Nancy Juetten knows how to yank my chain, make me sit up and watch me beg – journalistically speaking. Now, she wants to teach you how to make me salivate like Pavlov’s dog over the chance to tell your story.

Her first Publici-Tea workshop in Tacoma on Friday will combine tea, biscotti and insightful advice to help business owners sell their stories to people like me.

It works.

Kristen Marie Schuerlein founded a simple Seattle company, Affirmagy, on Valentine’s Day 2005. She silk-screens life-affirming messages about peace, love, serenity and other subjects on fleece blankets she calls “Affirmawraps.”

Schuerlein used one of Juetten’s action strategies to snag attention from an online business journal. Her blankets have attracted attention from 30 publications (make that 31 now), including Alaska Airlines’ in-flight magazine, Chicago Parent magazine and The Boston Globe.

“What I discovered a couple of years ago in my conversations with people is there are many small businesses equally worthy of media attention as big companies,” Juetten said. “But they’re so small they aren’t in a position to buy a firm’s public relations services. So I thought, ‘What if I came up with some tools to help (business) people help themselves?’”

So she wrote 147 strategies she’d learned from her public relations experience helping companies such as Olympic Hot Tub Co., Oberto Sausage Co. and Seattle Chocolate Co. She split her ideas into two booklets and turned them into a half-day workshop.

I’m particularly fond of No. 7: “Make it easy for reporters to tell your story accurately and in an interesting way.” Juetten describes how to pull together simple background materials for reporters. Because many of us newshounds behave a lot like domesticated dogs – we’d much rather hover around waiting for you to throw us some scraps than go out hunting for information.

As an opening exercise, Juetten suggests owners of small businesses type their names and the names of their businesses into an Internet search engine to see what comes up. She did that back in 2001 when she first decided to parlay her experience in marketing for fast food companies into her own consulting business. What came up on the search engine? Her slow time in a 10k race she’d run three years before.

If that happens to you, she said, “you have some work to do.”

Today if you do a search for Nancy Juetten, as I did, on the first page of hits you’ll see her company, her blog, some of her advice in print, and some video and articles she wrote as a user-rated media expert at ezinearticles.com.

“My first priority is to help people help themselves,” Juetten said. “But selfishly I like to help reporters and editors do their work better. A lot of time gets wasted by people schlepping bad copy that has no hope of finding an audience.”

As someone who scours the South Sound looking for good business stories to tell, I’ll vouch for that. Yet for business people, finding an audience most often translates into more business.

“Most people,” Juetten said, “don’t want to market their business, they want to do their business.”

But if no one knows you or business exist, well … you can finish that sentence yourself.

Come Friday, I plan to sit in the back of Juetten’s first Tacoma workshop and listen to the advice she dishes out. If the business owners in the audience intend to dangle what they learn as bait to get me to write about them, I want to know what’s coming.

Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785

dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com

Publici-Tea

What: Workshop for business owners to learn how to promote their businesses by persuading the media to write about them

Instructor: Nancy Juetten

When: Friday, 9 a.m to 2 p.m.

Where: A private residence in North Tacoma

Cost: $297, includes lunch, refreshments and publicity tool kit

To register online: mainstreetmediasavvy.com