Enabling essential skills and strategies for small business success.

Every week I sit down with small business clients to talk about how they can grow their businesses. We talk about social media, traditional advertising, face to face networking, their website and so on. What we rarely talk about is PR. Why is that? Well, for starters because I’m not a PR expert. It’s never been my thing and I don’t even feign an in-depth knowledge. Secondarily, it’s because PR seems to matter less now since traditional news outlets are seemingly less relevant every day. And if that’s the case, then isn’t PR becoming less relevant?

The answer is no. However, it is changing. Where PR seems to be going from my viewpoint is online. I’ve just done a simple search for online press releases and came up with lots of rich links to robust websites offering online press releases. There are numerous ones offering free online releases. Here’s a few: 1888 Press Release, Free Press Release (name kind of says it all, doesn’t it?), i-Newswire, and PRLog. Each one has information to help you write an effective press release and gives you lots of options to enhance it. Almost all of them offer additional features that do cost money, but I was surprised at low little some of these premium services run.

When you think about why you have a website, blog, use Twitter, it all boils down to the fact that you want to be found online. Well, online press releases can help you achieve this goal another way. Where it’s a little different, and perhaps challenging, is that you need to have some news around you or your company. It can’t just be Tuesday and you feel like sending out a press release. It needs to be Tuesday and you’re launching a groundbreaking new product.

We all go through periods like this when we do have something newsworthy to share, or at least it feels like it. So, let’s not forget to consider a news release. One blog I read called The PRoactive Report, states that 98% of journalists start with a Google search when working on a new story. Well, I’d like my news to be part of what those journalists find. If I have a newsworthy item that coincides with an article being written, Bingo!

These online releases can also have links embedded that lead back to our websites or videos, our logos, pictures of our products, and lots of the keywords we want to be found for. Almost sounds like a dream come true when you think about it.

We really need to be careful not to ignore the areas we don’t know a lot about when it comes to marketing our businesses. Otherwise we could really be missing the boat. Adwords comes to mind as being in this category for many small business owners. Me included. I’m doing something about Adwords though by starting to bone up on the whole subject of Pay Per Click advertising. Next up for me, is learning more about online PR. I want to be a marketing consultant that knows about using this vital area of marketing that’s intersecting with SEO and social networking for my business and those of my clients.

How about you? Let me know how you use PR to grow your business or you’re not, why not. If you know of other good resources to learn about using online press releases, please share those with me, too.

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