Allure Magazine

Allure's 2019 Editorial Calendar Available In Tin Shingle's PR Center

Allure Magazine’s 2019 Editorial Calendar has been added to Tin Shingle's Members-Only Searchable Editorial Calendar Collection. Easily find out the monthly themes for 2019 for this magazine and others in our PR Center. Will you be featured in their 2019 Anti-Anti Aging Issue this year? What about the Wellness and Energy Issue that focuses on how to get and keep the energy? Or the Culture of Beauty Issue?

Membership with Tin Shingle makes it easier and more approachable to pitch big magazines with your amazing brand. Education gives courage. Learn more about membership here.

SEO Opportunity: When A Celebrity Speaks, The People Take to Google - Be In Their Search Results!

PR and SEO have gone hand in hand for years. So much so, that Tin Shingle was actually designed around their union, to help you identify SEO opportunities from PR mentions. Case in point, as pointed out in this tiny blurb in Allure Magazine's September 2018 issue: When Kylie Jenner announced on Instagram that she removed the filler from her lips, "Google searches for 'lip filler removal' spike 10,000% that same day." Those types of Google searches - we'll call that SEO Gone Wild - is an open market for businesses and experts who specialize in this field to quickly benefit from Kylie's words.

I first witnessed this SEO magic when I was blogging on my first blog in about 2005, when the TV show One Tree Hill was on. A character on the show started a clothing line - Clothes Over Bros - that you could also buy in real life. My blog covered fashion stuff, and I loved that show, so it was natural for me to blog about it the night the episode aired. Overnight, traffic to my blog website soared. Everyone was searching for the clothing line, and no one else had written about it yet. My blog post, which I did make sure to write in a very SEO friendly way, outranked articles at major magazines who later did write about it.

An influx in searches like that will happen for a few hours at least. Maybe for a few days. This is why you want to be aware of what celebrities are saying, and then write articles about it at your own blog on your business website. Now with social media, you will right away want to create a picture post to your Instagram with a caption that includes those words, and uses hashtags that are related to the terms.

Not only will you possibly sell product from a mention like this - which is a PR mention that had nothing to do with your business!! you're just riding the wave  - but you could get PR as well. Now that a celebrity like Kylie said this about lip filler, it's a timely trend. The media will now prioritize this subject in their articles or TV segments. The media will be looking for sources to quote and products to feature immediately, to also ride that wave of the public's attention.

This is why having a blog at your own business website (some  businesses call it "News") is such an important tool in your marketing toolbelt. You must be able to control the content that first starts coming out of and representing your brand, but you also must create breadcrumbs for people to find. Think of these blog articles as little fishing hooks. If you are hoping for attention, fishing for exposure, then that is sort of like fishing. You're waiting. Having more fishing hooks in the water with good bait on it (good pictures, links in the article, great content), then you'll attract more fish.

Of course, SEO is the passive way of getting exposure. Actually going out to get PR requires more pounding of the pavement, targeted outreach, personalized emails, etc. Doing both targeted PR outreach and creating passive SEO opportunities are two strategies you should be doing at all times. The passive SEO work will have very good long term impact!

What Do You Mean By "SEO Work?"

The world of SEO is tainted by scientific formulas and baseless promises on instant Google ranking if you pay a price or do something convoluted with database submissions. All bruhaha. What I mean by SEO work is Creative Writing and Timeliness.

When you write an article in your blog section of your website about something in the news, you can write it in a way that:

  • Informs your reader.
  • Inspires your reader to trust you.
  • Directs your reader on where to go to get what you sell or contact you about your expertise.

That's it! There is a recipe to making your article SEO Yummy, which I'll talk about in this Tip Sheet, "The Celebrity SEO Effect: How to Score New Sales and Exposure from a Celebrity Mention of a Trend", but that's all it is. Just so you know, I majored in Communications in Media Studies, and was one class shy of a Creative Writing Minor. So that's why organic SEO methods come naturally to me, and they can to you as well.

Training TuneUp Webinars To Further Your Celebrity Quest

Tin Shingle produces Training TuneUp online classes to give you pre-recorded face-to-face training in PR, SEO, Social Media and Newsletter Marketing efforts. Pro Members of Tin Shingle get to listen to these for free. Here are a few you will like that are related to this strategy:

Training TuneUp:
How to Get Celebrity Buzz for Your Brand Even If They Aren't Using It

Training TuneUp:
SEO and How to Bait the Online Sales Hook Part 1

Training TuneUp:
SEO and How to Bait the Online Sales Hook Part 2

Allure Magazine Makes A Point To Feature Asian Women On Their Covers

We're going to start sharing with you our #MediaMonitoring research. It's really fun homework - you just read magazines. But it makes pitching the big magazines so much easier because you already know how they think. Continue the conversation with us in our Private Community Groups to bounce ideas off each other, but here's what we got from Allure:

Allure Magazine is stepping it up with Asian women appearing on their covers. Only 2 Asian women have held the spot: Lucy Liu in 2000, and Olivia Munn in 2014. Editor in Chief Michelle Lee  is changing that with this year’s "The Hair Guide" which dropped this May/June 2018 by featuring 3 “game-changing Asian models,” which has special meaning to her. “My preteen self couldn’t even fathom seeing an Asian face on the cover of a mainstream magazine or landing a TV show or headlining a movie,” she said in her letter from the editor. As for future coverage for Asian women, Michelle says: “Let’s not wait for Lucy Lui’s next movie.” Bravo! 👏

What else was featured?

A Local Hair Parlor - In Chicago! 

Usually when brick and mortars are featured in print magazines, they are in New York, since that’s where most of the magazines are based. Here, Chicago’s North Side is featured when the salon Logan Parlor took the spotlight. Founded by LGBTQ activists Jamie DiGrazia and Tricia Serpe, this parlor is unusual in that it was designed to look like your grandma’s house to promote familiarity, be snug, offer coffee and free beer while you’re getting cut, and “act as a safe community space first,” according to the article. Published during LGBTQ month, this gave the parlor even more relevancy against competing salons may have also been pitching into the magazine.

Products of Course

The Tangle Teaser, an invention of a brush by a London based hairdresser, Shaun Pulfrey. It got only two paragraphs of content, but it's a spot in a regular page of the magazine that features entrepreneurs. An entire page was dedicated to it. Shaun recounted how he mortgaged his flat, spent $130,000 to develop the brush, got on to Dragon’s Den (London’s equivalent of Shark Tank), and was sent home, rejected. They called it a hair-brained idea. That night, however, 1,300 orders came in and Shaun considered it a score. A global commercial for his brand. This type of story could have easily been pitched in to the magazine just by knowing the magazine’s theme alone. Which is what’s Tin Shingle’s Editorial Calendars are for.

PS: Want to pitch Shark Tank? Listen to this Tin Shingle's Training TuneUp where we interviewed two contestants on the show who went home with a win.

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The Experts Weigh In

There are the roundups of course. Maybe you would have seen this come across a HARO lead, maybe you would have missed it or maybe it never ended up in that slush pile at all. An expert or product owner could have certainly cold-pitched this in with an idea of when best to use this product. The editor may have forwarded it to the writer for consideration. If you’re an expert or service provider, you could off-the-cuff recommend your preferred products. If you’re a business who created the products, well...you know what to do.

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A Singer-Songwriter

Kelissa McDonald is a 29 year old singer-songwriter who was included in Allure’s feature story on how hair is represented in culture and religion. Kelissa was featured for her hair worn in Rastafarian tradition. Three women in total were featured in the article: a Sikh woman named Jessie Kaur Lehail who co-founded the Kaur Project, a storytelling site about the varied experiences of modern Sikh women like her, and Melissa Oaks, a Native American Mohawk who grew up on the Akwesasne Mohawk Territory and is an activist and organizer, as well as a teacher of Native American art and design.

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Are Your Wheels Turning?

This is what happens when you subscribe to magazines and study them for their style, vibe and content choices. The more you read them, the more you'll know how your brand might fit into a story. Thumbing through the magazine is a great way to think outside of the box, and think of clever angles or reasons to feature you or your business, that you normally wouldn't have thought of.

This is what we love about looking through Tin Shingle's Editorial Calendars. It forces us to think outside of the box, and form an idea around a theme. It means you are "cold-pitching" an idea, and not waiting around to hear something more specific that already has a line of pitches in for it. Tin Shingle helps you do this each month during our "PR Planning for This Month" Training TuneUp webinar. Subscribe to our newsletter to get alerts of when these are, and turn on a Level 3 Online Classes Membership to stream any of the webinars you missed or want to hear again.

What's Next At Allure?

Here's a sneak peek of Allure's Editorial Calendar in Tin Shingle's Members-Only Database. When you're a Level 4 Member of Tin Shingle, you can see our entire collection. Knowing the general theme of a magazine will help your wheels turn about the type of pitch you could send in to the right editor.

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Speaking of such contacts, Tin Shingle keeps an exclusive list of editors, writers and producers in our members-only Media Contact database. We also knew they were working on this Hair Guide because we have their Editorial Calendar in our members-only database as well. We focused on it during our webinar TuneUp, “PR Planning: January” where we highlight ideas 💡 that the print media is working on, since their editorial cycle is 3-6 months in advance.

Media Contacts & Editorial Calendars Through Membership With Tin Shingle

Become an All Access Level 4 Member today for access! And improve your chances for getting featured in magazines! Tin Shingle is your DIY PR BFF.