If you are in business for yourself online, it is especially important that you understand the concept of social proof.  When you are an online business, most visitors to your websites see you as as unknown entitiy, hiding behnd the anonymity of the internet, which makes them anxious. What if they give you their hard earned money and you vanish? They want reassurance. They want to know that you are a real, legitimate, established business. How can you give them this reassurance ... Continue reading

 My goal is to help my clients. Most of the time, I do this by writing press releases and doing social media marketing with the goal of promoting their website all over the internets, and making sure that their website is fueled by that all important Google Juice. However every once in a while this is NOT a good idea. And if I think so, I will tell my client so. Politely, of course. Here's when you don't want to send out ... Continue reading

I'm going to keep this post short and sweet - just the way a press release should be.   Fairly often, when my clients send me a proposed press release that they want rewritten, they are so excited about their business/new idea/upcoming event/announcement that they cram about 20 different ideas into their press release. This makes it not only too long, it makes it confusing. What they've got there is about 20 press releases in one. All of that greats info in ... Continue reading

  Here's what I find drives press releases to the top of search engine placement and also gets them read: ... Continue reading

 A lot of my clients come to me asking me to rewrite a press release that they've written - they've paid good money to PRWeb or PRNewswire to distribute the press release, but when they submitted it, it was rejected. Here's the number one reason why: It's not bad grammer, it's not lack of pertinent information, it's not excessive length. The reason for rejection that PRWeb and PRNewswire has given to my clients is that their press release sounds too much like an ... Continue reading

Here is the standard information that I need to write a press release, and then I also like to speak to the client to get an idea of what news angle we will be emphasizing - sometimes it's obvious, sometimes we need to find or create one: Your contact information - the press release sites require this: Contact person’s name, title, email address, and telephone number Company name Company URL Company physical address Your keywords A one paragraph bio about you and/or your company - things that ... Continue reading

Your headline is one of the most important parts of your press release, because if the headline is boring, or vague and confusing, people have no reason to read any further. Your headline needs to convey excitement and immediacy and immediately draw people into your press release. It needs to contain a strong action verb and it must sum up, in a dozen words or so, what your press release is all about. And it needs to read like a headline on ... Continue reading

What do press releases and article marketing have in common?  For those not familiar - article marketing is  a term for using articles to drive traffic to a website, and hopefully, of course, sales. The way that you do this is to write short, informative articles and submit them to article directories like Ezinearticles.com and Goarticles.com and Associatedcontent.com.  The article directories allow you to include a "resource box" or "author bio", and in that resource box you include a link to ... Continue reading

The fact that you're on a tight budget should not stop you from creating your own publicity campaign for your business, product and services. These days it is easy and cheap to be your own publicist; all you need to invest is a little time.  Here are seven essential tools for your publicity campaign toolkit: 1.) A  webpage which advertises your products and services. Even if it's a free blogspot blog, you need to grab yourself a piece of online real estate ... Continue reading

 When you are writing a press release,  it's easy to get so caught up in finding a news hook and crafting a well written release that you forget about keyword research. That would be a mistake. Writing press releases these days is like writing articles for ezinearticles - it gains you valuable virtual real estate and backlinks, as well as traffic. It gets you out there where your potential customers are searching for answers - and you want to be in front ... Continue reading