The Publicity Hound’s Blog  

Thousands of people who are being downsized, right-sized and capsized during this bad economy aren’t waiting around for a job offer. They’re looking to the Web for their next career—and maybe even riches.

Enter e-Riches 2.0–Next-Generation Marketing Strategies for Making Millions Online, a new book by Internet success coach Scott Fox.

If you’re one of the victims of this economy and you want to start selling online, or you’re new to Internet marketing, you can learn all about the basics of what it takes to create a successful business online. If you’ve been selling online for several years, the book will bring you up to speed quickly on how to add social media to your marketing mix.

Here are Scott’s 10 recommendations on how to use social networking as a marketing tool.

1. Invite a half-dozen or more friends to get your network started. Practice using the tools of the social network to communicate with them. For example, you can “add” friends on MySpace, “poke” or “write on the walls” of Facebook connections, or respond to some questions in the LinkedIn “Answers” section. (See Social networking ROI: A testimonial more valuable than an ad.)
              
2. Start engaging, publishing, and interacting. Get to know some people—that’s  why you’re here.
       
3. Be authentic. A big part of being authentic is letting the “real you” out to play. Nobody wants to play with a “suit,” so don’t be afraid to be yourself (within professional and legal limits, of course). Mixing the personal and business sides of your life is more common than it used to be.
       
4. Only try to connect with others with whom you really do have common ground. Indiscriminate friend requests are “friend spam.” They are  no more appreciated than email spam or junk mail in the real world. (And if people you don’t know starting linking with you, your own network will soon be less valuable, too.)
                
5. Ask for help. Most social network users are online to be social, and most are happy to help by sharing their knowledge about how the systems work.
              
6. Use feeds to keep up with your friends’ activities and broadcast your own. Posting your own status constantly and cleverly is a great distributed engagement marketing tactic. This is one of the “missed opportunities” I discussed during the teleseminar I hosted this month on 11 Ways to Avoid Missed Opportunities on Facebook. 
      
7. If you have a blog, feed its posts into your profile page. This will automatically help keep your pages fresh and share your writings with a new audience, too.
      
8. Join some groups—learn the lingo and the tools of the network by using them and observing how others use them, too. Joining groups will also begin to create a natural dialogue with other users that will grow over time.
      
9. Be a good and involved citizen in those groups to cultivate new friends. There’s no better way to gain the respect of any community than adding value by sharing info, support, or companionship—and these tools will amplify the effect. If you are an expert, social networks are a great way to spread your reputation cloud for that expertise.
     
10. Create your own group. Once you are comfortable, start a group around your product or brand. Position yourself as an expert resource and offer to help and facilitate community. Members usually proudly display the names of the groups to which they belong on their profile pages. This can lead to lots more clicks (and members) as others see your group’s name or logo on friends’ pages and in their feeds.

Scott’s book includes more than a dozen examples  of real-life Internet marketing success stories, from a North Carolina furniture store that profitably captures high-end customers using pay-per-click search engine text ads on Google, Yahoo! andMSN (Chapter 21), to the article syndication strategy that has helped a Christian stay-at-home mom to attract lots of profitable traffic for her blog (Chapter 16).

The book  is $25 and published by AMACOM, the American Management Association.

Posted In: Authors & Publishers, Blogs, Business Promotion, General, LinkedIn, Publicity on the Internet, Social media marketing, Social networking, Writing Articles, YouTube
posted On: 6/30/2009: 7:59 am: By Joan
Comments: 3 Comments

Starting July 20, Squidoo lenses will be limited to no more than nine outbound links to the same domain.

What does this have to do with publicity? Plenty.

Squidoo, a content-sharing site, is a great place to promote your expertise. Google views it as an authoritative site and gives it a page rank of 7/10. You can create a Squidoo lens on one or more topics and share content such as articles, videos, photos and other resources.

Most lensmasters include outbound links to their own websites which is fine.  I’m guessing  that too many lensmasters have been including too many links to their own sites, thus generating too many reader complaints to Squidoo.

I’ll be going over to Squidoo later this week to update my own content and count the number of links at my own lens on how to get publicity. Lensmasters who don’t comply can have their lenses removed.  All that hard work down the drain! Don’t let that happen.

Read their policy update and the 4 things you can do to get ready for the changes.

Posted In: Social media marketing, Writing Articles
posted On: 6/17/2009: 4:06 pm: By Joan
Comments: No Comments

Let’s see a show of hands.

How many of you like receiving cold calls from people selling ink cartridges, aluminum siding or ads in your local Yellow Pages?

That’s what I thought.

That’s why a speaker should think twice about hiring an assistant or virtual assistant to cold call meeting planners. It sends the message, “I’m too important or too busy to call you myself, so I’m sending my assistant to bother you with an annoying cold call.” 

Why are cold calls bad? 

Because way too many speakers—and their assistants—are making them. I made hundreds of cold calls myself when I was on the speaking circuit, before I knew any better.

The best speaking engagements I booked weren’t from cold calls. They were the result of meeting planners finding out about me from somebody else, or reading an article I wrote for their industry publication and calling me. When a meeting planner calls you to ask about your availability, you’re in a much better position to command the fee you want.

If a VA is making calls for you, she probably can’t answer all the questions meeting planners might ask about things like negotiating your fee, speaking about a topic that’s not part of your repertoire, altering the content of a particular keynote or workshop, doing a webinar instead of an in-person program, and many other unexpected subjects.

That’s why asking an assistant to cold-call meeting planners is a lousy idea for most speakers.  I said MOST speakers.  I’m sure some of friends in the National Speakers Association have assistants who make these calls for them—but only after they’ve done extensive training with an assistant who already knows their business intimately.  Expecting a $40- or $60-an-hour VA to present you to meeting planners puts you at a disadvantage.

             
6 ways to use publicity to book gigs

Here are six ways to use publicity to help you book speaking engagements—and ways to involve your virtual assistant in each:

—Write articles to attract the attention of meeting planners. If you’re trying to speak before a particular trade association, contact the editor of the group’s magazine or newsletter and ask if they accept articles from experts. If your article appears in that industry’s trade magazine, the meeting planner who hires speakers might see it. If you make a cold call after the article appears, you can mention the article. Your VA can research industry publications and order back issues.

—Create short videos that tie into your topics. Have your VA upload them to the video-sharing sites. Meeting planners who are using the search engines to find speakers will find the videos. If they like what they see, they might call you. Your VA can do keyword research for you and tag the videos.

—Answer questions on LinkedIn. Create a profile on LinkedIn and spend time each week answering questions that pertain to the topics on which you speak. This is a powerful way to promote your expertise. Each person who asks a question can flag one of the answers as a “best answer.” The number of “best answer” designations you’ve received shows up on your LinkedIn profile. Your VA can look for questions that pertain to your expertise and call them to your attention. See my article on other ways to use LinkedIn to promote.

—Actively seek recommendations on LinkedIn. If a meeting planner is considering you and another speaker for her group’s annual keynote, and the other speaker has more recommenations than you do at LinkedIn, guess who will probably get the job? Ask every meeting planner who has been thrilled with your work to recommend you there. Ditto for every editor who has published your articles and has a strong relationship with you. Ask your VA to remind you to ask for recommendaitons. 

—Tweet about your topic at Twitter. Link to helpful articles and blog posts you have written. Share other articles you’ve found online. Ask compelling questions that lead to lively conversations. And, of course, tweet about your speaking gigs. Your VA can peform a variety of searches on Twitter to find people who might be in a positin to hire you and who you would want to follow. (See “How to Use Twitter to Amass an Army of Followers, Customers & Valuable Contacts—and Promote.”)  

—Blog about your topic. Use keywords that meeting planners would use if they’re searching for someone with your expertise. Listen to the teleseminar I conducted with The Blog Squad on how to “Build Your Biz with a Blog: It’s Not an Option Anymore!–How to Build a Professional Blog that Turns Prospects into Clients.”

            
Leave your footprints

All those tasks will take  time. But the big advantage of all of them over cold calling is that you’re leaving your footprint at every step along the way, building a trail of expertise that will live online forever, and making it easy for meeting planners to find you.     

Finally, spend some time in the Compilations category at the SpeakerNetNews website to learn about some of the more innovative ways that speakers book gigs. 

Here’s an article that will help you find a virtual assistant to help with publicity. When you’ve found an assistant, it’s time for training. Here are tips on how to train your VA to help with publicity.

Posted In: Authors & Publishers, Blogs, Business Promotion, LinkedIn, Magazine Publicity, Publicity on the Internet, Search engine optimization, Social media marketing, Twitter, Video, Writing Articles
posted On: 3/1/2009: 9:40 am: By Joan
Comments: 1 Comment

Local Real Estate Deals, a bi-monthly nationwide magazine, needs expert articles that provide helpful advice for investors, first-time home buyers, real estate agents, loan officers and people who may have had credit problems.

The June/July issue focuses on green topics and the Denver real estate market. For more information, email editor Emily Cass.

Posted In: Magazine Publicity, Writing Articles
posted On: 2/24/2009: 7:28 am: By Joan
Comments: 1 Comment

If you have valuable advice to share on any aspect of  PR, marking and communications, submit your articles to the The Navigator, the email newsletter that Cision will relaunch in a few weeks.

Cision makes media relations software and other tools, so any tips you can offer for the company’s target audience could bring you some decent online exposure. I’ve been submitting articles to Cision for the past few years and have always gotten great feedback from its readers. The ezine includes the latest media news, new placement opportunities, profiles of top media contacts, and in-depth articles from industry experts.

It wants bylined articles about media relations, the intersection of public relations and Web 2.0, press release writing, public relations technology, consumer marketing, branding, event planning, product marketing, search engine optimization, writing and speaking skills, best practices, strategy and trend stories.  The Navigator will also consider articles on any topic that will benefit its audience.

Once Cision launches its redesigned website, you’ll be able to submit articles via a form on the website.  Before the launch, send articles directly to Editorial Director Kim Roberts. She hasn’t even completed the launch issue, so don’t hesitate to send her articles immediately.

Can’t think of an idea? Read my long list of suggested headlines for how-to articles. When you see a headline that leads to an idea, just fill in the blank, and then start writing.

Newsletters like The Navigator usually don’t pay for these kinds of articles, so be sure they let you maintain the copyright. That was one of the piece of advice from Patricia Eyres, an intellectual property attorney who was my guest expert during a teleseminar I hosted on Legal Issues You Must Know When Writing Articles for Fee or for Free.

Posted In: PR Consultants/Publicists, Press Releases/News Releases, Publicity on the Internet, Search engine optimization, Social media marketing, Social networking, Special Events, Writing Articles
posted On: 1/30/2009: 1:01 pm: By Joan
Comments: 1 Comment