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Do it Yourself PR: Do You Matter?
Copyright © 2002 - 2010 by Susan Harrow. All rights reserved.
Making yourself matter means that you affect the lives of
others in a positive way. Whether it be with a product,
service or cause, what you do has impact. You know that I
think intention is important, but Pablo Picasso says, "What
one does is what counts and not what one had the intention
of doing." I think he's right. Action has to follow
intention, otherwise good wishes are just vaporous pleasant
thoughts. Here are actions that you can take right now to
make your PR count for something.
1. Set up your systems.
Your systems and shopping cart must work flawlessly. I have
several clients who want to sell products in huge
quantities, but their websites don't support their desires.
One couldn't figure out why her customers halted the buying
process in the final step. I advised her to go through that
process herself step by step to see what happened. She
thought she knew--but a message popped up right on the final
buy page telling those potential customers that they could
contract a virus if they continued. Yikes. You need a
reliable shopping cart that has autoresponders so you can
follow up with satisfied buyers, safeguards in the merchant
account/credit card processing department given all the
Internet fraud, and an automated affiliate program to make
it easy for others to sell your products.
Get that here
2. Set up autoresponders.
Autoresponders make your connection to customers consistent.
Consistency breeds trust. I find that many people write to
me personally after receiving messages that I've delivered
via autoresponder. I get a sense of what potential customers
are thinking, if they find the information valuable (they
do) and why they aren't buying (lack of finances). If you
want to see how autoresponders work sign up for the Get a 6
Figure Book advance
free teleclass download and
you'll get tips and promos in your email box. Go ahead and
use that format for your own autoresponders if you like. If
you don't yet use a shopping cart that has autoresponders
integrated into them
go here to get yours. If you're just interested in autoresponders
without the shoppingcart
go here.
3. Distribute your articles regularly.
Regularly is the key word here. PR is an ongoing and
cumulative process. The 2 best systems we've found that we
use are iSnare and
ArticleMarketer. We're
testing them both right now to find out which one works
best for us. While it's incredibly time consuming even to
use these systems, having your articles posted on dozens of
sites gives you a real advantage when it comes to the search
engines. One of the top ways they rank site value is by the
number of linkbacks you have to your site. Article placement
gives you that.
4. Send out press releases.
Your press releases should fall into two categories. Key
word rich ones and ones that are truly designed to get media
attention. The key word rich ones are for the search engines
to pick up the information to give you a high ranking, so
while the press release must make sense, it contains the
terms that you've found people search on most for what
you're promoting. I've been fooling around with this and
will keep you posted on what I learn. In the meantime, this
is
the software we use to distribute our press releases.
We're testing another one that's still in the beta-test
stage as we speak.
5. Put video on your site.
Video gives your website visitors a chance to meet you
quickly. It's the next best thing to meeting you face to
face. See me here Internet whiz Mike Koenigs found out that in combination
with a "Squeeze page" one that has only an offer for a
special report and nothing else, combined with video,
produced a 37% conversion rate--unheard of results. He's now
unbundled his infomercial toolkit so you can get just this
feature and have it up in an hour. For the teleclass replay where your most pressing
questions about the process are answered
go here.
These are some shortcuts so you can spend your time where it
really matters. With people. Doing what you love.
Streamlining your processes, ones that are repetitious or
can be automated, frees you up to focus on the truly
important stuff.
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Susan Harrow, CEO of
http://prsecrets.com, is
a top media coach, marketing strategist and author of
Sell Yourself Without Selling Your Soul® (HarperCollins),
The
Ultimate Guide to Getting Booked on Oprah, and
Get a 6-
Figure Book Advance. Clients include Fortune 500 CEOs, bestselling authors and entrepreneurs who have appeared on
Oprah, 60 Minutes, NPR, and in TIME, USA Today, Parade,
People, O, NY Times, WSJ, and Inc. |
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