How did Get Organized Already get in REAL SIMPLE magazine this month?
First of all. HOLY COW! Get Organized Already is mentioned in the January 2018 issue of REAL SIMPLE magazine.
Seriously, HOLY COW! I’ve been wishing for this sort of thing for many years. It’s hard to believe the magazine beside my keyboard has my name and my company’s name inside it!
I’ve almost stopped smiling about this turn of events enough to think straight. Now I will let you in on some secrets about my journey, as the marketing director of the company, to get us noticed in a big publication.
What did not work
Here are some strategies you may think could work that absolutely did NOT work. None of these things got us into a national magazine:
- luck
- excellence in organizing (although if we sucked at home organizing, it probably couldn’t have happened)
- being pretty (ahem)
- money
- living in NY where the magazine is published
- a gorgeous and very popular Pinterest/Instagram feed (This could possibly work, but it wasn’t the case for us)
- a huge Twitter following (also could work, but didn’t)
Those are the strategies I would have guessed before I started running a small business. Did I miss any? What would you guess gets a non-celebrity-owned small business mentioned in a magazine?
Anger Management
The truth is, I got our company into this magazine by not writing an “I’m pretty mad right now” letter to the author of the article in which we appear, Leslie Goldman. (She writes all over the place, freelance and very good at her job.)
You see, Leslie had called me last summer because of a referral from my colleague, Fay Wolf, the genius author of “New Order” (one of the best organizing books I’ve ever read). Fay sent Leslie my way for parenting tips because I have children and like to give out tips (even when no one asks).
Leslie and I talked a while last summer and then I sent her a bunch of parent-related organizing ideas for Back-to-School time to be included in an article for a different national magazine she was writing.
September rolled around and I enthusiastically picked up the magazine only to find that, while my tips were sort of mentioned–not exactly as I’d written them, there was no sign of my name or Get Organized Already in the magazine at all. I was mad. Not mad at Leslie. But mad and disappointed that I had come so close and it didn’t happen. Another failure.
So, I took that anger and turned it into conviction with which I wrote Leslie a follow-up email THAT NIGHT saying, “Great article! I see my tips didn’t make it in there, but I have a lot of other tips. Here are some of them…”
What do ya know? The next week she wrote back and asked for input about the story you are looking at in this picture!
HEEEY!
What did work
In summary, here are the ways I DID get my company mentioned in a national magazine:
- years of reading and writing organizing tips and tricks (becoming an expert in the field)
- determination
- talking about business with people I actually like and admire (not people at events with “networking” in the title)
- persistence
- slowly, steadily building up our professional online reputation
I did it.
I’ve written before on this blog about taking credit for your accomplishments, however small they feel and however prideful you feel by taking the credit. Sometimes it is a hard thing to do for women. Sometimes? Really all the times.
[bctt tweet=”It’s much easier to praise someone else and move out of the spotlight. Still, most of us do accomplish noteworthy things on a regular basis. ” username=”getorganzdalrdy”]
So, go ahead and take some credit, Girlfriend.
You did it!
Do you have an accomplishment you can share with me? Here in the comments, or on Instagram? Or even Twitter? Please tell me. We can celebrate together!
Love, Nonnahs