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Tag: PR

  • Winking at a good-looking Girl in the Dark

    Avoid Winking at a Good-looking Girl in the Dark

    As the old adage goes, “Running a business without advertising is like winking at a good-looking girl (or guy) in the dark. You know what you’re doing, but nobody else does”.

    winking at a good-looking girl

    Now, for “advertising”, you can substitute “promoting”, thereby allowing yourself to concentrate on social media, for example, or getting out and meeting people. You may not have a budget for pure advertising, in the sense of spending money on media. However, if you’re short of cash, mister *, you might still be able to time-manage yourself to a sufficient degree to allow yourself dedicate some time to social media work, on Facebook, Twitter or other. Or get along to some networking opportunities. Or try to generate some favourable and free press coverage through PR work.

    Essentially, you’ve got to be telling people (your target markets) about what you’re doing and what’s good about your product or service. Another adage states that “If you’re not telling, you’re not selling”. There’s no arguing with that.

    As the summer winds up over the next few weeks, many of us self-employed small business owners who have perhaps been on autopilot for the previous two months will begin to turn our thoughts back to the job at hand. I regularly say that micro-business owners often have two beginnings to their year. The first, of course, is in January. But there’s a second one in September, once the holidays are over and the kids have gone back to school. Let me suggest that you develop some rigorous system to urge yourself to communicate with your audiences into the future.

    • Develop a social media marketing plan and schedule that makes use of the platform(s) your audience is active on.
    • Get networking offline, regularly.
    • Build relationships with journalists, bloggers and other influencers who can give you some coverage gratos.
    • Ask for testimonials from satisfied customers and put them up on your website. Even better, shoot some video testimonials.
    • Employ some free content marketing amplifiers, like Missinglettr. I like it very much.

    Winking at a good-looking Girl

    So, the next time you’re considering it, switch on the light first …

    *  Stolen from an old U2 track, “Bullet the Blue Sky”.

  • Business Blogging – What’s the Point ?

    Business blogging – should you get into it ? Yes, you should.

    However, one important point to remember is that no one single marketing action will be a solution all by itself for the achievement of all your business goals.

    When a client’s eyes glaze over as I launch into the merits of business blogging, I need to remind them that it is just one of many actions that can be taken to help towards the ultimate goal of more (profitable) business.

    Business blogging

    So, commitment to business blogging is no more than that – commitment to one more marketing action. Commitment to communicating with your clients at whatever rate you can manage. What nobody wants to see is businesses blogging all day every day at the expense of work that more directly makes the till tick over.

    No.

    If you are a micro-enterprise with few (if any) employees, then a reasonable target might be to write a new blogpost once per fortnight, or per month if that’s sound more achievable. Do try.

    Be aware that a typical post might have an initial lifespan on social media of just a matter of hours. Having said that, its lifespan can be expanded by retweeting or re-sharing at later dates and linking separate but related blogposts to each other. Know that in a fast-moving sector, where lots of posts are being generated, yours will have a much shorter lifespan.

    Use management tools like Hootsuite or dlvr.it to increase the reach of posts, by having them repeated out on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (free version).

    In 2016, a great new service I’ve discovered is Missinglett_r, where even the free plan gives you nine tweet-outs of each of your new blogposts, spread out over a year, with handy little snippets to attract readers.

    When writing your blogpost, be conscious of the fact that people may be reading it off-website, thanks to the tools above. Include links back to your site, to keep driving readers back to specific pages, to where you are selling or promoting.

    And don’t forget Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

    Without SEO, your blogpost will not be found – in which case, it might as well not exist. The number of blogs I come across that simply do not have any SEO plugin or functionality is huge. Indeed, many more have SEO functionality, but the blogger was not taught about it by their so-called website designer. Essentially, be sure that your post has a unique focus keyword (or phrase) – one that no previous post has had. Make each post focus on a different aspect of your business, a new product or service, a new piece of advice, or a new “how-to”. Go and learn about the basics of SEO and inform yourself about your site. Read this article about Basic SEO.

    Is blogging about making sales ? Not directly, it isn’t. It’s about PR. Is PR good ? Sure, but it’s not direct sales. It’s softer, slower, less obvious, more subtle. It’s marketing. Get into it.

    Business Blogging with wp.org

    I blog on WordPress.org, using themes from Woothemes and SEO from Yoast. Watch out! Don’t confuse the business blogging friendly wp.org with the less SEO strong, essentially hobby-friendly wp.com.