The Publicity Hound’s Blog  

If you’ve hired a virtual assistant to help with your publicity campaign, or for any other tasks you don’t like to do or don’t have the talent to do, Tough Love & Accountability, or Four Golden Rules for Working with Your Virtual Assistant is must reading.

Denise Aday of Aday VA Solutions, a Dallas, TX based virtual assistance firm, reminds us to:

1. Pay bills promptly.

2. Respect procedures that our VA has put in place

3. Remember that we are the VA’s client. The VA is not our employee.

4. Communicate, communicate, communicate. That means picking up the phone and calling my own VA, Chris Buffaloe of Serenity Virtual Assistant Services, if I get the feeling that our email communication just isn’t working. She does the same. 

If you haven’t hired a VA yet, what are you waiting for? During the telseminar I conducted on “How to Hire a Virtual Assistant to Help with Your Publicity Campaign,” VAs Cindy Greenway and Diana Ennen, both excellent VAs, said the VA and the client are responsible for building the relationship. They stressed that VAs must set boundaries right at the beginning and let clients know when they can and cannot call, when they are available to work on projects, and how much lead time they need.

Publicity Hounds can hire VAs to write press releases, update their online media rooms, manage social networking duties, and write how-to articles.  

A tip of the hat to Chris, my VA, for alerting me to this. (Chris, are you trying to tell me something???)   

Posted In: Publicity Resources, Social networking
posted On: 6/25/2008: 2:04 pm: By Joan
Comments: 2 Comments

The 2008 PRWeek/PRNewswire Media Survey reveals some interesting results about the way journalists do their jobs.  

When they hunt for sources and do research before writing, many of them use three popular social networking sites to save time: LinedIn, MySpace and Facebook.

PRWeek surveyed more than 1,200 journalists and bloggers. One out of four say they have a profile on MySpace. About one-third have a profile on Facebook, and one-third are on LinkedIn.

More than 57 percent of those surveyed report using blogs to measure sentiment. About half of the respondents use blogs to find what other mainstream publications are writing about. Almost one-third use blogs to find industry experts.

The results have interesting implications for people who want to promote a product, service, cause or issue:

—If you aren’t blogging, start today. You can have a blog up and running in less than 10 minutes at Blogger.com. Or use a more stable, flexible platform like WordPress, Typepad or MovableType.

—Post comments at blogs that your target audience reads. Comments give you a backlink to your own blog or website and positions you as an expert.

—Pitch bloggers, but don’t just send press releases. Most bloggers want a customized pitch, and they want to know you read their blogs. See “How to Pitch the Best Bloggers & Create a Publicity Explosion.”

—Create a profile on MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn and use relevant tags, or keywords, so journalists can find you easily when searching these sites.

Those three sites, by the way, are among the seven social media marketing sites where social media marketing expert Don Crowther says you must have a presence. Don was one of my guest experts when I presented the teleseminar series “How to Create a Media Plan” last year.

Posted In: Blogs, Publicity Resources, Social networking
posted On: 4/10/2008: 10:35 pm: By Joan
Comments: No Comments

Authors, are you giving away copies of your books to influential people and asking them to submit reviews at EzineArticles.com, the granddaddy of the article directory sites?

Heck, they don’t even have to be influential. If you publish an ezine, ask your readers to review one of your books. Bloggers, you can do the same. Speakers, how about asking your audiences to review your latest book?

Here are four reasons why you should be using this resource:

—Thousands of people search this huge website monthly, looking for articles on specific topics. If a review about your book is among them, it could lead to a sale.

—The website doesn’t want bad reviews that discourage people from buying a book.

• We will also not accept nasty book reviews that are designed to save a consumer from buying the book or seek to destroy or dilute the credibility of the author of the book. Those are better left for your blog and not in a syndicatable article.
• We will accept book reviews that mentions a negative or who the book might not be for, provided that’s not the theme of the book review. If you hated the book, we prefer to not see your book review here.

—It lets visitors subscribe to an RSS feed for books in certain genres. Bloggers, for example, might want to know about reviews in their area of expertise so they can  share the information with their readers.

—It accepts reviews of ebooks.

EzineArticles.com, by the way, has recently expanded the “book reviews” niche to become a main category and added 44 new book review sub-categories.

Authors, if your publicity campaign is stalled, see “Special Report #40: 42 Publicity Tips for Authors and Small Publishers.” 

Posted In: Authors & Publishers, Publicity Resources, Publicity on the Internet, Writing Articles
posted On: 4/9/2008: 6:20 am: By Joan
Comments: No Comments

If you’ve hired a virtual assistant, or you’re considering hiring one,  let your VA help you with more than just your business. Delegate many of your personal calls to her.

Here’s an example. 

When my local Pick ‘n Save supermarket stopped carrying Jennie-O turkey sausage links, one of my favorite breakfast foods, they told me that if I wanted to continue buying them, I’d have to call the meat department and place a special order for an entire case.

So every few months, I do. But making calls like that chips away at time I should be spending on my business.

Now, I turn over calls like this one to my virtual assistant, Christine Buffaloe. Yesterday, she hunted for the cheapest 16-foot USB cord she could find online and ordered it. She orders my books from Amazon.com and researches where I can get the most inexpensive office supplies.

This afternoon, she’s calling the sewing machine repair shop to see if my sewing machine is ready to be picked up. When that’s done, she’ll make a doctor’s appointment for me.

I can’t tell you the number of hours she’s saved me, not only doing business tasks, but making personal phone calls that eat up my precious time.

Last year, I hosted a teleseminar on “How to Find a Virtual Assistant to Help with Your Publicity Campaign.” My guests, virtual assistants Diana Ennen and Cindy Greenway, explained that VAs often relieve their clients of personal calls like the ones I’ve mentioned. Once I started delegating many of my personal these calls to Chris, it suddenly dawned on me how time-consuming these calls can be.

VAs, by the way, can help with many aspects of your publicity campaign such as:

—Writing and distributing your press releases.

—Updating your online media room

—Updating your profile on social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn.

—Calling newspapers and asking for permission to reprint articles they’ve written about you

—Researching media outlets and bloggers you want to target with your pitches.

The training program I conducted last year for VAs, interns and assistants on “How to Help Your Boss or Client with a Publicity Campaign” discussed hundreds of ways you can use VAs or assistants. Many VAs signed up for the course, have added publicity tasks to their services and, as a result, have been able to raise their hourly rates.   

Posted In: Blogs, Media Kits, Press Releases/News Releases, Publicity Resources, Social networking
posted On: 4/8/2008: 4:57 pm: By Joan
Comments: No Comments

Don’t miss this critical step when creating your publicity plan.

Start adding bloggers and editors of electronic newsletters (ezines) to the list of people who you will contact if you want publicity.

If you’re a publicist, and your PR client is adamant about getting coverage in top-tier media like USA Today, The New York Times, O magazine and on big shows like “Today” and “Fox & Friends,” take the time to explain that your client must also get in front of the thousands of people who don’t read those newspapers or watch those shows and prefer, instead, to receive their information online.

One of the big advantages of pitching bloggers and ezine editors is that unlike traditional media, the information you provide has a way of spreading online rather quickly. If it shows up in an ezine, and that ezine is archived, people will be able to find it months and even years later.

—Most bloggers and ezine editors write about specific topics. A stay-at-home mom who has her own home-based business, for instance, can offer information to bloggers and ezine publishers who write about stay-at-home moms or home-based businesses, or both.

—The best bloggers blog several times a week. Because they present a constant stream of new information, the search engines give good ranking to blog posts. That means that when somebody searches Google for “dog obedience tips,” the list that Google returns on the left side of the screen will include blog posts, not just websites.

—When journalists are doing research for their articles, most of them use a search engine to find background, commentary, statistics, experts and other sources. If they end up at your blog, at a blog where you are mentioned, or at an ezine archives where there’s an article about you, they might call you for their story. Many journalists also subscribe to electronic newsletters devoted to the topics on their beats.

—Bloggers love to link to each other’s posts. If an influential blogger mentions you, or your product or service, other bloggers who link to that post may help you get in front of an entirely different audience. The publicity builds and builds, like a snowball rolling downhill.

—I publish an ezine on publicity. Another ezine publisher who writes about publicity might ask if she can use one of my articles in her ezine in exchange for me using one of her articles in my publication. Some of the people on her ezine list, who want information about publicity, might not know about me. When they read about me, they might visit my website, sign up for my ezine and perhaps even buy my products. It’s a win-win.

How to research blogs

I’ll bet many of you already know about bloggers you’d love to target.

If you’re looking for others, go to Technorati.com. Type in a topic such as “engineering” and you’ll get a list of either engineering blogs, or blogs that mention the word engineering. From there, you can research each blog and see if it’s likely to reach your target audience.

Once you’ve found a blog that’s a good candidate for your pitch, spend some time reading it so you’re familiar with what the blogger writes about.

One of the very best ways to get a blogger’s attention before you pitch is to post a comment about a topic they discuss at their blog. I’ll sometimes post two or three comments within a week or two at a particular blog before pitching that blogger with my idea.

Why? Because I want the blogger to recognize me when I pitch. It shows I’m willing to become involved in the conversation, not just contact them when they want something.

It’s best not to be too promotional within your comment. Instead, add to the conversation, then email the blogger privately to let them know about other information you have about your product, service, cause or issue. (See “Let Bloggers Create Publicity for You.”)

How to find ezines

I like to use New-List.com where about 9,000 ezines are listed. You can also do a Google search for “health care ezines” or “construction ezines” or whatever the topic happens to be.

EzineSearch.com lists more than 10,000 ezines, with thorough instructions on how to search for what you need.

BestEzines.com includes includes information on more than 2,200 ezines representing more than 15 million permission-based email members.

NetTop20.com website includes the top 20 ezine directories.e most popular and highest-rating ezine directories on the Net today.

What ezine editors want

Ezine editors want content-rich material for their publications. So don’t be shy about pitching them. This is the type of content they love:

• Free advice
• Press releases about news their readers want
• Links to short videos that are entertaining or instructional
• Top 10 lists
• Commentary on controversial topics
• Other resources their readers will find helpful
• Success stories
• “How to” information (See “Headlines for how-to articles”)
• Frequently asked questions and answers on a particular topic
• Jokes and quotes (I include a dog joke in each issue of my ezine and readers love them!)
• Polls and surveys
• Quizzes and other briefs (See “Briefs, Fillers & Quizzes)

Another way to research is to ask the kinds of people you’re trying to get in front of which ezines they read. Ezine editors just like me are always looking for content like success stories, comments on controversial topics, innovative business practices, anything that will save people time and money, the rising stars in a particular industry, and the story and personalities behind a particular award a company has received. Email the editor and offer your information.

Now, you’re ready to start contacting bloggers and ezine editors. If you’re successful, email me and tell me all about it. I might write about you in my own ezine or this blog.

Posted In: Blogs, PR Consultants/Publicists, Press Releases/News Releases, Publicity Resources, Publicity for Niche Markets, Publicity on the Internet, Video, Writing Articles
posted On: 3/30/2008: 10:48 am: By Joan
Comments: 3 Comments