Big companies have public relations departments to get their message out. Small companies have always been on their own, battling to try and get people to write about them in the trade press and mainstream media. But the internet has changed the rules, and happily it’s the small companies who stand to benefit the most.

Nowadays, you can craft your own direct-to-the-public press releases and get your company’s message to your audience directly via the internet.

Write your own press releases
The way to do this is first to get comfortable writing your own press releases, and then post them with a news release distribution service, who will take your news release and do the electronic version of getting it out to the world, on your behalf, for a small fee.

A good service can get your press release published on hundreds of news site all over the internet, and the outcome is that whenever anyone searches for your type of goods or service, there is a chance that your press release will appear. From there they can click through to you, and you’ve got their eyeballs.

Compare the offerings of PR Newswire (www.prnewswire.com), PRWeb (www.prweb.com) and Business Wire (www.businesswire.com) to get a feel for who can help; there are scores of online PR firms to choose from, so Google “online pr” to get some more. You never meet these people; you just upload your release and pay online.

Anything is news with online PR
Because of this ease of distribution, press releases aren’t just for big news any more. You can write a press release for anything you can think of: when you win an award, get a new staff member, win a contract, launch a new product, sponsor a charity…. just write what you’ve done, keep it short, give a quote (“It’s great news, and we’re very proud” said Ian Watkins, general manager) and add some contact details at the bottom. If you’re after inspiration, go to www.docstoc.com and type “press release” into the search box to browse some random releases.

There are other simple rules to follow. You should make your press release appeal directly to your buyers, as unlike the old type of press release, you’re not writing for journalists any more. So for instance, if your opening hours have changed, then say “You can get your breakfast from 6.30pm at Ricky’s Diner now we’ve extended our opening hours…” rather than “Clients can…”
Another important thing is to make the copy “keyword-rich”. To do this, you have to know what people type when they search for you on the internet. (If you don’t know, get someone to check your website logs for you and find out.) Then, you weave these words into your press release. Congratulations, you’ve just become a search engine marketer!

Have a press release area on your website
Finally, once you’ve written and distributed your press release, you ought to post it on your own website too, as it may not remain forever online, and when the news services drop your content from their sites, that means people will still find it when they search for your keywords. If your website has a blog, this is really easy. If not – well, it really ought to have.

Do this even a few times a year and you will find that for your company name and for the names of your products and services, you are suddenly much more visible to potential clients, both locally and further afield. It’s a great way to spend a few hundred euros of your annual marketing budget, and one too few small companies take advantage of.

This article was written by Phil Morse and first published in Essential magazine.

In this brave new online world of social media, web marketing, blogs, affiliate schemes and so on (all of which are fantastic ways of marketing your online business), there is one simple, established marketing method that every single business forgets at its peril: email marketing. Why?

• It is a fast way of meeting business goals – More customers, leads, sales? Get the word out! Let people know about your offers and bargains. Offer up-sell and cross-sell products to customers who’ve already bought from you. Plan it well and you can get high response rates
• It keeps your customers informed and happy – Letting your customers know about little things, like changes to payment conditions, legislation that may affect them, business shortcuts and so on, shows them you care
• It’s cheap – Start stuffing envelopes and licking stamps and you’ll soon see the cost-effectiveness of targeted direct email marketing campaigns. With proper frequencies, follow-up emails and good timing (just like old-fashioned postal direct marketing) you can get great results for a relatively small outlay
• It teaches you about your customers – You can measure everything from whether the email addresses are correct to which part of the email each individual customer clicked on. So you can gauge the popularity of your offers, down to individual customer level
• It helps you with all your other online marketing – Remember the social media, web marketing, blogs and affiliate schemes we mentioned earlier? All of these can deliver great results for your business, and can do so even more effectively with statistical feedback from your email marketing campaigns

Reedus Design has a simple, effective and fully featured pay-as-you-go email system that is delighting many clients already. It has easy templates, full feedback of results and lots of other profit-friendly features. Contact us for more details.

Your blog is one of the best tools you have for getting people to your website, and thus for getting new customers and increasing profits. Here’s how this type of marketing works:

• By posting new content onto your blog, you show your “know your beans” to your potential customers, and you attract the search engines (they love new content)
• By properly promoting your content online, you start attracting the right kind of web traffic quickly
• By linking from your blog posts to your product or service pages, this traffic then arrives right where you can convert it into customers

The beauty is that the more effort you put in, the more traffic you get – and once you have a blog, it’s free (apart from your time of course.) If you don’t have a blog, you ought to consider getting one. Contact us for a free, no-obligation consultation.

It’s a system, and it works, but there are no shortcuts. You have to plan properly and then enact your plan well. Here is a brief overview of the steps you should be taking to establish your blog profitably:

1. Decide on your keywords. Your blog has to attract the search engines, so list all the keywords (and that includes short phrases, or “key phrases”) you want your business to appear for when people type them in to Google, and plan a blog post for each key phrase (you can have 2 or 3 per blog post, that’s fine)
2. Plan your content. Your blog has to keep your audience happy once they get there. So plan interesting/useful posts for each key phrase or set of key phrases. These posts should not be overly commercial; they should show your knowledge of your products, services and sector. Of course, you will link at the end of each post to your shop / product / service, which is how the blog feeds traffic into your commerical offerings
3. Write your content. Aim for one post a week and stick to your plan. In our experience, any less looks like your blog is an afterthought, and any more is unsustainable for busy business people. Incorporate the keywords for that post into the content, in headlines, subheadings, and the content itself. Aim for three occurrences of the keyword(s) in each post, but keep it natural; “keyword packing” is counter-productive. Don’t fret too much about this; by writing around the subject you have chosen for your key phrases(s), you’ll naturally use them anyway. If you ignore key phrase(s) entirely, you’ll still get some results
4. Register your blog on blog directories. Type “blog directory” into Google and register it on as many services as you find
5. Join web forums. These are online message boards where people discuss the same products / services / subjects that your blog does, and comment usefully and in a non-commercial manner on what they’re talking about. (Type “forum” and your business type or subject area in to Google to find them; you’ll soon get a feel for the dominant forums in your sector.) Post a few times before you start linking back to your site. You can link back to individual blog posts that are relevant to discussions and you can sometimes add your blog (and shop) to your forum signature. Follow the rules and be useful. Forums aren’t about plugging without adding value
6. Every time you post, publicise your latest entry on social media services. Post the fact that you’ve added a blog entry to your Facebook page, on Twitter, to Delicious and any social media/bookmarking services that are particular to your sector too. Don’t forget that you can also set up an RSS feed so people who visit your blog can subscribe to your posts too

Remember, this is a numbers and time game. The more you promote your blog, the more traffic you get. Use Google Analytics to monitor traffic to your blog overall and from the forums, and direct your efforts where you are getting the best results. Expect some traffic in days or weeks; decent volumes takes months, but once it’s “switched on”, it’s yours and it’s free.

Contact us for a free, no-obligation quotation to get a blog for your site, or to learn better how to make your existing blog work for you.