I did a podcast interview a few weeks ago on a medical podcast. We were talking about how physicians can do more interviews and how they can help get them more of their ideal patients. But in the first few minutes of the interview, he asked why doctors should even do media work at all. Basically, he wanted to know if doing interviews talking about different topics on the local TV news or local radio shows, or in newspapers or magazines, was worth a physician's time.

I thought it's a valid question no matter what type of work you do.

As I say on just about every episode of this podcast, your goal for doing these media interviews is probably not becoming famous or just helping people generally. You almost certainly want to grow your practice or business.

Maybe you are already too busy. That's certainly true with a lot of physicians and other experts today. But the great thing about the media is that it can help you attract a very specific type of client, customer, or patient.

With the media, you can focus on topics that appeal specifically to your ideal client, customer, or patient. When I was starting out in the media, I was trying to grow my practice with more young athletes, since that's a key part of sports medicine. So, I suggested and pitched a lot of topics about youth sports, injuries in youth sports and how to prevent them, what parents and coaches should know and do. I became known as the expert on youth sports in Charleston. Pretty soon, I was getting more young athletes as patients in my practice.

That's not to say that doing an interview that is on a topic slightly outside of the ideal is always a bad thing. Again, as I've said many times before, the value in media comes from repetition and being seen over and over. But if you can narrow those interviews to being mostly about a small niche field, it could be a huge boost for your work.

Now speaking of investment, it's important to understand that there are really two types of investment when it comes to getting media interviews. You can spend money, or you can spend time.

First, money. Part of why the physician hosting the podcast I mentioned earlier was asking if it was worth the investment was that most physicians are busy. Like so many other experts. We're all busy. So, you can avoid spending any time researching topics and pitching the media and just hire someone to do it for you. Basically, you could hire a publicist, and a lot of experts go this route.

From an investment standpoint, you save time by spending a lot of money - anywhere from about $3000 to $20,000 a month. Now if that publicist has a lot of connections, you might get interviews that provide a lot of credibility - maybe USA Today or the New York Times. But in my experience, they are less effective getting you interviews in your city or town unless they live and work there. And those local interviews are where your customers, clients and patients are going to come from. Doing a radio interview in Oklahoma City that your publicist got you probably won't get you more business in Georgia or California or wherever you live and work.

Time. Instead of spending money, you can devote time. And at first, you will put time into it. Collecting ideas for topics. Pitching reporters, journalists, and producers. Putting together a home or office "studio" to do remote interviews. Creating a database or CRM of people in the media you can pitch.

But once you put the system into place, you can do it without tons of extra time. You can scan articles for a few minutes each day while drinking a cup of coffee. You can - and should - create a pitch template that you tweak for each different topic idea, so you aren't recreating the wheel each time.

And even better, once you create and implement your system,