| Getting featured in O, the Oprah Magazine,
is like winning the Academy Award. It's a distinction that validates your product like no
other publication.
In fact, getting featured in O helped raise one
entrepreneur’s sales by 60% in just 30 days. But that was just the tip of the
iceberg. The mention brought much needed awareness to a cause close to her heart--breast
cancer. Thanks to Oprah magazine the issue is now visible on a grand scale.
Knowing how valuable it is to get featured in O, you must
consider your competition and understand that, just like The Oprah Winfrey Show, the
standards at the magazine are some of the toughest in the industry. O magazine prides
itself as a publication valuing beauty, courage, attention to the finer points of
relationships, and people doing amazing things in the world.
Here Are 3 Things You Should Know If You Want to Be
Featured in O, The Oprah Magazine:
1. Your product packaging must be beautiful.
If your product packaging and product itself isn't an
eye-stopper, it's most likely not going in O, The Oprah Magazine. Jeanine Boiko of J9
Public Relations, who placed her client Bonjour Fleurette in the magazine three times for
three different products, has this rule of thumb:
"For a product to work in O, ask yourself this: if you
walked past your product on the shelf somewhere, would it catch your eye and make you
stop? It must have unique, attractive packaging that will photograph well. My advice,
especially to new business owners, is to not play it cheap with packaging. At the end of
the day, it's all about the draw of your packaging."
2. Your pitch must be meaningful.
So, before you make a pitch, heed the advice of The Oprah
Magazine Executive Articles Editor Dawn Raffel who says the magazine teaches people how to
live their best life: "It's about realizing your own greatest potential and also
about making a contribution to others."
Whether you want to write about yourself, be written
about, or write about someone else, ask yourself these two questions:
- Are you making a difference in a big way?
- Are you making a difference in a way that is important to
Oprah?
Genevieve Piturro, founder of the Pajama Project, gets a
"yes" on both counts. Her charity gives new pajamas to abused and poor kids,
many whose mothers are in prison. Some of these children never owned any pajamas, and
certainly not new ones. When you think about children going to sleep at night in a fresh
pair of pajamas instead of tattered, dirty clothes, it conjures an image of safety and
home.
Pitturo scored big on two points: She tapped into one of
Oprah's key areas of importance: abused children. And she created a remarkable endeavor
that attracted many people's interest, given the story’s emotional pull. It made me
want to hurry and buy pajamas and donate money to this worthy cause.
3. Your pitch must be well-written.
O's readers expect the content to dig deep into emotional,
physical, and spiritual wellbeing on many levels. Oprah's magazine delivers on this
expectation by seeking out top authors and freelancers from the best national magazines
and newspapers in the country. They look for writers from publications like the New York
Times to Wired to write on topics as diverse as women slavery to how men really feel about
breast implants to the death of a beloved dog.
You can either be interviewed by these experienced writers
or write a feature on a topic that touches the heart of the O magazine reader.
It may take you 1 to 2 years to get published in O, The
Oprah Magazine. But I've haven't met one soul who said it wasn't worth it.
Henry David Thoreau said, "If one advances confidently
in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he
will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." So if getting in O is one of
your dreams, keep advancing toward it with all the steadiness of a tulip reaching toward
the sun. |
