This week's media tip might be a little controversial, but I feel strongly about it. You need to be very careful whose advice you listen to when it comes to interviews, whose feedback to get and act on, and who to ignore.

Never take unsolicited advice.

For your media work, focus on the opinions of people who matter. Who know what you are trying to achieve by doing TV, radio, podcast, newspaper or magazine interviews. Who you trust to give you advice that makes you better.

Especially early on, you will get two kinds of unsolicited advice. On one hand, you will get friends and family that tell you did great, even if you didn't. They are trying to be nice and build your confidence. But you don't want or need that. You want people who tell you what you can do better. And let's face it, most of your friends and family don't know the media to give you tips that actually help.

And then you will get the haters. People who don't know you that love to bring others down. It's especially bad on social media, these anonymous people who do nothing but criticize people. When you start posting your interviews on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, these trolls will make fun of your appearance or something you said or really anything at all. Don't listen to that at all. There is nothing worthwhile about any of it.

What you do want is advice from people whose opinion you value, and who actually know what they are talking about.

Maybe you become friends with a writer at the newspaper where you do a lot of interviews, or the news director of the TV station you appear on occasionally. You can ask for 1 or 2 tips to make your interviews better. If you have done what I tell my clients all the time - to help hosts or producers or reporters do their jobs more easily - then they will gladly take a few minutes to give you some tips.

If you work with a publicist, he or she will give you feedback. And it's usually good advice. They want you to be great in interviews because they want to get their other clients on those same shows or in the same publications.

Or you could work with a media coach. This is the strategy that will help you improve the fastest, in my opinion. I've worked with three media coaches specifically, and several other coaches who have helped me develop skills I use in the media. A media coach can review every interview and identify things you could do better. Then he or she can help you prepare for the next interview so you can get better and better, which gets you asked to do more and more interviews. A media coach can be expensive, but if you want to be great, this is the fastest and most reliable way of doing it.

One of the things I do with the clients I work with one-on-one is that you and I figure out what shows or publications are best for helping you grow your business, pitch reporters for those publications or hosts and producers for those shows, work to make your performance amazing, then make sure you have the feedback to do even better the next time, someone you can trust to give you honest feedback and who knows what he or she is talking about, maybe even me as your media coach.

Now please remember, that just like my website, my coaching and everywhere else, that I am not giving business, financial, legal, medical or any other kind of advice here. Talk to a professional for advice specific to your situation.

If you want to learn more...if you want more customers, more clients, more patients, you want to make more money, you want to be recognized as THE expert in your industry, or you even want people you don't even know to come up to you at the gym or in the grocery store, thanking you for helping them, I can help you become a Media PRO.

Sign up for a FREE 30-minute media strategy session with me. We will see where you are and what you're trying ...