What goes together with marketing like peanut butter and jelly?
While PR has changed over the past 10 years, it’s still a valuable component of your overall marketing strategy.
Pitching the media could result in you getting written about in a magazine, online, or on a television or radio program.
Publishing press releases online can get you valuable links back to your website, which helps you rank higher in search results.
Start here for all things public relations!
A lot of businesses focus on making it big in the media. While it’s great to be interviewed in Entrepreneur Magazine or be covered in the Wall Street Journal, the average business owner will not have this success. And you know what? That’s okay.
Say you have a press release and you have two options. You can send it to the Wall Street Journal and pray every day that they decide to write about you OR you can distribute your search engine optimized press release using a distribution service, knowing it will definitely reach a wide variety of channels online, including Yahoo!, Google, RSS feeds, blogs, journalists and others who may want to interview you further or write about your release on their websites.
If you learned about PR and marketing in the “old school,” you probably only think of pitching news to editors. If this is your only approach, you’re at the mercy of journalists who get hundreds of unwanted pitches and press releases every day. But what you may be overlooking is the importance of working with bloggers.
Welcome to what David Meerman Scott calls “The New Rulesof Marketing & PR.” In this new world, bloggers may be your best (and most overlooked) ally. Think about it. They need to write. A lot. And they run out of topics to blog about. Enter your pitch or press release. If targeted correctly, you could end up with several bloggers writing about you. Each one gets roughly between 10 and 10,000 readers to his or her blog, which increases your exposure that much more.
As promised, here is my interview with Joan Stewart, The Publicity Hound. First let me give her a brief introduction. Joan worked as a newspaper reporter and editor for 22 years. She left to start her own business consulting in public relations in southeast Wisconsin. This being the mid-nineties, she quickly realized she could reach a much wider audience if she brought her business online. As she said, that “opened up my market to the entire world.”
Joan started by offering a free PR newsletter, and quickly began to add products for sale, beginning what she calls the “work-get paid-get paid-get paid” model that we now all strive for. She is now an expert in public relations. She shares her knowledge with anyone who wants it, and shows you how to use free publicity to establish your credibility, enhance your reputation, position yourself as an expert, sell more products and services, promote a favorite cause or issue, and position your company as an employer of choice.
Many companies don’t believe they have anything newsworthy to tell the world about. They couldn’t be more wrong. Every single business has something that’s worth putting into a press release. It’s just a matter of looking at it the right way.
Your news doesn’t have to be earth-shattering. It might not even matter to anyone outside of the company, but if you’re proud of it, toot your horn!
The more news you have, the more active your company appears to be. I tend to be so focused on my business, I forget that getting interviewed on the radio or a blog is kind of big. So now I strive to write press releases about all my activities.
I’ve always been a big proponent of press releases. They’re short, simple, and to the point. But lately I’ve been asking myself if they’re relevant in a world where journalists are bombarded with releases and there are thousands of releases online at any given point online.
I decided, yes, they are relevant. Here’s why.
1. Press releases boost SEO. Anything that helps move your business up that legendary search engine list is worth doing (short of paid placement). News is fleeting, but press releases will help move and stay up in rankings, especially if you put them out regularly.
2. Press releases make it seem like you’re important. There’s no real secret to writing and distributing press releases, but people seem mystified by the process. So if your business has releases out, it seems like you’re moving and shaking. Even if you’re not.