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Teleseminars: Are They a Wise Business Choice?

June 09th, 2010

Hi All!

The following post is courtesy of Kathleen Gage, (hugely successful) Online Business Building Expert, and she is a teleseminar pro. Truly.

Here are some great insights from her to get you started, or to think about if you’re already doing teleseminars…

Teleseminars: Are They a Wise Business Choice? By Kathleen Gage

Teleseminars are one of the most incredible ways to build customer loyalty, provide incredible value, position yourself as an expert and make fantastic revenues. The fact is, there are many experts for which teleseminars are the cornerstone of their business and marketing model.

To optimize your effectiveness (and revenues) with teleseminars, or any aspect of your product or service offerings, you not only need to know how to develop a great teleseminar you also need to know who is interested in your information, how to market your offerings and how you will sell.

Let’s begin with foundation. In virtually any marketing course, a primary area of discussion is defining your target market. Without knowing specifically who your market is, it is difficult to develop products and services your customers will be interested in and be willing to pay for.

Here are a few considerations.

  • Who is your market?
  • What do they want and need?
  • What is their most challenging problem that you have a solution for?
  • What keeps them awake at night?
  • Is your expertise what they are looking?

A consideration many people never take into account is, “Who do you ideally want to do business with?”

Start from the space of, “Where are qualities I look for in my clients that will enhance our working relationship.”

After all, you will be putting time, energy and effort into any working relationship. Why not make them the most enjoyable relationships you can?

This is just the beginning. The challenge many professionals have is they have not taken the time to identify who wants and needs what they have to offer, but who they ideally want to work with.

Without knowing this you may drastically miss the mark. Take time up front to do your homework so that you will benefit your market over the long run and have a great time doing so.

To learn more about effectively using the Internet to generate great revenues go to http://www.streetsmartsmarketing.com/free-ebook.htm to access the FREE ebook The Truth About Making Money on the Internet.

Thanks, Kathleen!

Cheers & Happy Marketing!

Lisa

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How to Write a Killer Press Release and Where to Deploy It Online

May 01st, 2010

Hi All!

If you’re like a lot of the clients I work with, you probably don’t have a lot of experience writing a Press Release…if any! So I’d like to provide you with some very helpful tips for not only crafting one, but also where to deploy it on online so that the media actually sees it…and so that it shows up in Google searches to provide on-going traffic to your website.

Ready? Let’s get started…

1. Make Sure It’s Newsworthy: Some people want to write a Press Release about everything and anything they do, and that’s not a good strategy. Save writing one for big, worthwhile news: Your new book, landing a significant client, an event you’re conducting, etc. And they are not meant to read like articles! They are meant to be “news”!

2. The Headline: Make sure it’s short, effective, and not like the headline of an ad, eblast or direct mail piece. A Press Release is not a “marketing” promotional piece; it’s meant to share news in a factual, straightforward way.

3. The Body Copy: I have read many Press Releases that read like an ad or marketing brochure. Wrong! Using hype, exclamation points, marketing speak, etc. is not appropriate.

4. Basic Structure: Headline, intro paragraph that covers the “5 W’s” (who, what, where, when and why) because some media may only run your first paragraph and not the whole thing, second paragraph with more support info or a quote from you, a third paragraph with more support info and details, a fourth paragraph with a quote/testimonial from a client (or expert) about you, a fifth paragraph with boilerplate info about your company, and a short final paragraph with contact info. Keep the paragraphs short and try to keep the length to around one page. Click here to see a formatting example. You can use variations of this!

5. Add Testimonials: It’s always good to include one Testimonial so that someone else is quoted in it saying how great you are. It gives you more credibility.

6. Get Client, Organization or Individual Approval: If you want to mention a client, or any other organization, business, or person, in your Press Release, get approval first! This is BIG. Example: You may have just landed a big newsworthy client, or landed a keynote speech for a high profile company or organization, and want to tell the world about it. Yes, this type of news would warrant a Press Release, BUT those entities may have strict policies about being mentioned in someone else’s Press Release (mandated by their legal departments), and you can get into A LOT of trouble sending out a Press Release with them mentioned in it without approval. A LOT of trouble.

7. Optimize Your Press Release: Add 5-10 keywords or phrases that have received good search results because when you deploy your Press Release through an online service, those keywords will help it get found by people doing searches related to the topic of your Press Release. Click here to use a free keyword search tool that Google offers. You can type in keywords and phrases into this tool and it will tell you how many searches were done that month for them. This will help you determine which ones are worth putting in and it will also provide you suggestions that are variations of the ones you came up with.

Online Deployment & Distribution:

Okay, so now your press release is written…now what? You’ll want to deploy it through an online service. There are tons of these Press Release distribution services. Note: They vary in cost, so it will boil down to your budget. But most of them enable you to choose the industry(s) and media you want to reach, add keywords, select the date of deployment, and add pictures, images and logos to the upload.

Here’s a few that most PR pros I know use, and ones I use:

  1. PRWeb.com
  2. BusinessWire.com
  3. PR9.net
  4. PRNewsWire.com

PR9.net is super cheap, around $15 per Press Release. Even when I use one of the other more expensive services listed above, I always deploy through PR9.net, too. I do this because I find my Press Releases do show-up in Google searches through their service, so that’s worth $15 bucks.

Also, in addition to deploying it online for mass coverage and distribution, you’ll want to create a targeted list of media you want to reach. Then you can email your Press Release to them and do follow up calls and emails. But don’t attach the Press Release to your email! Paste the Press Release copy into the body of your email to them.

OKAY! There is your crash course in writing a killer Press Release, and where to deploy it. I hope you found this helpful!

Good luck!

Cheers & Happy Marketing!

Lisa

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