You’re here! Welcome.

Welcome to The PR Glow Up! I have been mulling over the launch of this blog for what feels like a lifetime — reviewing years of “notes to self,” reflecting on lessons shared by my mentors and, most importantly, identifying the skills, capabilities and habits that I believe can fuel a great career as a solo public relations pro/consultant.

It would be easy enough to let it all marinate forever — after all, learning is a lifelong pursuit – but there is never going to be a definitive list of dos and don’ts. However, as I tell clients all the time, at a certain point you just have to declare “pencils down.” This thing isn’t going to write itself, is it?

photo: "Welcome" - Bob Duran

Do any of these scenarios describe you? If so, you're in the right place:

• You took the leap and went solo, but growing your business has turned out to be much harder than you expected
• Journalists are not responding to your pitches, and getting media coverage for clients is a struggle
• You’re finding it difficult to define your PR specialty areas and the niches where you can excel
• Short-term and project-based clients are not converting to long-term contracts or monthly/annual retainers
• You’re passionate about having a career in PR, but wonder if you have the right skills to be successful as a solo pro
• You haven’t set up an ecosystem of PR-adjacent services to ensure full support of your clients (photographers, media trainers, graphic designers, makeup artists, etc.)

My goal is for the information shared on my blog, in my webinars and through my courses to help you craft your own PR Glow Up – and I want to hear from you (in the comments, through my contact form, on Twitter, or on Facebook) about additional topics you want to explore, the questions you have, and the industry challenges you encounter.

What's a Glow Up?

JD Hancock - "Fowl Storm"

Put simply, glow up is a term referring to an amazing personal transformation for the better. Some people use it to refer to the ugly-duckling-to-swan stage of our teen years, but really, a glow up is any incredible before/after story.

More importantly, it's a time of mindfulness, patience and preparation. Even if you're not aware of it, your glow up phase is extraordinarily productive. It's when you do the best you can with what you’ve got – all the while, grinding to pull together the knowledge, tools and routines that will propel you to your desired next phase. I love YouTube creator Patricia Bright’s hilarious and frank video about her own glow up. If you think about it, most of us are bound to rack up a few glow ups during our lifetime.

So, by extension (and extreme artistic license), I have extrapolated the term to apply to your before/after story in public relations: The PR Glow Up is an amazing professional transformation into a more competent, confident solo PR practitioner.

"Good to great to glowing" - Bruce W Burtch Incorporated

Join the PR Glow Up community now!

Becoming part of The PR Glow Up community is your opportunity to immerse yourself in professional development and map out your plan to go from good to great. If you haven't already signed up for my mailing list, scroll down right now and drop me your email address.

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Inspiration and Resources

It's well past time to wrap this up, but one thing I’d like to do with each post is to offer you some inspiration, and maybe a little “homework.” It might be a quote, a song, a book, an article – we’ll see. Whatever it is, you should be able to derive some motivation from it and build out your knowledge base, unless I’m just having a laugh (which I do, a lot).

This inaugural bit is all of the above — PR Newser’s “The Top 15 PR Fails of 2015” roundup. Enjoy!

A final (tongue-in-cheek, housekeeping) note:
Of all people, I should know the perils of hanging the very premise of my entire blog on a faddish, slang-y concept. I'm pretty much breaking an unspeakable trust with every English teacher and PR agency boss I have ever had by doing this. Plus, my kids (who, like all teens, are a bunch of haters) might suggest that no one in my generation has any business including “glow up” in their vernacular.

But man, it just works. It’s so simple, so clear. And if two years from now I look like a dinosaur for using the term glow up, welp — I will just make my apologies then!