I Can’t Afford a Publicity/Public Relations Campaign – Can I?
It’s a phrase I hear over and over again from many entrepreneurs, small businesses owners and inventors: “I’d love to hire someone to launch our publicity campaign professionally, but we can’t afford it, so I’m just going to have to do it on my own.”
Over the past several months, I have been conducting an informal survey among entrepreneurs and business owners who have contacted me about my services. I have found that due to their lack of information or knowledge on the topic, many businesses typically over-estimate or over-budget the cost of a prospective public relations/publicity campaign. During my PR consultation with them, I asked: “How much do you think it will cost to launch a solid, effective PR/publicity campaign for your product/business?” Of the 102 people I’ve queried:
* 11% – Thought a professional PR campaign would cost $10,000+ per month
* 32% – Thought a professional PR campaign would cost $5,000-$10,000 per month
* 39% – Thought a professional PR campaign would cost $3,000-$5,000 per month
* 12% – Thought a professional PR campaign would cost $1,000-$3,000 per month
* 6% – Thought a professional PR campaign would cost less than $1,000 per month
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7 Steps to Creating Your Own Podcast
Listening to podcasts isn’t something I enjoy or take time for, quite frankly. I’m a visual learner and prefer to read something rather than listen to it, as I find reading a much quicker way to gather the info that I need. However, with the proliferation of audio listening devices, like the whole iPod family and other mp3 players, I have to acknowledge that I’m in the minority, I believe. The world is listening to a wide variety of audio files, much more so than ever before in history, and I need to get on the bandwagon or be lost in the dust.
What is a podcast, anyway? A podcast is an audio file that you create in .mp3 format that is uploaded with an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) file to your server for your target market to download on any number of programs created to receive or subscribe to your audio file so that they can listen to it at their leisure on their computer or a personal mp3 device.
Why should you create a podcast? I think it serves as a marketing tool for the solo service professional, who might want to do one of the following:
- create an Internet radio show or talk show in which you create content-rich broadcasts for your target market
- conduct a teleclass series in which you interview experts who have solutions to problems faced by your target market
- promote a printed book, ebook, or CD/DVD series by releasing promotional snippets to a wider audience
- provide short and valuable expert tips to your target market (my Get More Clients Online podcast consists of the weekly article I write for my newsletter)
Many podcasts are about an hour in length, especially when they consist of recordings of radio shows or teleclasses. However, I think that the listening threshold for most people is about 10 minutes. So, that means that your podcast needs to be 10 minutes or less in length. If it’s longer, you really have to grab their attention in the first 10 minutes to keep them listening for the full amount of time.
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The Essential Code Optimization Tutorial for SEO
Do you want to get the traffíc you deserve flooding into your website? Code optimization is an essential component of the search engine optimization process and if you aren’t technically minded then it can be difficult to get your head round. This guide is meant for beginners and more advanced webmasters alike.
A shallow knowledge of HTML coding is useful, however, it is not necessary. Optimizing your code can be done by simply opening your html document in a text editor and changing different parts as shown below. Follow these steps carefully and your code will become 100% search engine optimized and ready for promotion and link-building campaigns.
The steps below assume you have chosen the keywords which you want to optimize the page code for. If you have not done that, go and do that now and return to this guide later.
HTML Code Optimization
The optimization of your HTML code for search engines is vital. It is the base of your SEO campaign. It must be optimized in a number of ways in order to improve the relevance of a chosen keyword. Follow the advice below as closely as possible. The closer the better and the higher your rank will be.
Remember: Keywords are the words people will use in search engines. Including a keyword in your site content (and optimizing your site) will cause your site to be returned as a search result. You can choose to optimize your page for a keyword or a keyphrase (a number of related words, eg: ‘free red hats’). Using a keyphrase is more advantageous (as discussed later) but for simplicity, I will refer to keywords AND keyphrases as just keywords.
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