Dan Janal | Publicity and PR Leads Blog

You’re an author or entrepreneur and you go to sleep with this one dream in your head every night:

“If only I can get the media to cover my book/company/product, then I’d be rich.”

As a PR person, I share that dream. But I realize one point that they fail to realize: PR is only the beginning, not the end. It is one dot in a series of action steps that fuel your marketing plan.

What do I mean my this?

PR is important. PR gives you credibility. PR gives you exposure. PR gives you reach. But that’s today’s news. By tomorrow, your newspaper article is lining a bird cage.

You see, once you get your publicity, you have to market your publicity. In fact, publicity can be the spark plug that ignites your marketing program. But you have to take the steps to make that happen.

Why?

No one opens the newspaper to find an article about your subject, whether it be how to save money on taxes or how to raise happier children. When newspapers write about those topics and the reader is interested, that’s great. Maybe they’ll buy your book or services.

But more likely, they won’t get to read page 17 of the Wall Street Journal, which features your service. After all, did you read page 17 of the Wall Street Journal today? Then why should you expect your target audience to?

Your goal is to first get the publicity, then tell everyone in your marketing world that you got publicity.

Publicity is part of a giant canvass of connect the dots that begins with creating the product and ends with the sale. Other dots along the marketing chart could include advertising, direct mail, online marketing, direct sales, and even more publicity. If you don’t get publicity, your job will be that much harder. But if you get publicity and don’t use it to fire up your marketing engine, then you won’t connect the dots to make money.

Dan Janal
Your Fearless PR LEADER
PR LEADS
www.prleads.com

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Piggyback is more than a child’s game.

Piggybacking in press releases could help small companies leap frog over their competitors.

Here’s how.

When you are doing a joint venture with a company that is more well known, issue a press release saying, “Big Company Uses Small Company’s Products or Services.”

Reporters who would normally consider a press release from a company they don’t know as a Trivial Pursuit and might toss the release down the Chutes and Ladders might be inclined to give your release a serious read.

This happened to me several years ago. I had a client that produced street-mapping software in the early days of GPS systems. They had a relationship with Trimble Navigation (a big name in the field) and Sony (a big name everywhere). The Associated Press turned the press release into an article and it appeared in more than 200 newspapers! Chances are my clients wouldn’t have gotten an ounce of ink without name dropping their joint venture partners.

Get a Clue, follow this strategy and you might wind up with a Monopoly and become Numero Uno.

Dan Janal
Your Fearless PR LEADER
PR LEADS
www.prleads.com

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I had the pleasure of meeting the Eisenberg brothers (Bryan and Jeff) back in 2001 when they became my clients at PR LEADS. Little did I realize I would benefit more from then, than did from me.

Back then, web marketers were all taking about generating traffic. The equation was “traffic = sales.” The Eisenbergs believed in numbers and wanted to study “conversion rate marketing” instead of traffic. No one else was thinking about this way back then. They might have invented the term.

Many of the concepts the Eisenbergs developed have been chronicled in their best-selling book (#837 on Amazon) Call to Action and their company Future Now Inc http://www.futurenowinc.com/ is helping GE, Price Waterhouse, Overstock.com and many other name brand companies.

But the best example for me was when they introduced me to John Walsh, of Walsh Technology Group, who developed the PR LEADS website by incorporating the design techniques the Eisenbergs pioneered.

I won’t take time here to discuss the terms, techniques and strategies the Eisenbergs and Walsh used since it would take too much time here and is amply described in their new book called Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results.

Instead, I’ll focus on the results.

The PR LEADS website does such a good job of conversion that most people (97 percent) sign up on the website without talking to me first.

That means the first time I talk to most people, I talk to them as customers, not as prospects. I am seen as their teacher and coach focused on helping them be successful, not as a scheming salesman out to take their money. The difference in creating a relationship is huge. And I credit the website for giving me that positioning.

Also, it is amazing how many people volunteer this comment, “I really like your website.” How many times do people volunteer positive comments about your website? This always blows me away, because to my untrained eye, the site looks fine but worthy of unprompted compliments? Wow.

This is a short way of saying I give this book my strongest recommendation. You’ll find information presented easily with real world examples and tactics that you and your web team can implement. If you do, you’re likely to see an increase in your conversions — whether that be sales, capturing names or whatever else you need to track and measure to grow your business online.

Dan Janal
Your Fearless PR LEADER
PR LEADS
www.prleads.com

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