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How can I promote issue Number 500 of my free newsletter?

Almost every Tuesday during the last decade, my readers and I have been sharing our best tips in “The Publicity Hound’s Tips of the Week.”

If it’s Tuesday, and it’s Christmas, the ezine arrives via email on Christmas Day and the other 51 weeks of the year.

On April 16 this year, I’ll published Edition Number 500, and I’m looking for a clever promotion or contest that will engage current readers, create a buzz on the social media sites, and attract new subscribers.

Because I’m knee-deep in three other projects, I’m not even sure I’ll have time to pull this off. But I’d be crazy not to ask my Hounds for help.

What can I do to promote the newsletter, pull in new readers, attract attention for the archived issues, encourage people to submit questions for Help this Hound, and make this a really fun celebration?

Posted In: Authors & Publishers, Business Promotion, Contests, Publicity Resources, Publicity on the Internet
posted On: 3/16/2010: 11:26 am: By Joan
Comments: No Comments

How to generate publicity from Pi Day

Piggybacking publicity onto popular or obscure days, weeks and months of the year is one of the easiest ways to find your way into the media, and I give lots of examples in my ebook, How to be a Kick-butt Publicity Hound.

Here’s one of the more obscure days of the year. It’s Pi Day, and it’s today, 3/14. It celebrates pi, which is 3.141592653589793, the mathematical constant that goes on without any repeating patterns, right into infinity.

Columnist Jim Stingl of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote a column in today’s paper about two local businesses that are celebrating:

Discovery World Museum is giving prizes to math wizards and Einsteins who can recite from memory the most digits of pi.
Each year, Whole Foods Market in Milwaukee gives away free slices of apple, cherry or blueberry pie, starting at 3:14 p.m. It also sells pies for $3.14.

Your business doesn’t have to be tied to food, or math, in order for you to generate a little publicity from Pi Day. What can you sell for $3.14? Or what challenge can you issue to your customers that ties into the numbers 3, 1 and 4?

Update:

Someone who commented on Stingl’s column another great publicity idea:

“When I used to work as a medical researcher, our department celebrated Pi Day every year by bringing pies into work on that day. A lot of people would bring in pies and we’d set up the pies on a credenza in the hall outside of the labs along with plates and forks, whipped cream, etc. On the wall above the pies there were fun facts about pie.”

This is something ANY business or nonprofit can do. Try it, and invite the local TV stations and newspapers.

For more ideas, see Special Report #45: How to Generate National Publicity from Your Own Holiday (or Day, Week or Month of the Year). Or if you don’t want to create your own day, you can always piggyback onto someone else’s.

Posted In: Business Promotion, Holidays, Newspaper Publicity, TV Publicity
posted On: 3/14/2010: 10:07 am: By Joan
Comments: No Comments

Pros & cons of using Facebook, Twitter geo-location features

Any day now, you’ll be able to let your Facebook friends and Twitter followers know where you are when you post status updates.

Daniel Ionescu’s article in PC World says Facebook will start adding friend location starting next month, though it’s uncertain exactly how this will work. Twitter turned on its feature briefly this week and then turned it off. On the main stream, Twitter will show maps overlaying individual tweets, together with place names and your location. On both sites, the geo-location features will be optional.

Ionescu offers three reasons for using them:

To get social recommendation from real people
To find relevant local news
To find friends and cool people around you

His three reasons for not using them:

Criminals are reading Facebook and Twitter status updates, too. I wrote about how unsuspecting Twitterers are showing up on sites like PleaseRobMe.com
Even more advertising in your face
The lack of control over who actually sees your location.

If you’re planning to use the geo-location features, let’s hear why. If not, why not? Share details of how you’ll use these features in a PR campaign. Comment here.

Posted In: Facebook, Social media marketing, Twitter
posted On: 3/11/2010: 2:44 pm: By Joan
Comments: 1 Comment

How engaging is your blog? 17 metrics to measure

Measuring the effectiveness of a publicity campaign is one factor that separates the true Publicity Hounds from the Publicity Pups.

If you have no way of measuring the success of a press release you’ve posted online, then why are you posting it?

The same with your blog.

My friend Don Crowther, an Internet marketing expert who measures all the time, has 11 engagement metrics you need to track at your blog.

Some of them will be a little advanced for beginning bloggers. So if you’re struggling to come up with enough content for your blog and enough time to write it, concentrate on producing the content for now. You can return to the task of measurement in several months.

All of his metrics measure what bloggers are getting, like traffic, unique visitors and subscriptions to their RSS feeds. I commented at his blog and suggested that bloggers also measure from the other side. Instead of just measuring how much we’re getting, let’s measure how much we’re giving.

6 more things worth measuring

I offered these six examples of “giving”:

—How often are we blogging? I hear from so many people who start on Monday and quit by Friday “because I’m not getting any traffic.”

—How often are we writing about our competitors?

—How often are we featuring guest bloggers, including our competitors, who have something valuable to say to our readers?

—Do we bother to reply to comments at our blogs? I started doing this a few months ago, fairly consistently, because it shows I want to continue the conversation, and I’m noticing the number of comments from others is increasing. Also, replying will encourage people to return to my blog to see what I had to say about their comment. Besides, it’s the polite thing to do.

—Do we show readers that we welcome comments and prod them into writing them? You did in the last paragraph of your post above.

—Do we show readers how easy it is to use our blog? I love your little note reminding people to get a gravatar. I’m going to steal this idea (I know you won’t mind) and use it at my own blog.

And a time-saving tip

I also left this P.S. at Don’s blog. It has nothing to do with measurement, but it’s a time-saving tip you can use at your own blog:

P.S. As I go from blog to blog posting comments like this one, I sometimes them turn my more substantial comments into posts for my own blog. That’s what I’m going to do right now. I’ll simply save these comments to my clipboard, go over to my blog, write a post, link to this post, and add to my list if I can think of anything else.

In other words, the post you’re reading here originated from the comments I wrote at Donsg blog. You can do the same thing.

Whenever you comment at somebody’s blog, or answer a question on LinkedIn, or create content for something like handouts for a presentation you’re giving, ask yourself if you can turn it into a blog post. That’s one of the many tips that Patsi Krakoff and I shared during the teleseminar we presented in January on Time-saving Tips for Smart Business Blogging.

What metrics to you measure at your own blog? And what other ways do you engage your readers? Comment here.

Posted In: Blogs
posted On: : 12:29 pm: By Joan
Comments: No Comments

Ideas needed on how to promote an expert on mold

Susan Murphy of Pleasant Ridge, MI writes:

I’m looking for some interesting avenues in which to promote our client, an environmental scientist who specializes in toxic mold education, detection and remediation.

Connie Morbach, M.S. CHMM CIE, is a respected national authority in indoor air quality (IAQ) who has performed over 10,000 residential/commercial air tests and environmental evaluations.

Since 1994, her team has witnessed the illnesses and devastation caused by many ill-equipped and unscrupulous IAQ/Mold ‘professionals’ in their industry, and they continue to help so many who have suffered from these injustices. She has just started a blog and is tweeting to share her knowledge as well.

Connie has been featured on a half dozen indoor air quality investigative segments for NBC’s the ” Today” show (“Why your gym may be making you sidk” and “Watch out for hidden germs in supermarkets”) , as well as “Rachael Ray” and “Extreme Makeover Home Edition” in the past but she hasn’t had a PR firm since then.

She’s looking to get the word out again about her expertise and I’m hoping your loyal Hounds can suggest some thoughtful ideas.