Use Publicity to Grow Your Business

How to Get Free Publicity

Publicity as you know comes in many communication forms, from traditional print, tv, and radio to the power of the internet. My outcome is to re-ignite your passion and purpose for creating FREE and low cost publicity to increase your market share!

Traditional Media Relations is a sophisticated process with its own protocol, etiquette and rules. Savvy marketers know how to navigate those waters to build those relationships and reach their target audience through the power of publicity efforts. You can do it too!

Let’s review the key elements of a publicity plan.

Start by developing a clear understanding of your target audience? Who are they? What do they read, watch or listen to? Define their demographics, lifestyle and life stage? Next, make a list of your core messages and ideas. For example the PROBLEMS, SOLUTIONS, and TOPICS related to your products & services. What problems can you help them solve? Keep in mind, that to create an effective press release, it must be of value and not a self-absorbed promotion. Ask yourself, what message you want to give them and why should they care? How can you entertain and inform them at the same time? Finally, dedicate time each week to your publicity efforts. It’s one of the best ways to improve your positioning, and grow your business.

Recently we launched the ProfitRichMarketing.com membership site. It’s a website that’s focused on all things related to marketing to help you grow your business. We wanted to drive traffic, generate leads, gain subscribers and get higher rankings in the search engines so that our prospects could find us. when they are searching for specific keyword terms. The process started by creating the publicity plan and answering the questions we discussed earlier. Our goal was to reach business owners, marketing directors, entrepreneurs, sales people and anyone else who wanted to learn how to promote and use marketing methods effectively. We knew that our prospects weren’t searching to join a content membership site, but that they would be searching for solutions, for tips, tactics, strategies and techniques related to understanding marketing, sales, promotion and publicity.

Then we created press releases and articles in a format that was newsworthy and filled them with keyword rich search terms; included hyperlinks back to us; and a byline about our company. Please understand, simply creating compelling content isn’t enough…it still has to reach interested readers.

The most effective way to publish your media release is to simultaneously place it on your own website and send it to the press release distribution services. I’m sure you understand the concept of posting it to your site… just get your webmaster to create a section on your site with clear navigation and links with the keywords, titles and topics of your press releases. Warning: this next tip is a bit technical… You can go the extra mile and create an RSS feed on your site using a RSS feed generator script too. That makes it easy for your site visitors to get YOUR content dynamically… automatically to their site, blog or RSS reader… if they subscribe to your RSS Chanel feed. We don’t have enough time to go into the depths of RSS in this episode. For now, just make sure you post your releases on your website and get your webmaster to research and implement RSS feeds.

Next, you’ll want to utilize Press Release Distribution Services. Keep in mind that they fall into two categories, each with their own benefits. There are distribution services that specialize in getting your releases out to lots of different Internet sites. This helps you reach thousands of people almost instantly because listings get automatically sent to Google News, Yahoo News and others. Your search-engine rankings improve too when you include hyperlinks back to your site from your releases because in-bound links are a weighted component of the search-engine rankings algorithms. And the other type of distribution service focuses on getting your release into the hands of broadcast and print reporters. While some services claim to do both, usually you’ll have to use more than one service and track the results. While I don’t endorse any particular service, you can find them popular services on Google or Yahoo by searching for *News Release Services*

I hope you’re taking great notes and have already compiled a list of publicity action steps you’re going to take. Subscribe to the RSS Feed on follow me, Ford Saeks on Twitter at: www.Twitter.com/Prime_Concepts