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.

To many people, “networking” conjures up images of awkward breakfast meetings or even pyramid selling. Which is a shame, because in its broadest sense, networking is a great way of getting clients, and the science of good networking is neither unethical nor difficult to master. And as usual, the internet has made it all much easier.

Face-to-face networking
The old way is to join local networking groups, and ply your wares at regular meetings. You get your name out there, and then when someone finally needs your kind of service at some point in the future, you’re in the frame. Until then, you help your fellow networkers out with anything you can, keeping the relationships alive. For this, you have to be as reliable as your word – and that’s where web-based customer relationship management (CRM) software comes in.

A CRM is like an address book, but one that tracks all touch-points between you and a contact, allowing you to follow up effectively on any promises you’ve made, and on potential work, however tentative or long-term.

As well as remembering cliché icebreakers like birthdays, CRMs can log all email conversations or phone calls you’ve had with a contact, accessible from your phone or laptop as well as your office. How good would it be to be have all of this information available whenever someone contacts you?

Not only that, but you can make seemingly throwaway promises long ahead (“I’ll call you in the spring to see how that went…”) and always follow up; such systems will email you reminders way into the future.

The industry-dominating web-based CRM, SalesForce (www.salesforce.com), often scares small businesses with its cost and complexity. But now, competent and attractive products like Highrise (www.highrisehq.com) and BatchBook (www.batchblue.com) make such technology available to all cheaply, quickly and with easy set-up.

Getting social online
It’s a mark of the times that “social networking” has taken on a meaning of its own, but make no mistake – this is real networking. Social networking sites give your business the chance to develop relationships with new types of clientele, winning evangelists who’ll pass the word along for you, helping to create a network of people that you’d struggle to reach otherwise.

LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) is the choice for many professionals, being built around the whole notion of new introductions through trusted contacts. You can post your reasons for being there (career, expertise etc) and answer people’s questions and queries in your particular area, gaining friends and influence along the way. This is traditional networking on steroids, so if you’re not a member – join. For a perfectly usable basic membership, it’s free.

However, don’t ignore Facebook (www.facebook.com). With its Facebook Pages function, you can have a commercially minded “fan” page for your business. Add a link to this page on your company website and email signatures and you’ll start to get visitors, who can join in the conversation around your brand, posting on your “wall” and conversing with you and others. Post some compelling content, dish out some free advice or help to the right person here and there, and you stand to gain both friends and clients.

Dip your toes in!
The online networking work can seem alien, with its own norms and vocabulary, but nowadays you really can’t afford to ignore it. Keep up the traditional networking, manage it well with a decent CRM, and join a couple of online services (with a pledge to do something on each once a week), and pull ahead of your competition and their Rolodexes!

This article first appeared in Essential Magazine Marbella

It is a constant source of frustration and amazement to us how few companies have an active, up to date website. Most are old and broken, which is sad because with a little understanding and effort (and not necessarily much money), most businesses could benefit greatly from using today’s web.

The internet is dead…
Five years ago, things were very different. The small businessman wanting a presence online would remortgage his house, brave a visit to a web company (who’d blind him with science and slap him with a huge bill), then more than likely spend an equally scary sum paying for mysterious “search engine optimisation” to get the site to “number one in Google”.

And then… well frankly, normally nothing. The site got a bit of traffic, nobody really kept it updated, and a few years later, there it is: unloved and unvisited. The businessman can’t really articulate what went wrong, and so doesn’t know what to do to put it right.

Meanwhile, nothing short of a web revolution was happening under his nose.

…long live the internet!
So what’s changed? Simple: community. The web today isn’t about companies dictating from on high: Nowadays, people find and talk to each other about companies without their help. Who hasn’t read online user-generated content (reviews, rants, praise, exposés) on the internet? Hotels, music, airlines, destinations, white goods, employers – we assess, reject, choose, update, plan, reminisce, share… and all away from the sites of the companies who often provide what we’re talking about.

So what’s a small company to do? Once you’ve accepted the fact that authenticity, transparency and honesty are absolute givens, there are practical changes you can make in order to gain traffic and customers. Here are just two:

1: Start a blog
A blog is a simple way of adding new content to your site. Once you have one, you don’t need a web company to update it – it’s as easy as using Microsoft Word. If you simply write a 200-word piece every week about something to do with your business (New product? New store? Roadworks outside? Holiday opening times? Famous customer? It really doesn’t have to be world-changing…), Google will over time index your efforts and your site will appear when people search for your products and services. At the same time you also benefit from positioning yourself as an expert online in your chosen field.

You can get a blog for free (try www.blogger.com, wordpress.com or livejournal.com) – or for a more professional look, get a web company to incorporate one into your website.

2. Get yourself out there
People will talk about your business on local expat web forums, on Facebook, on TripAdvisor (if you’re a hotel, bar, restaurant) and so on. The point is, they’re not necessarily coming to your website to make a buying decision any more. So to have your say, you need to be where your customers are. You need to sign up on these sites and join in (be they forums, reviews, blogs or whatever). Someone praising you? Thank them and provide a site link. Someone got a complaint? Publicly put it right. Competitor no longer offering something you do? Suggest an alternative… you.

Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) can help you find where people are talking about you. It will take some keywords and your email address, then search the whole web continuously on your behalf for your terms, emailing you whenever you get mentioned. Start with your brand name and your main products or services and wait for it to find interesting conversations going on right now about you.

The most important thing is to join in, however strange it feels at first. “Get it” now before your competitors do, and reap the benefits.

Next time: Networking. This article first appeared in “Essential” magazine.

By Phil Morse