Join us for our free PR Webinar tonight

Doing your own PR can seem like a no brainer: invest your time and generate valuable coverage for your business. But what if your press release doesn’t get covered? You’ve wasted your valuable time – because as a business owner your time is truly irreplaceable.

In business, time is money – and so is press coverage. A mention in a magazine can be worth thousands of pounds: just read some media packs and check out the ad rates to discover just how much. What’s more, media coverage can enable you to reach people who wouldn’t discover your business. Some magazine or newspaper readers don’t check Facebook or browse the web: you can’t capture everyone via social media. You probably know a business owner yourself who regularly gets great media coverage and is reaping the rewards in increased sales and business profile… and you probably also wish that this was you!

If you want to discover why press releases don’t work and what you can do to make sure your releases DO generate coverage AND bring in business join a webinar with PR expert and author of A Guide to Promoting Your Business Antonia Chitty. You’ll discover the 5 reasons your press release isn’t getting coverage or bringing in business – and what YOU can do to change all that.

Join Antonia on Tuesday 13th March at 8pm GMT for a free webinar. 

Sign up below.

Online Marketing: PR Online

There are an enormous range of activities you can carry out to promote your business online. On one level, you might take online PR simply to be sending a press release to websites which reach your target audience. If doing this, you may need to customize the content of the release to match the style of the site you are targeting. You also need to remember that while magazines work months in advance a website can publish content straight away.

However this is looking at a very limited interpretation of online PR. You can raise your business profile online through the use of social media. You might choose to:

• Participate in forums focused on your target audience
• Communicate via blogs using a system such as WordPress, Typepad or Blogger
• Communicate via micro-blogs: Twitter is the main player, but there is also Plurk, Pownce and Jaiku
• Communicate via social networks including. Bebo, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace etc.
• Communicate via social network aggregates like FriendFeed
• Communicate via online event networks including Upcoming.com, Meetup.com

You could also upload videos about your business to YouTube or Vimeo, make images available through Flickr, take part in social bookmarking or tagging of articles about your business through Delicious, StumbleUpon or Google Reader. I’m sure you can think of more ways to use the power of the internet to promote your business too.

You could read this BTTradespace post about Online PR if you want to get some more ideas. Then, add the ideas which seem right for your business to your promotion plan. (This is simply a plan of activities to promote your business every day - you can find an example here).