In my last post, I talked about the importance of talking to your customers directly to get the most out of everything the internet has to offer you and your business.  In this post, we’ll talk a little bit about how that can be done.

How do you do this?

We’ll get more into that in the practical parts later, but you’re going to need to customize your site and all of your other communications so that you are exactly what the potential customer is looking for. At its most basic level, you’re going to need to build many different microsites or landing pages with purpose-built content aimed at each of the targets that you’ve identified.

That gets us on the topic of how the design of those pages is another integral part of your communications strategy, but I’m getting ahead of myself again.

With regards to PR, while media coverage is still important, and can be very beneficial to some businesses, there are now better ways to get media coverage than simply by sending out a press release.

What if a reporter already has a full plate when you send your release out? What if there’s no interest in the subject just then? But two weeks later, something related to your subject hits the news, and he goes looking for more information to give his story a new angle, but he can’t find anything about you (And he forgot about the press release you sent out).

Instead, you could tell your story directly to interested people.  They will then talk about you, leading the media to pick up on the story and cover it.

The crucial difference in PR campaigns, is that, for the first time in a very long time, public relations is actually public.  Anyone can launch and run a successful PR campaign by knowing who to talk to, and how to go about it.  Blogs, online news releases, and other kinds of web content will make it easy for your potential customers to find information about you, and opens up a dialogue for your buyers to communicate directly with you.

With a direct PR campaign, you should cultivate as many small relationships within your niche that you can.  While these bloggers and media people may seem like small potatoes compared to some of the biggies out there, they are highly influential within your niche, which is where your customers are.

You need to remember that a large number of small marketing efforts can bring in just as much business as one big coup can.

You also can’t look at your PR campaign as something that exists separately from your marketing efforts.  Online, the two are inextricably linked.  PR and advertising are all different aspects of the same communications strategy, and there are a lot of communication efforts that will possess aspects of both.  Again, throw out everything you thought you knew about how advertising and marketing campaign are planned.  You’ll get lost in the details.  Get the big picture down first, and then move methodically through the other steps.

In later posts we’ll go over what the new strategies and theories you need to look at when formulating your communications strategy, and in then I’ll show you how to do it yourself, through step-by-step instructions.  Then I’ll tell you how to keep your site in tip-top shape once you’ve gone through all the trouble of setting it up properly.  That includes testing, as well as the importance of fresh content and keeping your site relevant in fast-changing times.

And at the end of the process, you can start calling yourself a Trusted Expert.

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! – Copyright JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved

Once upon a time, the only way you could get your message out there was to buy advertising, or convince someone to write something about you. It cost a lot of money, and there wasn’t a really good way to measure the results. As someone (there are arguments as to who) in advertising once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I don’t know which half.” And that’s just how it went.

Your choices were newspapers, magazines, outdoor, radio, television, and direct mail. While attempts were made at targeting through industry-developed demographic profiling, the segments were broad (think men 25-34) and targeting buyers beyond those very simple demographics was very difficult. It worked for the large brands who were targeting large segments of the population, but was too broad and ineffective for the average small-to-medium sized business owner.

Because those smaller businesses didn’t have the big budgets, and the targeting was so broad, a lot of advertising dollars were wasted reaching people who weren’t part of their target audience. This was accepted as simply something that came along with advertising.

Traditional advertising also relies on a one-way conversation. Because of that, it found that it needed to be an intrusive as possible to make sure that it would interrupt whatever you were doing so you would pay attention to it. When there wasn’t that much competition, the interruption wasn’t that bad, but as the number of media outlets and ways to advertise increased, the messages became increasingly intrusive, with flashy messages that were aimed at the lowest common denominator (read: stupid).

As for public relations, or PR, it was a private club that you had to pay big bucks to be a part of. You paid some PR guru a ton of money for the privilege of getting to use his network of contacts that he made over years of schmoozing to try and get your message out. The success of your campaign was judges by how many inches of press that you got, not how much the press release actually affected your sales. Press releases were also written specifically with the media in mind, it used terms and jargon that only media people would understand, and even had to formatted in just the right way. If you wanted to play the game, you had to submit to their way of doing things.

Then something called the internet came along. And advertisers and PR people realized that is was an opportunity to reach potential customers, even if they didn’t quite know what to do with it at the time.

To be continued…

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! – Copyright JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved