researchers at Stanford University found that walking boosts your creativity exponentially. That’s not just walking outside in a lovely location. You can even just be in a basement gym and walk on a treadmill and stare at a blank wall, and still be creative. They found that for those people creativity was boosted as much as 60%.

Wow, that is amazing. I wouldn’t think I would be as creative on a treadmill as walking in nature or in a neighborhood.

Exactly, and that is what I thought, but their research suggests otherwise. The first thing that I did was I find the right platform here in the UK in order to put my event on the listing and get it out in the world. I happened to use this Eventbrite site, which is a big resource of events here. I was really lucky, but also I was smart; I chose a good title for my event, and I decided that curiosity had to be in the title of all of these events. I liked the idea of it being urban, because I think that we can’t all escape to the country or the coast to get a little hit of Zen.

But if we are deliberate and mindful of how we move about in the city, we can find it here. London, in particular, is even a very green city when you search that out. The workshops are about finding everyday moments of beauty and interest and curiosity, so that it’s less about being somewhere that is exquisitely scenic, per say.

How did you come up with your title? Because I think that titles are so important for events as well as press releases or whatever. Do you have a process for that?

No, I don’t. I think it is quite instinctive. I wanted it to have either the word or the essence of curiosity. I liked it to be called Urban something. The workshop twist seems cool for me, it was a walk-shop. It stuck. One of my first routes was in East London. East London is really popular and there are lots of graffiti walking tours, lots of historical walking tours and contemporary walking tours, so the title I chose was East End Urban Curiosity Workshop. My event got picked up by the Eventbrite people and it got on their calendar. It got some exposure just by virtue of me, maybe not very strategically, picking the title that I picked. It is really crucial that you consider carefully the title that you choose.

But also that it came to you, whether it was your walking, or it came to you in one of those flashes that you really love that. It does not necessarily need to be a process. It is part of something that you are doing that allows this space for those thoughts to emerge.

Precisely, and then moving on from that, I made sure that I got in touch with people like from Time Out. I was then careful in looking for relevant hashtags in my social media accounts.

What types of hashtags did you use for that situation? First of all, some people might not know about Eventbrite, but it is here in the US. You also mentioned Time Out London, I guess we’ve got Time Outs but I’m not sure.

You used to, but you don’t anymore. So a key thing, in hindsight, if I was being more strategic than I was then – I am now; but at the beginning, it was just this experiment that then just grew as I was talking to more and more people. There are key three things; get clear with what it is that you are offering, and who it is that is going to help. I feel that this is something that was manageable — a two-hour event that could really help a busy city slicker who was having a bad time and feeling a bit stressed and spread thin, and they wanted to connect themselves. Maybe this is someone who hasn’t put pen to paper for over 15 years just because their teacher told them that they are bad at writing.

I then expanded it to anybody. It doesn’t have to be anybody who has particularly got a writing interest or background. It is much more about busy people wanting to feel calmer and feel more creative, and that is through the guided exercises that I have given them in the workshop. They go away at the end of the workshop with a greater sense of the time that they’ve perceived themselves not to have to pursue creative passions, versus the time that they do have if they are deliberate about the time that they choose to spend connecting online. That’s something that people leave with.

Word of mouth has been really positive. Me being really happy to tell new people about what it is I do. A little bit at the beginning, I was quite anxious and shy and self-conscious about that. But now, it is very clear. This is what I do, though it might not appeal to everybody. The people who resonate with it are going to get excited about it.

When somebody asks you, “What do you do,” what is it that you say? What is your quick elevator pitch?

My quick elevator pitch is that I am a writer who also leads Urban Curiosity walk-shops which are creativity and digital mindfulness sessions on foot around a variety of London areas. And that these target busy people who are stressed out and need to just slow down while unplugging and to spark ideas. This gives them space to do that.

You said that once people start writing in their journals, which you give them, do you actually make the journals?

I do. I was lucky enough to participate in a fantastic workshop run by my friend Rachel Hazel who is a book artist and teacher of book-binding. She taught me how to cut the paper and how to do coptic stitching, and all sorts of beautiful things. I decided to incorporate that in my offering.

We were talking about you putting the next course online. For those of us who don’t live in London, you can go to Urban Curiosity, and very soon you will have one for people who like me, live in California, or live elsewhere so we can buy your book or your journal and write in something beautiful as we tour London with you.

This summer there will be something coming out like that. That website is where I will be posting my news first off to my mailing list.

Just to expand a little bit on your question on getting the word out, as I have come along this journey, I have realized how important collaboration is; that is getting to know others and going to networking events like Creating Mornings, I go to that here in London. It is meeting people in the real world, going to fantastic conferences like Alive in Berlin, going to retreats like the one we met on with Andrea Scher and Juna Mustad Milano in Bali, and all sorts of things. That makes it easier to reach out to people when you need the help in spreading the word. They are already your friend and they have already a sense of who you are because they have a human connection. I think there is great power in that. I believe in getting out, meeting people, and not just sitting behind my screens all day long.

It’s things like reaching out to membership associations. For instance, I met a man who is a member of the National Association of Writers in Education here in the UK. They’ve got a community of people who are potentially exactly my audience. It’s contacting those guys through their regular mail outs. It’s things like Writing for Wellness Association here, the Romantic Novelists Association, all of these different organizations that I’m either a member of or that I follow. I’ve made sure to connect with the relevant people and let them know what I’m doing and how to encourage their community to benefit from what I’m offering. Where appropriate I also offer discounts to those people because they are members of those organizations or associations. I think that’s really powerful.

More recently, partnerships that I have embarked on have been with Digital Magazines like Thoughtful. We got something that is coming out this summer. It is a really fantastic and relatively new magazine that this publication has. It really excited me because it is about meaningful living without compromising the coolness of a product that you might be interested in, or the people that you want to learn more about. I have being doing some interviews of really interesting people for them.

We are developing something that is coming out later this year which we will see some kind of collaboration between the publication and me offering some kind of Urban Curiosity exploration just for their readers. That has been really fun to explore and develop. I think it is also really helpful to me because that opens me up to a whole new community here in London which might not have come across me otherwise.

So that’s the digital magazine online called Thoughtful.com. I know you do live events in person, but do you also promote live events mindfully online?

I do. I currently have a number of social media profiles. I love, love, love Instagram, and I am there as @ClareBarryUK. I post most days, and I love that little moment of mindfulness. This is why I don’t like digital detox. This is one act each day of finding that image that I want to record and capture and share with the world.

That is a mindful moment. How do I want that image to look? How does it lend itself to the words I want to share? How does it inspire me or speak to me in that moment? I am on Twitter with the same handle (@ClareBarryUK). I am also at Facebook at Urban Curiosity Events so that’s a really good place to find out about things that are of interest and for me to share cool articles and curate good things from people online, and also share updates of all upcoming and past workshops and retreats.

You brought up something really interesting too, that social media can be mindful if you choose to do something you really love. I think a lot of times people think they have to do every social media, and Alex Franzen, who you and I both know and is my mentor, sort of experimented with it. She fooled around with Instagram and found that it wasn’t for her. She built up a following very quickly but she didn’t love it. She never was on Facebook. She did Twitter for a long time and then she gave that up and now she just does blogging. So go where you are called.

You used Instagram for a mindful moment, something that you really loved, the beauty of the image. I say go to the social media where you are called, you don’t have to blast every single social media because it’s really important to be consistent on one social media. If you are posting an image a day, that’s really consistent so people get to know you. Maybe they are just visiting London, they don’t necessarily live there but they want to go to your workshop. I saw that you offer writers workshops too and there’s an overnight one I wanted to go to as well. I was like, “Oh that sounds super fun.”

Yeah I’m really excited. I’ve got a good group of people coming to my first couple of retreats at my house. It’s going to be good.

I spent a long time figuring out how to word that particular page on the writers retreat on my website so that it appeals to the right person, gave them all the information that they needed, and was presented in a way where they can scan the page and they will pick up the right points in an easy way.

For the writers retreat?

Yes.

You can see here that Clare has really easy to remember set of URLs, which is a really good thing when it comes to being able to promote live events mindfully. It’s really important to remember to just keep things simple for when you need to say them when you are on the radio or have to write them out.

Exactly, because I did a collaboration with a friend recently, we came up with a workshop called Mouth and Mind. It combined creativity with mindfulness and a walk and food. It was a fantastic workshop and we are really excited to do it again. That’s with Meredith Whitley from Food at Heart. But what we found, and we were playing with titles before we launched our workshop, we came up with a couple that looked great on paper but we couldn’t say them. If they don’t roll off my tongue easily, they don’t make the cut if I can’t say it, because I have to say it lots and lots of times.

That’s so important even with sound bites. Sometimes they look really great written, but they are not written, they are spoken. So you do have to have them be able to sound natural when you speak them. It’s the same thing for titles, if you don’t feel comfortable speaking them, then they are not for you even if they do sound really great on paper.

I know! And we were so sad to say goodbye to a couple of them, but we made the right choice in the end. I just want to jump back to what you said about Alex Franzen, I loved it when she put out those blog posts that were a reminder to people that we can spend a lot of our time on social media connecting with other people. But what kind of connection is that? It can be meaningful connection, but it can also be mindless connection. I really admire that she had the courage and the clarity to say that this doesn’t work for me, and in fact business wise, I don’t need to do this, so I’m not going to anymore. I think that was really fantastic.

I had a big love/hate, push/pull relationship with social media in the last couple of years. I have not used it as well, or leveraged it as well as I could have done from a business point of view. I felt that it was this time suck. I had a real mental block about it. I had been working with a fantastic woman here in London called Samantha Miller of Lifeandme.com, she is definitely someone worth checking out. She has helped me deconstruct it and see that it is something that doesn’t have to be over us, it doesn’t have to be a big thing that is going to be a big time suck everyday. It is a really important tool for helping me spread the word about the work that I am doing and how it can help other people.

On a very practical note, things like Hootsuite have helped be less overwhelmed by the idea of trying to figure out how I can try to push my content out and how to present it, as well as manage it. Also, crucially, how to manage the responses. There is nothing I loathe more than to respond to somebody’s tweets or update and then for it to disappear into the ether and they don’t acknowledge it. I love it when somebody comments or acknowledges that something they have put out into the world has touched me. Finding those tools to help you manage those things that makes it seem not overwhelming is key.

Also, don’t be everywhere. I see some websites where people have got umpteen icons. When I click through, many of them are inactive, and that is quite damaging. I think you should then do one or two things really well.

What does Samantha Miller do?

She has recently launched a business here in London which is to help small businesses and creative entrepreneurs to branch out. She helps them to be strategic in thinking what it is that they like doing, and how to grow their business in a way that is sustainable and meaningful to them as individuals. She is very interested in wellness and creativity. I think she is brilliant because she is a young woman who is ahead of her generation. She realized that we need to nourish ourselves and our bodies as well as our souls. We need to work in a way that allows us to do that, and not work and live like many people do, which is to be switched on all the time.  That’s not necessarily that we are switched on online, it’s that we never allow ourselves that space in the day. Like I used to not allow myself that space and then I struggled to sleep at night because my mind was filled with all the thoughts that I suppressed throughout the day.

Hello, I know that one well. I’ve been up since four in the morning and haven’t slept since then, my mind was buzzing so I just got my little notebook out and started writing just so I could get it all out into my little notebook so that way I could fall back asleep. That didn’t happen, I just had so much on my mind today.

Getting back to social media for a minute, you use Hootsuite to manage social media. Do you set up a little campaign when you’re promoting an event on social media?

Yes.

How do you set up that campaign?

I think about what it is that I’m doing, I think about what problem does this solve, who is it going to help, and when am I going to run it, and where I am going to run it. I have a little template whereby there may be some obvious themes that might come up for that event. I’m always writing down interesting quotes that I hear on other people’s podcasts, I really can’t wait for you to launch your full suite of podcasts, before and after mine!

So I’ve got this running notebook with lots of different things. I pick out the quotes that I’ve listened to or read, and I tie them in with the theme. I’m also finding other content or articles that are interesting that are related to the theme. Then I write a number of my own tweets and status updates around this particular event that is not overwhelmingly salesy. I remind people in a variety of ways that the event is happening, that what it is going about, and this is how it might help them, and where to go next to book that ticket.

That’s great, so you have collected quotes, articles, things that are about your topic that are not direct promotions about your topic to create interest around this whole thing, then you promote in between. Do you have a certain number that you do? Like three other people’s stuff to your one promotion?

I am not that strategic, but I shouldn’t admit that out loud on a podcast about how to promote live events mindfully. But I am very instinctive about my business. I think I get turned off by the people on social media who are trying to flog their book every other tweet, so I am acutely aware of what a turn off that is. I am interested in curation and I want to be known for curating and sharing interesting content and spreading the word about good stuff that other people are doing. But I only share it if it touched me or if it’s worth it to be putting me on your radar. I don’t want to waste your time, you are a busy person Susan.

So five or six is probably more realistic. It also depends also how near I am to the event and what numbers are looking like. There are times where my event tickets have sold out really quickly. There are also times around the holidays where things are a little bit slower and that time is where I might do some last minute messaging of that the last tickets that are available. It is just all about reminding the people of the scarcity of these tickets. “There’s one or two left, final booking of these slots available now. Book here.”

You said also something that touched me, is that you said you curate things that touched you and that you want to be known for curating those meaningful things to people. You are about meaningfulness so you are putting out meaningful images, not just because they are popular, but you are putting them out there because they’ve touched you in some way and have meaning for you. Whereas I think that sometimes people start sharing because other people have shared. They are not thinking, “Is this something that is really connected with me that I want to share with others?” That is not a way to promote live events mindfully with gorgeosity.

I feel very strongly about being respectful to other people. If somebody else has liked my Urban Curiosity Events Facebook page, I don’t want to bombard them with a load of crap, frankly. I don’t appreciate it in the reverse, from a business point of view and being a bit tougher. I have unliked or hidden certain pages when there is a steady stream of stuff that does not resonate with me in that moment. I want to nurture my community whether they are following me on Facebook or whether they are following me on Twitter.

Each of those platforms operates in a different way and the interaction is different. I think you have to be cognizant of that and adjust. I want to share stuff that is going to have an impact and will be helpful, not just because I need to send out a tweet because it’s been one hour since my last tweet.

The other thing I was thinking about when you were talking about social media, and I want to finish up with social media and then I want to ask you one more question about your international publicity. Do you use other tools for social media too? I think what you said is really important too, each medium has a different protocol and a different way to connect with people that you want to be cognizant of. It’s not okay to blast people with your stuff over and over again to your community, which I know that some people do.

But by the same token, with something like Twitter, this is where you have to understand the platform because it is very fast moving. If I put in a tweet out in the morning here, but because you are in the West Coast of the US, you are going to miss that one teeny tweet in the sea of a million when you wake up, or at the point in the day when you jump onto Twitter. There is merit in making sure that you share certain messages more than once, absolutely. But it needs to be deliberate and done with intention and not in a way that is going to turn somebody off, you never want to do that.

I know someone who is a producer of a radio show that circulates the show one tweet every two hours and mixes them up on Twitter and cycles them in over and over again. I asked the person who works for him if he has unsubscribes on Twitter and she said no because he is consistently building his audience. But I bet they are hiding some too, those that see the same things over and over.

Also this comes back to, and I hesitate using this word because I think it gets thrown about too much these days, but this comes back to being authentic. So I am my business the same way that you are with yours. My integrity is really really valuable to me, and once that is gone with a prospect or a customer, I don’t easily get it back, if I ever get it back. So that works for him, and that’s great. For me, when I am putting something out, I am aware of what I would feel if I were the consumer. Would I be ticked off because this was the third time I saw the same salesy tweet or Instagram with a terrible image?

I am always thinking about myself as my prospect or my client, maybe that is not what the business and marketing gurus would recommend, but up to now it’s worked for me and I will keep at it until the day that it no longer works for me.

I think that’s great and I don’t think you need to listen to the gurus because it is important to listen to yourself for your own integrity. Also to understand what resonates with your community.

Precisely.

If it resonates with you it will resonate with your community. I know Andrea Scher works like that too. Other people who are the “marketing gurus” might say that is not correct, but I will disagree with them too.

Andrea’s got a fantastically successful audience and her audience is very established because what she does is very good. She is really good at what she does. She has found a way for it to be authentic and meaningful for her. That is what keeps people going back to her. That’s why people like us leapt at the chance to go to Bali with her and Juno.

Back to social media for a minute, do you have any other tools that you recommend other than Hootsuite?

At the moment, that is the main one. I am really late to the party on this one but that has revolutionized things for me and made it seem less overwhelming. There is a guy called Bryan Collins, he is an Irish writer, and he has a free guide to Twitter. I find it really helpful because it demystified the whole thing to me. If I just pulled off Excel all these fantastic quotes that I am collecting and just put them in to a couple of columns and just upload them to Hootsuite in a CSV file. I just upload it and schedule it through the platform. It just makes it so much easier for me. I am sure that there are a lot of other tools out there, but those are the ones that I am using for the moment.

While it’s really important to get the word out and social media is one strand of that for me, and I have to be very careful to not allow it to be a time suck, which is what put me off getting involved in the first place. Now I feel not so [apprehensive] about it, I know what I’m doing when I jump on. I am on for a fixed amount of time and then I get off. It’s working for me.

Can you upload images to Hootsuite?

Yes, everything. It really made it less frightening and overwhelming. I felt frightened by the sense of overwhelm that I had with, “Oh my God I need to be on social media.” I wanted to do what Alex Franzen’s done, but by the same token, she was able to do that because her business is much more established. She already has a solid client base, which is fantastic and well deserved. I am much earlier on in my journey, I can’t afford to not embrace the power of social media at this point in my business. Maybe at some future point I may pull back. By the same token, it’s allowed me to maintain contact with some fantastic people that I meet along the way and I am enjoying that.

I also know that Alex built up her following through her blog posts, then that fanned out to social media. Obviously for any social media, you want to drive people back to your website to connect with them more deeply.

I was also curious about national publicity. I remember when I was a publicist and I did publicity for a hair salon and art gallery called Architects and Heroes. I did national publicity for them in Vogue, Bazaar, all the big fashion magazines like InStyle. The reason why we did it is that is people from all over the world when they came to San Francisco, would book an appointment. So even though you’ve got something local for Urban Curiosity Walk-shops, have you done any national publicity or is that something that you have not considered yet?

This is something that I am working on right now. I am doing a soft launch of a new speaker event that I am hosting this week in Notting Hill, London. Next month, I will have a launch whereby I invite along some media from the glossy magazines, so Psychologist Magazine, Harpers, and Tattler, those kinds of guys and the people from Wellness Magazine. I would like those people to receive my lovely invitation which will be a handcrafted invitation.

My speaker is going to be book artist, Rachel Hazel, who is fantastic. She is going to come along and speak to us about the tension between living – she lives partly on Iona, this tiny island on the west coast of Scotland and partly in Edinburgh. The rest of the time she’s traveling the world and making fantastic art, and books, and teaching people like me how to make our own books.

She is going to teach the audience how to make a tiny book after I’ve grilled her on stage. I’m really excited about that. I am really hoping that the time is going to pay off for me because here, all of the journalists are running around doing Christmas in July. They taste the minced pies in the heat of summer because they are working on their editions that you and I buy in November, December, and January.

So you are doing this well in advance is what you are saying. You understand the editorial calendar of journalists and that they need three to six months depending on what they are working on.

They do. One option that I have not explored yet, but I am about to, is looking at those more niche magazines where there are overlaps. It might be the executive magazine that is handed out in business class on one of the major airlines. It might be one of the more niche craft journals that come out quarterly. I am doing research which is code for buying lots of fantastic magazines. I love magazines and journals. There are so many fantastic ones out there.

We love paper and tactile things. Will you share some of those? Even though you are in the UK, we would love to have some of those.

Yes, and they are not all UK based, there’s lots from Australia, Germany, and the United States too. I’ll fish those out.

That would be great for people like us who love books, journals, and all those tactile things.

She literally just arrived back from Squam and arrived back in the UK today.

Did you say Squam? I’ve never heard of that.

Yes, so I’m sure I’m going to get this a little wrong, but they do live retreats and online retreats. They are based out of the east coast of New Hampshire but don’t quote me on that. It’s a female community and many of the people who are interested in knitting and crocheting, very tactile crafts.

I thought it was a place! I was like, “Here’s another place that I don’t know about in the world.”

Yes, it’s held near Nantucket. She’s definitely one to check out.

What you’ve just said I want to repeat, because some people really want to go for the big national media, that they ignore the niche market and the trade magazines. The market where your people are could be very niche markets. There is still a lot of competition there, but you can do a very targeted campaign that is very specific to what you do that really reaches those people. What I’m saying is it doesn’t necessarily matter the size.  You might get a better response from a small niche magazine than you do from a big national one because it’s right for you.

An example of that is my client, Lionel Bissoon who does something called mesotherapy. It’s natural vitamins, minerals, and homeopathy under the skin with tiny pin pricks that rejuvenate your face, or get into the place where it is hard for you to lose fat, things like that. So his business used to be mainly women and star celebrities all would go to him if they wanted to look great before an event. He did one placement in a magazine that targeted CEOs in the New York area because he is in New York City and his whole business shifted because these men wanted testosterone therapy.

It’s so competitive in New York to look young, you want to feel great, you want to get the young women, and you want to get ahead in business. His whole business shifted because of that one small, but very targeted publication which was for CEOs who could afford his testosterone therapy. I’m saying that the power of a small niche can shift your small business into growing one particular part of it or shifting the whole thing.

And in unexpected ways. If your business model is one that allows you to be agile, and allows you to pivot when these opportunities present themselves, then that is fantastic. Go for it.

So remember that you can go to Urban Curiosity. Tell us about your next big project and your plan to entice big prospects into it and promote live events mindfully. 

Something I have been working over the summer is this mentorship community called Thrive. This is set to launch in the autumn or fall and it is going to be for the busy person, for men and women who want to find those moments of pause throughout their day. Maybe they need a little help through inspirational essays, whether it’s through a webinar with interesting guest speakers sharing their expertise on wellness, on quirky more specific topics like the work Rachel does on papermaking and handwriting. It’s also things like keeping an eye on your physical health.

So I write these days and I can easily spend all day sitting down behind the computer screen and write. These are some of the topics that I am currently working on at the moment and how to package them in a way that is really appealing to my prospects.

I am feeling excited and more confident about the marketing options out there. This is a digital product. This is a membership community. It is going to stretch me to market my product in a very different way from the marketing that I have done to date. I am looking forward to hearing all of your juicy tips from your other guests on your podcasts. I am looking at what other people are doing and what is working. I am a big believer in deconstructing what is working for somebody else.

A piece of advice that I got when I was writing fiction was to take a favorite novel and deconstruct it. Look at the framework and the techniques. Don’t read it as a reader who is sucked into this fantastic story. Break it down into its component parts so that you can analyze how the author has managed to create this fantastically compelling story that has sucked you in. I did just that with two of my favorite authors. I just got stuck two chapters in because they were such good storytellers that they sucked me into the story and I stopped seeing the architecture and the framework of how they wrote it. That is what I have done in figuring out sales copies.

I have looked at what other people have done that has enticed me to buy something from them online. What compelled me to buy that course? What compelled me to sign up to Andrea and Juna’s fantastic retreat in Bali? Deconstructing their sales page, I can see how it appealed to me and I can see that they are clearly telling me what they are going to be offering me. Taking that same model of deconstructing, I am looking at what other people are doing at their launches online and figuring out a plan with two or three months lead time as to how I could launch that community to my audience. I will come back to speak and will let you know how I’ve been getting along.

That is something that I do too, regularly. I know that for some people that doesn’t necessarily come naturally. I am writing a YA novel, and I don’t know anything about those kinds of novels so I just started reading them like crazy and deconstructing them like you did.

Like you, I learned to write sales copy from people like Joe Vitale. He made me want to buy every single thing even though I don’t need it. I thought, “I do not need this, but why do I want it so bad?” I call it reverse engineering, because it is the same way I create sound bites, is I listen to how people speak naturally. I listen to all the great people on radio and on TV and in print, then I reverse engineer it.

What did they do that other people could do too? That is what you are saying to do, and I think it is so valuable because you need to know what is out there in the market place, it’s your own homework. You also need to know what if there are ten other people who are doing walks in London?

There are lots of people who are doing versions of what I do, but they are not me. It has taken me some time to reach this point where I got the confidence to say that there might be similarities, there might be overlap with our audience, but this is the differentiating factor: it is me. This is what has attracted me to the products and services that I bought, it’s the person behind it. It is part of their story and how they have conveyed their story. I will be tapping into all of those things as I develop this marketing strategy for my new community project.

I am thinking of the idea of also doing vlogging which I am slightly trepidacious about. Not because I am afraid of the recording part because I’m kind of overcome that anxiety because I’ve been doing some recording for some other things. What I am anxious about is the actual technology, I am a tech dolt, I am not very clever when it comes to the fancy stuff that makes these things work. I know I will get there but sometimes I find it quite difficult to get my head around how to make some stuff work. I’m looking at vlogging like, “Oh gosh, I’m going to have to figure out how to edit, and upload, this, that, and the other and hope that this is not potentially just another big time suck.”

However, I really love when my favorite people online post stuff that is live. Maybe it’s not live, but I get to see them and see how their face is animated when they are excited and telling me about the service or the products that they want to sell me or the information they want to share with me that is going to help me learn and help me grow my business. So I am toying with the idea of doing some kind of vlogging because I think there is something powerful about it that helps you connect with your prospects quicker and more easily than just written words or through audio. It is just another complimentary mode.

I think this is true because to not get caught up in the technical aspect, you can hire people to do that. The most important thing is you and you being yourself. Which, by the way, you are the one who’s created this fabulous walk and created the idea of making that tiny book for people which is so appealing, it’s so much about you and that’s part of your personality that is coming through in what you do and what you leave people with. Not only in you leaving them with your great spirit, but you are leaving them with a book that they are not going to forget which is tactile and beautiful. It now has things in it that they have written and that are important to them and they will associate that with you.

That’s my plan, thank you Susan for saying that.

Thank you so much for joining us, Clare Barry. I and Clare are not feeling very well, but we still managed to give this episode on how to promote live events mindfully with lots of spirit. Sometimes things happen like this during a media interview. Suddenly the day of your interview, whether it’s the Today Show, Good Morning America, or Oprah, or whatever it is, something horrible happens.  Sometimes it’s something minor – your kid is sick at school, but sometimes it is major. One time one woman told me that her father was dying. Sometimes it can be as little as a cold or as big as impending death. And yet, we are still able to bring, and it’s so much of what we talked about so much today on how to promote live events mindfully, it’s bringing that mindfulness to the moment from where you are despite the way you feel, even if you are not feeling 100%. How often are we really at 100%?

We have been talking about the stuff that gets us to be excited. I love talking about this stuff. An hour ago, I was not feeling too hot. Right now, I am feeling fantastic. That is the thing. Telling your story and spreading the word is exciting because I am passionate about what I am doing. I want to tell this to more people because I can help more people. It is about bringing that enthusiasm in the moment whether you are feeling tip top before you start recording or not.

Thank you so much Clare, it’s been a joy to talk to you on how to promote live events mindfully.

It’s been fun. Thank you for having me Susan.

About Clare Barry

Clare Barry is a London writer and the founder of Urban Curiosity. That is creativity and wellness brand that helps busy people like all of us, slow down and spark ideas. Her writing workshops, retreats, and monthly speakers’ events focus on creativity and human connection in a digital world, in London, the real one. She went from frazzled office worker whose creativity was in a puddle at the bottom of the career ladder to a thriving writer and a creative entrepreneur when she slowed down long enough to breathe. Now she helps writers reclaim time and head space for what really matters. You can find her at clarebarry.com/urban-curiosity.

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