Chapter Five
Using PR to Market Your Business
Watch a newscast with a different mindset or buy a magazine that you normally wouldn’t buy so you can look at how other people see things or how they write headlines about other topics. Apply those to you and your business.
Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud said, “If I’m going to do something, I do it spectacularly or I don’t do it at all.” He’s one of the richest people in the world. I believe he’s the one behind the hotel shaped like a sailboat in the United Arab Emirates.
What that’s about is creating an event that’s newsworthy, whether it’s a Web page, a relationship, or something similar. That’s going to be a core focus of you getting attention from the media.
Think, “What can I do to make this spectacular?” Whether it’s an interview about your book, a field study guide that goes with a book, or you’re launching your own radio show or podcast. What can you do to make it spectacular?
I heard today about a band that signed a contract with VH1 to cut a record album. Is that newsworthy in itself? “Up and coming band cuts new album.” No, not really. So what did they do to make it spectacular?
The band is living inside a bubble on the water and they can’t come out until the album is finished. They have 25 days to come up with their album and they’re doing it inside a glass bubble which is on the water.
Now it becomes publicity. It becomes newsworthy. They’ve got a sponsor that’s pushing it. All of those things add up for energy, momentum, and marketing that get attention by the media, not only on VH1, but all the shows that cover it.
Steve Baumer is now the president of Microsoft. He has worked for Bill Gates for many years. He said, “The number one benefit of information technology is that it empowers people to do what they want to do. It lets people be creative. It lets people be productive. It lets people learn things that they didn’t think they could learn before and so, in a sense, it’s all about potential.”
Publicity and PR were fairly powerful before the dawn of the Internet in terms of getting attention with people, but it was slow and more expensive. A lot of it was print-based.
What you can do today with publicity and PR online is more than revolutionary. It’s more than evolutionary. It is “spectacular.”
Online Publicity and PR
We will start by looking at the objectives for your online publicity and PR. Many are similar to traditional publicity; however there are some new ones.
The first objective is the same as with traditional publicity. You want to brand your business or get business recognition. You’re introducing yourself. You’re introducing your company to the public, to your best prospects. You want to track customers.
Next, you want to get traditional media to invite you to participate in their traditional media formats; radio, TV, and so on. People on who are on television shows, radio shows, podcasts and whatever are looking for guests. They’re Googling online. They’re searching looking for you.
Customer Catcher Tip: In the business to business space, almost 100% of people use Google to find resources, products, assistance, and information. The consumers spill over to the MSN and Yahoo search engines, but almost 100% of business to business is focused on Google.
Third is the measure of stats. This is different from traditional publicity.
For traditional publicity, I can place an article in a newspaper and the newspaper might be able to tell me how many places they send that paper, but I don’t know if somebody opens that paper. I don’t know if somebody reads my article.
With online publicity and PR, I can measure placements and stats. An example of placement is if I send a digital press release, the service will tell me how many different places that it was located on the Internet.
It will also tell me how many people actually clicked on a link and opened it to view the press release. It might get placed in 400 different places. It might be opened and viewed by 100,000 people. Out of that 100,000, maybe 50 click on it.
Stats also tell you how many people download a document like a PDF. PDF stands for “portable document format.” It’s the ending that Adobe uses for their special software that essentially allows documents to be viewed on any platform—on a PC computer or on a Mac computer.
Measuring stats is very important. With traditional offline PR, I can’t necessarily measure. Even television and radio are estimating the audience size. About the only thing I can measure is if somebody takes action and calls a special number or goes to a specific Web site address and gets a certain package.
The only thing I can measure is the people who actually buy. As a marketer using publicity, I want to know how effective that is. Are 20% of the people opening it but taking no action? Are 10% of the people opening it? How can I increase that?
The next point is how to get traffic back to your site. This is huge. This is the differentiator between online and offline publicity.
Online publicity such as putting articles, press releases, and links back to your site gets you traffic. It’s about traffic. On the Internet you want to have traffic and conversion.
That’s the secret formula to being successful on the Internet. Whether you’re non-profit or for profit, you want to get traffic and then convert people.
Next is to easily distribute your media text and video. These are probably the heaviest ones online. You can use audio as well, but you can actually distribute press releases now with video in them.
You can have a prepackaged one or two minute clip and send it out in a press release that can actually end up on traditional television by providing the right content, the right size of file, and the right quality. You can then get that distributed.
There is a major difference between traditional publicity and online publicity. You can actually sell through your online publicity. We’re going to be covering this more in depth in the following sections.
Online Publicity Versus Offline Publicity
First, online publicity is fast in creating a press release and distributing information. This is a huge advantage over traditional PR.
Here is a real life example of the difference between traditional PR and online PR. I was interviewed by a National news network last week. Sometimes you can say, “When is this on?” and they’ll say, “Oh, it’s on tonight at 6:00,” or “It’s on tonight at 11:00.”
But other times, and in this instance, the reporter said to me, “Well, we’re shooting this and it will be on some time in the summer.” So this is a piece they’re creating that’s not urgent, current news. It will be used as filler on a slow news day. They can’t tell me when it is going to be aired.
It’s very difficult for me to actually see it or capture it.
Online there are ways you can be notified the minute your name, your company name, or anything having to do with your industry is put online. It’s fast. You’ve got creation, distribution, and reception of your media information.
Second, you can have an instant action taken by people.
They can click on your site. They can download special reports. They can see a video you have on your Web site. They can listen to an audio. They can take a survey or a personalized test or analysis.
If I’m a weight-loss specialist and I put up a personalized analysis on my eating habits, sleeping habits and how they work together, you can do that. Again, it’s an action.
A comparison would be that I’m interviewed on a talk news show on traditional radio as you’re driving along in your car, what can you do if you really want to take that test? Maybe you can write it down or phone yourself and leave a note but there’s a time lag. There’s a disconnect between the information and you taking action.
If you’re listening online to an Internet radio show that I’m being interviewed on and I say, “WeightLossByMartin.com,” you can go there while you’re listening and take action.
With a digital press release, someone can click inside the press release on a hotlink of the word that’s connected to a Web site. It’s got a hyperlink underneath it, so it could say www.CustomerCatcherTV.com or it could say, “Click here to see Internet TV.” If they click on they will go the Web site.
Customer Catcher Tip: When you’re marketing whether it’s in publicity or on your Web site, don’t always put http://www.MyWebSite.com. Instead embed a hyperlink in the actual text.
For example, “If you’re interested in information about weight loss and other wellness things,” what you can do is take the words “weight loss,” highlight them, right-click, and add a hyperlink to that. It will become a blue, underlined word which people are conditioned to click on. It then looks like this: “There are many new ideas for weight loss and dieting.”
Surveys show that people are less intimidated to click on words that might have more information than they are on Web site address and long, peculiar looking URLs.
More Online Opportunities
Traditional publicity has a limited scope in its production and limited scope in its reach. Traditional broadcast radio will only reach so far unless it’s syndicated.
Online has way more opportunities for you to appear; more voids for you to fill and become the person that they talk to or the information that they cover.
Traditional media has to find you. They might phone you; they might go to your Web site. It’s a little bit longer curve. Online things happen faster. There are online publishers. There are forums online.
Forums are places online where people gather in a community. Maybe they like drag racing. At the forum on drag racing they’ll talk about the race that was last weekend, who won, who bumped who, who bumped what, and how things are working.
There are newsgroups you can go to on Google or Yahoo. There might be groups on Civil War historians or other different types of groups. You can go www.Groups.Google.com and search for and join groups.
If you go to Google Groups and you type in “French poodle,” it gives you all the Web results for that topic. You can join a group or you can post your information in there and find others also interested in that topic.
Next is the ability to search. Traditional publicity has a limited ability to be searchable and it is costly. If you wanted to find out who was on TV yesterday talking about financial services, it’s a little bit more of a challenge utilizing traditional publicity sources.
In the olden days, all of five to ten years ago, you would phone a clipping service and ask for information and they would do a manual search. They have people who sit and watch TV all day and organize all this information, and you pay them a fee to do that. It’s quite expensive, actually.
Online searching is fast.
You can look up your industry, your company, and you can even look up you. It is appropriate to Google yourself once in a while. Put your name or your company name in quotation marks. That tells the search engines to combine those words and only find that specific phrase.
Another online opportunity is news alerts. You can find news alerts at www.News.Google.com . This is a free service and you can put in multiple news alerts. You can put in your name, you can put in your company name, you can put in the title of your book, or you can put in a competitor’s name.
You can set it up so you have choices as to when you are notified. “As it happens,” or “once a day;” are two examples of the options. I usually do “as it happens,” especially on my name because if there’s something going on with your name specifically then you probably want to know about it.
If your name is Michael Smith you may have a bit of a challenge there. A tip is you might want to make a change so that whenever you’re in the media always use Michael J. Smith or Michael W. Smith; get that in as often as possible and that will help be a unique identifier.
You can put in anything here about your industry, a product, a book title, or whatever it is. You then get an e-mail in your box.
I was in Las Vegas on Saturday, jet-setter me taking red eyes there and back, giving a talk on online video. Anyway, a lady approached me and did an impromptu video interview in the hallway outside the event.
I put in a Google alert for my name. I got an e-mail at 8:30 this morning, a Web site called www.BuzzBooster.com posted the video interview they did with me.
If you look in the Google block alert, they give you the link to the exact page where it is, the name of the company and what they’re using and how they’re using your name.
Buzz Booster is an alternative media site. These are a couple of ladies who are consultants and help people with their marketing.
The good thing is they’re doing something. The other good news is they did it immediately, so I believe this was probably up within 20 minutes of my doing the interview or at least within the day.
Customer Catcher Tip: Use free services, like YouTube, for posting your videos online within a blog. That’s online publicity. This is a good example of creating your own publicity online in a blog using video.
I told you about free streaming at www.FreeIQ.com/unlimitedaccess, but what you could do is put a video on here. Actually, YouTube is free as well, and they’re using YouTube. You just have to have that logo on the bottom in the right hand corner.
The challenge there was they didn’t use a microphone attached to the camera. They just used the microphone in the camera at about ten feet, and the audio is not that good for this video.
That’s an example of doing an interview. I knew I did the interview, but I just didn’t know when it was going to be posted. Google alerted me the moment that they posted it on their blog.
Google has these things called spiders that go out and they’re always searching the Internet and if you tell it what to find it will report back to you. What does this cost? It costs nothing which is just amazing to me.
Personalization
Personalization is the next feature of online PR. I can personalize my news page. If I go to www.News.Google.com or Yahoo as well, I can personalize my own home page and my own news.
What it does is allows you to pick what you’d like from world, business, sports, health, tech, entertainment, more top stories, whatever it is.
You can use this, one, obviously to see what’s happening in your industry. Two, is to keep an eye on your competition. Three, is to get relevant, current events that you can tie into your publicity.
So if they’re talking about war or peace or forest fires or famine or whatever, and you talk about security and disaster prevention, you can tie into current events.
Customer Catcher Tip: If you or your businesses are not newsworthy, tie your content or information to current events and other newsworthy items.
If, sadly, another child disappears and you’re in security and child safety, then I think you’re serving people and helping them by making yourself available to increased child security. Tie it to the disappearance of the name of the latest child that’s getting the attention. They’re searching for ways that that may have been prevented.
News feeds are basically services that will send you information based on what you searched for. So that’s the news feed. Now the news feed you can see there’s a lot of different links there. These are basically press releases from other companies and services.
Customer Catcher Tip: Tag your public relations. Use one specific and unique URL when you’re being interviewed on traditional channels or in online channels so that you know that somehow it came through your PR.
Whether it’s www.MyWebCompany.com/media or something a little more subtle like, “Contact our company and ask for Jane,” and there’s no Jane, but that way you know it’s coming from a media source and then transfer it from there.
Customer Catcher Tip: Read other people’s press releases. Look at the headlines they’ve used.
One place to do this is at www.PRWeb.com. It is a Web site that lists press releases and also distributes digital press releases for you. They’re starred and actually rated.
They list off today’s press releases. They have over 40,000 customers. They’re basically the gorilla online right now. There are other services. This one is really good to take a look at to check out some of the press releases.
Sell Via Online Publicity
In traditional publicity a press release is only in print. You sent it out and you hoped the people read it, and it was based mainly on the headline.
With an online press release you can actually have links that people can click on. You have the ability to take advantage of sending this out a PR, getting coverage in traditional media, in online media, plus also having the ability to have people click and go to your Web site, plus have the ability to sell.
This, phenomena blows my mind. The ability to have links back to your site, create traffic.
I sent out a press release for a client, a software company offering a service online, and we had 167,000 clicks back to our site from that press release. It was a digital press release online. We sent it out saying here’s where we want to send it to these types of sites, to these types of news services, etc.
We used PRweb.com. I think we paid the $40 level, so it ended up on the AOL news, Yahoo news, and significant places. We had 167,000 clicks and traffic coming back to the site within 24 hours.
So if you’re in Internet marketing and lots of people are trying to do this Google dance and search engine and everything else to drive traffic to their site, that pales in comparison to the immediate response you get to people clicking inside your digital press releases.
Another advantage of Online PR is that you can add color. Traditionally, again, in the good old days we were faxing press releases and they were text based. Unless it was a color fax which just came along recently, they were all in black and white.
Now you can add color. You can add eye-catching images, captions; you can use more. When color was first being introduced it was still this cool thing, but you weren’t using a lot of graphics.
Customer Catcher Tip: Always take a digital camera with you, especially when you go to a radio station to get interviewed. When you’re being interviewed have somebody else in the station or somebody that came with you take pictures of you being interviewed with the headset on in front of the microphone.
This is a credibility building piece that you can use on your Web site, on your bio page, in your media kits. It gives you credibility as an expert because you have pictures of yourself in the media.
We do this also with video. We will videotape us being videotaped. Sometimes on the news you’ll see this where the camera two or three will pan back and they’ll show Barbara Walters sitting there, they’ll show the bright white lights, they’ll show the guest walking in to come and sit down in the seat. It adds another dimension.
You can do this with static pictures on your Web site. Use media photos on your Web site, in your media room and on your sales letters as sidebars for what I call social proof.
If you’re a host, do the same thing. Have a digital camera and if you’re at a conference with someone, take a picture with them then put it next to your audio up on your Web site or where people come to get your podcast. Include the call letters, if you can, of the media.
If it’s a newspaper, you can include the masthead of the newspaper; The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Scranton Scoop, or whatever it is.
These are some powerful things around online publicity. Again, the most important one is that you can use links and drive traffic and you can also sell.
When you wrap that up with a color that just attracts the eye and makes it more exciting and makes it more interesting for people to want to click and go there.
21 Ways You Can Get Online Publicity
Just ask yourself, wouldn’t it be exciting to get one or two of these a day everyday. If you even got one a week, that’s four times a month you’re featured in publicity that has links back to you.
Isn’t it worthwhile to really take a close look and apply some of your time to this? If you could get 167,000 links back to your Web site within 24 hours, what would that mean to your business? How many books would you sell? What would you be able to do?
This is third party referral. It’s the media saying you’re good. It’s another Web site saying your book is great or that your business is savvy and that you’re the person to deal with.
1. Digital Press Releases. They’re fast, they’re affordable, and you have links back to your site. You can include audio and video as well in those digital press releases. It doesn’t cost to distribute.
We used to do press packages that included the press release, a media kit which was a hard-cover folder with a bio of the company, and then a videotape. Then we would have to courier those out.
You can imagine if you send that out to 200 places, $200 times $30 is $6,000 just to send out the possibility, the hope, the slim chance that you would get some media coverage.
If you look up PRWeb, they give you an example of a press release that has color graphics, links, places where you can sell, and you can do it.
Now the risk is much reduced. Time and effort may be $80 to a service like PRWeb and you’re good to go.
2. www.PRTraffic.com. That’s an associate of mine, Marc Harty. He’s an expert who drills deep on digital press releases. PRTraffic.com is an information product and service that Mark sells to help people take advantage of that.
The next PR channel is www.PRLeads.com. Digital press releases and PRWeb and PRTraffic.com are examples where you’re pushing out your information. PRLeads.com is run and founded by my friend Dan Janal.
What Dan has done is set up a service where you get notified of what the media is looking for. For instance, if you’re an expert on raising children or an expert on amicable divorce, or any area that you specialize in; the topic of your book, if you host a radio show in small business, then you’re a small business expert.
With this service you get notified via e-mail that says, “National magazine is looking for expert on traditional home-cooked meal,” or “Regional television station looking for doctor to interview about early onset Alzheimer’s.” I almost forgot what I was going to write there. (That was a joke.)
3. E-books. E-books are great tools that you can use online to introduce yourself. If you don’t have one, it’s very simple to make one. Get yourself interviewed, transcribe it, and that’s your e-book. Have live links in them.
4. E-zine articles. Syndication is a fantastic opportunity as an alternative publicity channel.
Probably the leading e-zine syndication site is www.EzineArticles.com.
Another e-zine resource is www.TheInternetArticleGuy.com. That’s a service where you send them your articles with your information in the byline.
Again, have links back to your site. This gives you credibility; you’re the leader, you’re the expert, you’re the go-to person. Publish those articles.
5. Blog Posts. Blogs are a certain type of Web site. They’re usually three columns. They have articles posted in them, sometimes daily, other times weekly, and sometimes sporadically.
You can actually post to other people’s blogs. If someone in your industry or another author who wrote a complementary book or writes about a different service, you can send an e-mail. You don’t have to write an article. It could be congratulations.
There’s an online blog on video that my friend, Ken McCarthy, does. He’ll write something about video and refer to a site or give some tip, and I will respond with either an added tip or congratulations or a correction or anything. You can actually include a live link back to your site.
Posting to a blog is public relations. It’s something you do in public that gets you recognized, hopefully providing good, valid information with a link back to your site. That’s the wonderful thing that blogs allow you to do.
6. Forums. Forums are places where people can post and share information. You’ll see customer service and support forums.
There are also niche forums like for French poodle. There’s probably a forum that a dog breeder who specializes in poodles would provide. It’s a place for people in the community to share information, issue warnings about tainted dog food or whatever it is, and you can become part of that community.
One word of caution: in these communities, they don’t appreciate out and out self- promotion or pitching. You need to contribute in a positive manner in a very subtle way. Usually that subtle way is just including your domain, and hopefully that’s a good domain name that people will understand that there’s a benefit.
I might contribute to a forum on Internet radio and talk about the importance of sponsors and one thing that people overlook is having different levels of sponsorship. That’s my tip, “Thanks a lot, Martin Wales, www.CustomerCatcher.com.” There’s an implied benefit in that domain name.
7. Internet Radio and Podcast Interviews. Instead of getting interviewed on traditional radio, you’re now being interviewed on Internet radio and podcasts.
Podcasts can also be video, not just audio by the way. Some people seem to think it’s just audio.
They can be distributed on iTunes. That’s a great thing. Thank you, Apple, for distributing free information for us.
An example of a radio station is www.wsRadio.com. You can see the logos there, eBay Radio, Entrepreneur Magazine Radio. I’ve been a guest on these.
I used to host a show for Entrepreneur Magazine called the eBiz Show. You can see Hay House Radio. Hay House Radio is a publisher and they now have a radio component to their marketing to help market their authors.
If you go click on the menu you can see all the different types of shows that exist. They have business; they have arts and entertainment, auto and motor sports, and lifestyle.
Go there, listen to the shows, see the style, listen to the style of the host, and send the host or the executive producer an e-mail offering yourself as a guest.
For PayPal Radio I’m the executive producer and I get emails from people who are interested in being featured on the show. We take a look at who they are and what they do, and we put them on the show. Every show needs guests, so you have to work with these people.
What did I want to tell you about Internet radio? Well, I wanted to tell you that online radio and online broadcasting has longevity.
That means that you’re not just on once. If someone was in their car or in their house listening and they heard you, now you’re searchable. They’ll write a description of the interview and you’re online. They’ll put your domain name and now you have a link back to your site.
You see the power of online publicity now. It lasts longer, it’s more actionable, and it leads traffic back to your site.
The other thing is it’s very low cost or free.
An example of creating your own Internet radio is the Bailey brothers. They don’t do this show anymore; one of them had health issues. But they became radio hosts of the Pet Fish Talk Show; niche radio.
I can’t remember if they started a podcast or not, but they definitely did Internet radio. The powerful marketing example I have here is that they did a show on December 18th, 2002, about how to set up a new aquarium; they did a 20-minute interview, and they received 7,000 unique visitors to their Web site over a four or five year period to hear this one, single interview.
People would search online. They just got a pet fish for their child because they didn’t want to get a puppy. They’d search how to set up an aquarium, how to set up a new fish tank, and they would find this interview.
These guys got 140,000 listens a month; that’s 140,000 shows played of people who were listening who wanted to know about pet fish.
If you’ve written a book whether it is fiction or non-fiction on how to increase your sales, how to avoid cold calling or whatever it is, you