So you’ve hung up your shingle and clients aren’t exactly beating a path to your door. What can you do? Well you might think standing out on the street with a megaphone will do the trick. And it may be one way to gain attention for your business, but an overall public relations plan incorporating a number of promotional ideas could be just what your business needs.

Public relations is communicating who you are, what you do and how you make a difference. It’s about having successful “relationships” with your “public”. They could be friends, clients, potential customers, competitors or the media who can all help spread the word about your business.

One way of communicating your message is through publicity or media relations. Sending out media releases to create awareness of your product or service through editorial coverage is great publicity and it is very effective. They say publicity is seven times more effective than advertising. But it is just one tactic of an overall public relations plan that you could incorporate.

Let’s look at a few other ideas:

* Newsletters email or hard copy – direct communication with your public, clients and customers. Send out some sort of communication to your data base at least once a quarter to keep “top of mind”

* Write articles about your area of expertise and submit them to business or consumer publications and online sites such as this one you are reading. I have had work come to me directly through published articles

* Fact sheets or a brochure. Include written information about you, your product or service with any mail outs

* Create a website. This is your online PR brochure but you need to keep telling people about it. Make sure you incorporate strategies to promote your site, such as include the domain name in every piece of communication collateral you have, whether it’s brochures, stickers, pens or caps. Put it everywhere

* Product launches and product giveaways to the media. Create “buzz” for your business by giving something away. Be generous as ultimately it will help with sales

* Public speaking – free speeches to Rotary clubs or other organisations is a good way of letting people know about your business and area of expertise. By being known as an expert on a particular topic and getting the word out perhaps the media will contact you

* Networking – join organisations of like minded people such as business networks or your local Chamber of Commerce. Build rapport and relationships to help spread the word about who you are and what you do

* Special events such as a trade show or entering business awards can help boost your profile. Why not hold a launch or an open day or even a cocktail party at your place of business to thank your clients or customers

* Sponsorships. If you can’t afford to hold your own event why not sponsor an event that somebody else is organising. Make sure your sponsorship is acknowledged on any advertising and other communication collateral

* Something as simple as sending thank you notes and letters is good personal PR

About the Author
Sue Currie, the director of Shine Communications Consultancy and author of Apprentice to Business Ace – your inside-out guide to personal branding, is a business educator and speaker on personal branding through image and media. Sign up for free monthly tips at http://www.shinecomms.com.au/contactmanager/default.cfm. To learn more about how you can achieve recognition, enhance your image and shine, visit http://www.shinecomms.com.au.

Every smart business owner knows that visibility in the community is an essential part of a good marketing plan. One of the easiest ways to get that visibility is to use the media. Let print, radio, TV, and the Internet tell others who you are, what you do, and what you have to offer.

When the media’s eye is on you, it’s priceless. So much so, in fact, that the investment you make in retaining professional public relations services to get that attention is paid back many-fold. Not only is your message presented to countless consumers who read the paper, check out their favorite Internet blog, watch TV, or listen to radio, it can go well beyond that particular media moment. For example, copies of an article about you (permission granted by the publication and/or author, of course) can be inserted into your professional portfolio or posted on your Web site. Radio or TV interviews can be downloaded from your Web site for listening or viewing.

To get that visibility in the first place, you’ll want to consider hiring a public relations .professional While no one can guarantee news coverage, an experienced professional already has a media system in place that includes important details such as how to create and distribute a newsworthy press release to the most appropriate media contacts and has time to do the necessary follow-up which often includes customizing news angles, if needed, so that they fit the current needs of particular media venues.

Fees for pr services depends upon the range of assistance you require. A campaign that includes national as well as regional and localized media exposure will cost more than a campaign gearend towards local media only.

If you think your PR budget doesn’t allow for professional assistance, think again. There may be a way (perhaps several) you can reduce those fees. Here are a few ideas about how to generate the revenue so that you can enlist professional services:

1. If you offer fee-based events/workshops, consider securing underwriters to cover the cost of “free” seats or tickets for students or seniors. Honor the underwriters with name recognition, program mention, or even naming seats after them.

a. Underwriters can offset your costs so that you have more funds available for PR purposes. In some instances, PR costs themselves can be underwritten.

b. Underwriters are often other businesses that could benefit from being part of what you are doing. If you offer travel workshops, for example, maybe a local travel agency would be willing to become an underwriter.

c. If the event is hosted by a non-profit, the underwriters can receive tax credit.

2. Consider collaborating with another organization when promoting a service, event, or product.

a. This mutually beneficial arrangement can allow for shared staffing as well as shared publicity expenses.

b. Your partner may be able to contribute to your PR budget in exchange for mention in any article or mailers connected to the event or product launch.

c. These collaborations can also include in-kind assistance. For example, you could hold your retirement planning seminar in a mortgage company conference room that has been “donated” by the mortgage company. Their staff may even help set the room up. This reduces your overhead.

d. Your collaborating group may even be willing to share mailing labels and/or email data base.

3. Use your company newsletter to offer advertising space at reasonable rates.

a. Consider expanding your newsletter’s distribution base because that offers greater visibility. It can be as simple as placing extra newsletters in coffee shops or other places your clientele is most likely to frequent.

4. Do you have an item or service you can raffle off to customers for a good cause? A portion of the raffle ticket fees can be directed toward your PR budget. The rest can go to whatever cause you have selected to support.

a. Donate a percentage of the proceeds to a local kids’ club, senior center, or animal shelter. Everyone loves to be part of a cause that is meaningful and close to home.

Hopefully, these suggestions have sparked some ideas of your own about how to pay for public relations services and how to reach out to your community to invite support. Some of the examples cited here may be more appropriate than others for your situation. That’s fine. Not everyone is going to cover their PR budget by selling raffle tickets. But remember that inviting others to work with you for mutual benefit will always generate good will. That good will, placed in the hands of a competent PR professional whose fees have been offset by your collaborative efforts, can in turn become the subject of yet more media attention.

About the Author
Since 2000, Karen Pierce Gonzalez Public Relations has provided public relations services for businesses, non-profits, art and culture organizations, and individual professionals locally, regionally, and nationally. Founder and president Karen Pierce Gonzalez has twenty-five years experience in the media having worked as a journalist for such media as the San Francisco Chronicle, Marin Independent Journal, and Point Reyes Light newspapers as well a numerous local and national magazines. She knows what makes the news and what does not. Want to know more? Visit Karen Pierce Gonzalez Public Relations at http://www.karenpiercegonzalez.com Also check out her blog: http://kpgpublicrelations.blogspot.com

A PR product or service launching is a perfect way to build momentum slowly. It handles the first and most important hurdle to overcome in building a brand — credibility.

Step 1: Be a leak-er. The media adores describing events that are “going” to occur. Use it and use it to its longest capacity. Don’t jump out too soon.

Step 2: The Slow Buildup. Like a rose, slow gets more beautiful to people the more it unfolds. It is the way people expect and are comfortable with, respect it.

Step 3: Recruit natural allies to support your launch and buildup. Especially, the enemy of your competitors.

Step 4: Bottom-up rollout. You don’t want to jump up to the roof and yell, people just think you’re crazy. Begin at the lowest rung on the ladder first. Consider each rung a media outlet. Each media creates its own momentum, its own attraction.

Step 5: Listen and Adjust. Be very aware of credible comments and adjust accordingly. Don’t react but do respond.

Step 6: Make message modifications. What attributes are working and build on them. Observe media feedback and watch for media nosebleeds.

Step 7: Patience. Launch occurs after PR has run its course, not before. Have a big D-day planned with a massive approach.

After PR comes advertising and not before. The advertising handles the conventional hurdle — being popular enough so people buy. Conventional, people buying because other people are buying, never comes before credibility. Credibility is why the most effective brand launching starts with PR.

About the Author
Catherine Franz, a Business Coach, specialized in writing, marketing and product development. Newsletters and additional articles: http://www.abundancecenter.com. An expanded view on this topic, “Brand Building: The Ideal Way” is available in the articles section.

Considering how fundamental they are to the publicist’s trade, it’s always amazed me how lousy almost all press kits truly are. Your typical press kit is a bloated folder filled with puffery, hype, irrelevant information and worse. The vast majority of these monstrosities do little besides kill trees and clog newsroom trash baskets.

The good news is that creating a press kit that actually works really isn’t that hard. Let’s look at the elements of a winning press kit, and help you avoid some common pitfalls.

The Psychology of a Press Kit

There are two fundamental rules to creating a good press kit:

1. The press kit exists to make the journalist’s life easier, not for you to present sales messages and hype. Good publicists are
journalist-centric — that is, they think from the perspective of the recipient, not the sender. They take the time to learn what
journalists need and then they give it to them in as simple, straightforward and user-friendly a manner as possible. Remember, publicity is not about you — it’s about giving journalists what they need to create a strong story.

2. Everything in the press kit goes to support your clincher. Everything else gets yanked out. (A refresher: a “clincher” is my term for the one or two line distillation of your publicity message. It’s the publicist’s version of the Universal Selling Proposition that marketers use to boil a product’s marketing message down to its essence.) You lay out your clincher in the pitch letter that gets clipped to the cover of the press kit, and the press kit serves to flesh out and support your clincher. That’s it. If your clincher is that you’ve brought a radical new way of thinking to your market segment, then a backgrounder about your “old fashioned commitment to excellence” not only doesn’t support your clincher, it may actually contradict it.

The Elements of a Press Kit

The Cover: In my twenty years as a publicist, I have never encountered a single journalist who told me the cover a press kit had the slightest impact on their decision whether to run a story. Yet, businesses still spend thousands on glossy, four color folder covers. Don’t bother. A simple colored folder with your business name imprinted upon it will work just fine.

Some businesses choose to get stickers printed up with their logo and place them on blank folders, which is fine too, as long as
the stickers are neatly applied. Either way, don’t obsess over it — it’s what’s inside that counts.

Letterhead: The first page of each press kit element should be on your letterhead. Some folks prefer to get special “News from
(name of company)” letterhead printed, although, again, I doubt it really matters.

The Lead Release: If your press kit is going out in support of an announcement, an event, a trend story or for another specific
purpose, the release that lays out the news should be the first thing a journalist sees upon opening the folder. This “lead release” should be positioned at the front of the right side of the folder.

Backgrounder: This is the element of your kit that provides, well, the background information to support your pitch. It’s written in the fashion of a standard news feature (i.e. in third person, objective tone). This is typically the longest element in a press kit, often going 2 or 3 pages. As you’re crafting this, keep something important in mind: if a journalist is reading your backgrounder, chances are he’s already interested in your pitch. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t bother with it. You’ve hooked him and the backgrounder can reel him in. To do so, you must answer the two questions he has: “Is the claim made in the pitch legitimate?” and “Is there enough material here for me to do a story?”

Your pitch letter (based on your clincher) made a claim of some sort about you, your company or your product. You’re the fastest, the most advanced, the hottest-selling, the most civic-minded, etc. Now you have to back up your claim. Your backgrounder is where this happens. Provide proof, by giving concrete examples, third party observations, study results, etc.
to support your pitch. If you’re claiming that there’s a trend taking place, here’s where you provide the statistics to back it up. If you’ve claimed that you’ve won more awards that anyone else in town, here’s where you describe them. Don’t stray from your purpose — to reel in the journalist by convincing him that your claim is legit.

The backgrounder also must demonstrate that enough material exists to support the claim – and that it will be easy for the journalist to access this information. Journalists don’t have time to do extended investigation on every piece. Provides leads
to websites, trade journals, experts and other resources to back up your claim and help the journalist complete the story, you’ll have a big edge.

To write a backgrounder, do some role playing. You’re a reporter. Your editor has handed you a pitch letter and said “write this up”. In this case, of course, the pitch letter is your own. While you’re writing it, try to forget that the piece is, essentially, about you. Pretend you’re an objective reporter. Track down resources, dig up stats, interview experts. Try to see if you can create a credible piece that proves the pitch’s claim to be valid and interesting to the reader. If you can, you’ve got a great backgrounder. If you can’t, it may be time to come up with a new pitch!

Bio: Only include bios of people who are relevant to the pitch. A bio of your sales manager in a press kit designed to support a
claim of technological superiority is pointless. A bio of your head of R&D is valid. Keep bios short (three paragraphs at the most) and include only information relevant to the pitch. The fact your head of R&D spent twenty years at NASA is relevant, that she loves golf and has two cats isn’t. The point of a bio: to show the legitimacy of those quoted in your release or being offered for interview, and to help the reporter craft a short description of the person when writing the piece.

Fact Sheet: The fact sheet should distill the entire press kit into an “at a glance” document. Keep it short, use bullet points and bold headings. For example, I might start with the heading The Story: and include a bullet point repeating the pitch. The next heading might be Why It’s Important: followed by some bullet points putting the pitch into a broader industry-wide (or perhaps even worldwide) context. Finally, I might use the heading Why (name of my company) is at the Heart of this Vital Story: and run some bullet points taken from the backgrounder giving support to my claim. Put this fact sheet at the front of the left side of the folder, just across from the lead release. This sort of fact sheet is amazingly powerful and almost never crafted in the fashion I just laid out. I’ve sold countless stories because of this style of fact sheet and you can too.

Other Stuff: Filling out the kit with a company brochure and a photo or two is reasonable, but don’t get carried away. Keep your
kit simple, stick to your clincher and think like a journalist, not a marketer, and you’ll have crafted a first class press kit!

About the Author
Bill Stoller, the “Publicity Insider”, has spent two decades as one of America’s top publicists. Now, through his website, eZine and subscription newsletter, Free Publicity: The Newsletter for PR-Hungry Businesses http://www.PublicityInsider.com/freepub.asp he’s sharing — for the very first time — his secrets of scoring big publicity. For free articles, killer publicity tips and much, much more, visit Bill’s exclusive new site: http://www.PublicityInsider.com

Always ask, “Is now a good time?”

Deadlines in journalism are unrelenting and unforgiving. Using these as your first words after “hello” shows the reporter you’re sympathetic to her needs. It also ensures your pitch gets heard when the reporter is devoting proper attention.

Your goal: attract

In your first contact with a reporter, don’t come off like a talking encyclopedia. Your job now is to attract and interest them – not to deliver the whole story yet. Keep it short and enticing.

Offer that reporter a nugget of information they need

The best way to get a reporter’s attention: put yourself in her shoes and ask yourself, “What do I know about my topic that would help this reporter do a better job or get a big story?”

Don’t go “off the record”

Memorize these words: “There’s no such thing as off the record.” It’s just too risky. If you don’t want to see your words splashed across page one, don’t let them out of your mouth.

When the interview’s over, don’t just hang up

Wrap up every media interview or informal chat with a reporter with this question: “What else are you working on?” Finding out what else is on the reporter’s plate can line you up to get interviewed for the next story, too.

About the Author
Ned Steele works with people in professional services who want to build their practice and accelerate their growth. The president of Ned Steele’s MediaImpact, he is the author of “102 Publicity Tips To Grow a Business or Practice.” http://www.mediaimpact.biz/