How to create a media kit for free publicity
Free publicity. It’s the dream of every small business owner. But sadly it’s not the goal of every small business owner. We can dream in our sleep, but to achieve a goal we need to be fully awake, alert and working hard at it. We’ve talked about press releases before. Recently we covered the impact of Google’s Panda algorithm update on press releases, plus we’ve given you the basics you need to craft press releases that get read and published. However, for your best chance at extensive free publicity, you need to do more; you need to create a press kit (also called a media kit). Your first question to answer when you sit down and decide how to create a press kit for your business is to ask yourself if you have the writing, graphic, photography, web design and layout skills to do it yourself. When you create your media kit, it’s an exercise most small business owners are going to do twice – once on paper and once online. You’ll want to include your media kit when you send out press releases via snail mail and you’ll also want to have it on hand when you attend trade shows or go virtually anyplace in public with your small business. Having it online is also a smart move. It makes it much easier for writers, bloggers and editors to cite your business and include it in articles if your information is easily accessible online. Here are the basic elements to include when you create a media kit for your small business: Artwork. You should include your company’s logo along with professional photographs of your product, service and location. You want editors to be able to pull from these pieces of art to create comprehensive articles about your business. And even if they are including your business as one among many in an article, they will choose the best photographs to run with their articles – so make sure yours are the best. Hire professionals to create these elements. Introduction/pitch and company background. These can be separate pieces or combined in some cases. With your introduction, you want to “put your best foot forward” and make the case for doing business with you. This is a marketing piece without making it too “salesy.” The company background should cover its founding and short – but compelling – biographies of founders and key personnel. Concise fact sheet. Many won’t take the time to read your full introduction and background papers, so provide an overview organized as a list. Product or service information. Tell readers exactly what it is that you make or the services you perform. Describe in detail what makes them different from others in your industry. Press clippings and press releases. You should have a clipping service of some kind so you can collect mentions in the press. Include these when you create your media kit. For online kits, they can be links to articles, as long as you provide a sufficient overview. You can also include significant press releases that you have distributed over the years. A sample, or “model” news story. Some editors are looking to fill space and if you give them a good article written about your business that is factual and not just a...
read moreContent Marketing/SEO Success: Two Places to Gather Business Intelligence
Ready! Fire! Aim! The order of those commands may seem patently silly, but frankly, they capture exactly what many small business owners do when they work with content marketing campaigns and search engine optimization (SEO). First we need to quickly explain that content marketing and SEO are, in many ways, “kissing cousins.” Good content marketing campaigns – especially those that involve posting articles to your website blog – will help improve your website’s position within search engine results pages (SERPs). But what’s required to make a “good” content marketing campaign? Good content? No. “Great” content, and creating great content starts well before you ever put one word down in whatever word processing software you use. Unfortunately, most small business owners I talk to believe that if they have a “good idea” for a blog, they just need to get to their computer, pour it out and post it. That’s “Ready! Fire!” There is no “aim” in that sequence. So the question becomes: How do you “aim” your content so that it is effective for content marketing and improving your website SEO? Answering this question moves us into an area of business intelligence. If you don’t approach content creation by first doing your homework and gathering accurate business intelligence, you’re simply rolling the dice on whether or not your content will do anything to improve your SERP or sales. There are two basic areas where you need to gather business intelligence when you’re about to create a content marketing/SEO piece, such as a blog article: What attracts your prospects, and What works for your competitors. You should have website history that tells you which content best attracts prospects and customers to your site. What pieces of content have logged the most views? Dig a little deeper when you answer this question. You might find that you have some content that isn’t at the very top of your list of popular articles yet, but it consistently brings in readers or viewers. When this happens, it means that the content is pulling in people without being supported by a crash social media promotional campaign. In other words, people are finding it organically. You may have discovered a “diamond in the rough.” If you create more content like this, promote it, and cross link it to the original content that you discovered, you may find that you’ve released the (organic website) Kraken! The principle here is simple: Find what works and do more of it! But this means that you need to spend a good amount of time looking through your website history before you ever start writing an article. If you invest this time, you should be able to come up with a list of promising article topics. For my second point above: What works for your closest competitors should also work for you. Your competitors may have found some keywords or topics that interest your prospects that you haven’t yet developed on your website. Let me share two free tools to get you started: Buzzsumo SimilarWeb There are paid versions of these, but you can gather some good business intelligence on your competitors with their more limited free tools. Use them to discover the most popular articles in the sites as well as the most popular organic search terms that lead...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: The Rise of Messenger Apps
The evolution and increased importance of messaging apps for marketing gets a lot of attention in this week’s roundup of top articles. You need to see how your small business will fit into this new marketing world. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Facebooks’ Messenger app is already the second most popular app in the world, but Zuckerger has an even bigger vision for it and it could become the “app for everything.” If you’re looking for excitement, you might consider jumping into an industry that’s ripe for disruption. Three are described in this Forbes article. Marketing and sales It looks like the future of social media will be in messaging apps. Will your brand fit in? Step one in social media marketing is discovering which platforms are best for your small business. And once you’ve done that, you need to get a grip on the trends that are here to stay. Jeff Barrett, SEO of Status Creative, outlines four things small businesses should do to succeed with inbound marketing. Need to do something to increase online sales? The three ideas presented here should get you moving. You may – or may not – need to hire an SEO firm. At least try these 16 DIY SEO tips first. Digitalux CEO Daniel Scalco lists five B2B marketing strategies you need to consider. Today you have to weave a good narrative to engage and lead prospects. These five tips for effective small business storytelling will help. Leadership, management and productivity Unfortunately it’s not just the major brands and big government websites that are in the sights of the hackers. Small businesses are increasingly under attack by ransomware. To do things right you have to know the mistakes to avoid. Here are five common small business mistakes. We recently noted “World Backup Day.” If you don’t have solid backup strategies for your virtual world, you need to read this article. Really. Small business owners should be on top of the seven important trends listed in this article. They include fintech, the rise of the Millennials, and more. Politics, government and the economy As the primary season drags on, it looks like small business owners are losing confidence in virtually all of the candidates. Two streams of history crossed paths recently: U.S. Relations with Cuba and the gig economy. William Fenton has an interesting take on the situation in his cautionary tale. (No)surprise! Small business and big labor are on opposite sides of the fence when it comes to government...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: The Rise of Messenger Apps
The evolution and increased importance of messaging apps for marketing gets a lot of attention in this week’s roundup of top articles. You need to see how your small business will fit into this new marketing world. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Facebooks’ Messenger app is already the second most popular app in the world, but Zuckerger has an even bigger vision for it and it could become the “app for everything.” If you’re looking for excitement, you might consider jumping into an industry that’s ripe for disruption. Three are described in this Forbes article. Marketing and sales It looks like the future of social media will be in messaging apps. Will your brand fit in? Step one in social media marketing is discovering which platforms are best for your small business. And once you’ve done that, you need to get a grip on the trends that are here to stay. Jeff Barrett, SEO of Status Creative, outlines four things small businesses should do to succeed with inbound marketing. Need to do something to increase online sales? The three ideas presented here should get you moving. You may – or may not – need to hire an SEO firm. At least try these 16 DIY SEO tips first. Digitalux CEO Daniel Scalco lists five B2B marketing strategies you need to consider. Today you have to weave a good narrative to engage and lead prospects. These five tips for effective small business storytelling will help. Leadership, management and productivity Unfortunately it’s not just the major brands and big government websites that are in the sights of the hackers. Small businesses are increasingly under attack by ransomware. To do things right you have to know the mistakes to avoid. Here are five common small business mistakes. We recently noted “World Backup Day.” If you don’t have solid backup strategies for your virtual world, you need to read this article. Really. Small business owners should be on top of the seven important trends listed in this article. They include fintech, the rise of the Millennials, and more. Politics, government and the economy As the primary season drags on, it looks like small business owners are losing confidence in virtually all of the candidates. Two streams of history crossed paths recently: U.S. Relations with Cuba and the gig economy. William Fenton has an interesting take on the situation in his cautionary tale. (No)surprise! Small business and big labor are on opposite sides of the fence when it comes to government...
read moreHow one strong, guiding principle can save you money and prevent problems
There is something I’ve noticed about the most effective leaders and it’s true no matter what field they are active in: The have a few strongly held, guiding principles that govern their actions. They don’t have a list of 20 priorities, because they are guided by a small number of overarching principles that are able to provide consistent direction whenever they are faced with making a decision. Let me give you one of these and show you some of the implications that follow. Here is a principle that will serve you well in your small business, and in any other endeavor you choose to pursue: Do it right the first time. When you do a task correctly the first time, you: Save materials, Save time, Prevent personal frustration, Meet deadlines, Please your customers, Eliminate the mistakes caused when something has to be redone Raise the quality of your output Raise your competitiveness, and much more. One small business owner may have a problem meeting deadlines. That owner may decide to attack the problem. However, had that same owner instilled a company culture that was dedicated to “doing it right the first time,” that delivery problem may have never occurred. The commitment to doing it right the first time would have revealed weaknesses in the system or organization and they would have been corrected early on. This brings me to a major component that is required to do it right the first time: systems. For small business owners, it’s always wise to install a system which has “doing it right the first time” built into it. Further, when you implement systems that fold together related parts of your operations, you get additional advantages. What I have been describing up to this point are some of the strengths I see in the Sage catalog of products and services. When you can integrate and seamlessly coordinate processes such as payments, accounting, expenses and payroll, it saves you a lot of money, prevents errors and eliminates redundancies. A product like Sage 50, for example, gives small business owners far greater efficiency, and because it ties together various critical business areas, it delivers the insights required to make the right decisions. In other words, it gives you a “system” that provides answers. From my experience as a small business owner, and from talking to hundreds of small business owners across the country, one of the most frustrating things they have to do is “go hunting for answers.” When you have a solid system in place that does things right the first time, the answers aren’t so elusive. And by the way, if the frustration of going on “wild goose chases” resonates with you, you should take a careful look at Sage’s newest product, Sage Live. It was designed from the ground up to deliver real-time answers to the important questions that small business owners face. So what are the few guiding principles that give you direction each day? If you can’t state them directly and simply, you many not have any. Let me urge you to make “do it right the first time” one of the guiding principles you live by and instill in your small business team. Image: “João Zeferino da Costa – Moisés recebendo as tábuas da lei – 1868” by João...
read more