Do It Yourself Tips for Marketing & PR

December 23, 2008

It’s all over the news, every blog, every station and every person is talking about the economic situation and what’s to come. Large corporations are claiming bankruptcy and laying off hundreds or even thousands of people. If large companies are having trouble, how are small businesses coping during these times?

Marketing and Public Relations is always important. It’s what drives new customers to your business and it’s what reminds your existing customers, that you’re still there and you still care. But it’s never been as important as it is right now.

Many small business owners think marketing and PR isn’t for them, thinking it’ll run them a few too many dollars. If this is you, I’d like to help change your way of thinking.

Here are a few Do-it-Yourself tips on PR and Marketing for any business.

Know your Market.
Do you have a product or service? You want the world to know, right? Having everyone know about your product would be a dream to any business owner, but thinking that way means your marketing is wrong. Know who you’re targeting your product towards. Study your market, how they buy, where they buy and why they buy.

Know Who to Pitch to.
You may have written a fantastic press release but sending out your release about baked goods to an editor of a fashion magazine won’t do anything for you. Find the right media outlet and the right contact before sending out your release or contacting them. Aimlessly sending out press releases is not only ineffective but can also be seen as spam and create a bad name for yourself or your company.

Follow Up.
If you’ve done your research and were able to successfully contact and communicate with the right person, don’t forget to follow up. Editors and producers get hundreds of emails a day and contact several people, so they can easily place your story or pitch on the back burner. Don’t be afraid to follow up with a media alert or a thank you if appropriate. Just remember the no spam rule.

Network, Network, Network.
I don’t think I can say this enough. The only way people will know about your company is through you and your efforts. Go to the parties, the meetings and the trade shows. Shake hands, meet people and always make an impression (the right one!). If you’re a little shy or unsure of which events to go to, there are thousands of networking websites you can join.

Social Networking Sites.
Starting and owning a business can be quite overwhelming and keep you incredibly busy, especially if there are other priorities in your life. Attending networking meetings and events can be hard, which is why social networking sites can play a vital role in marketing your business. There are an endless amount of sites and most of them are quite easy to use. You can establish business connections, publicize your company and its services and increase your client base. You have the ability to reach people on a global scale.

Have an online presence.
Whether you build a website or start a blog, everyone is using the Internet to connect. You don’t have to be a writer or know the ins and outs of computers, starting a blog or website can be quite simple. It’s an easy way to reach out to people and inform them of what’s new and exciting in your company.

Always carry your business cards.
Not just one or two, but a handful. I’ve learned this lesson the hard way. There have been too many instances where I’ve been in the right place, at the right time and I didn’t have a business card on me. Whether it’s in your other purse, your car or you just gave your last one out – there are no excuses. Yes, most people have a phone or a pen and can take down your information but it just sends the wrong message – unorganized and unprepared.

Be prepared to market yourself.
Social gathering, birthday parties, family dinners, any conversation can turn into a lead. You should always be ready to talk about your business and where they can reach you. No need to constantly oversell yourself. When the topic arises or when the time seems right, be ready to market yourself.

The previous article was a guest blog by Rachel Azagury.  Rachel is an entrepreneur and freelance marketing and PR consultant based out of Toronto, Canada.  She writes a blog at http://whichwaytoeasystreet.blogspot.com/ and her website can be found at www.creatingabuzz.ca.  You can email Rachel at rachel@creatingabuzz.ca or follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/pinkbrickroad.


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7 Comments | Branding, Guest Blog | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zach Heller

Guest Blog – You’ll Have a Profitable Business by the Time You Finish this Blog

September 30, 2008

Congratulations! Your company has officially turned a profit! What? You didn’t get the memo? You thought your business was months, years away from the blessed black? Whoa! You must be thrilled to get this news. You must feel like doing a little happy dance, maybe even hopping down to the corner store for a celebratory six-pack.

Hold on, bucko. You’ve got two teeny, tiny, no-big-deal steps to take before you can count your chickens, err, cash. It will take all of five minutes, I promise. And then you can call your Mom.

-First, open an interest-bearing escrow account online, one that even the entire Ocean’s Eleven team can’t access. You’ve got to guard those pennies from that thief in your office – YOU.

-Next, transfer 5% of your last deposit into the account. That’s it. You’re done. (Until your next deposit, that is.)

Yeah!!! Tell all your Facebook friends, write your hometown newspaper, and stop total strangers on the street. Your business just officially turned a profit! And will do it CONSISTENTLY!

The simple truth about cultivating a profitable business is you already have a profitable business, you’re just putting the profit back in the pool to be spent on new desk chairs and late night pizza runs. You’ve got to take that profit FIRST and put it where the sun don’t shine – or in the bank. Whatever you prefer.

This system, what I refer to as the Profit First Account (PFA), allows you to make a profit off of every sale. Not bad. Not bad at all. I know, I know, you’re wondering how the heck you’re supposed to run your business when you’re skimming 5% off the top? Easy. You adjust.

Five percent is doable. After a few weeks, you won’t even notice. You will adjust your spending, planning, and even your thinking to accommodate the swelling profits in your PFA. You’ll forget about the things you thought you needed and make do with what you have. (Come on, do you really need all of those paper clips? Join Office Depot Anonymous and get on with your life!)

Better yet, you will come up with scathingly brilliant ideas about how to best use the remaining 95% of your inbound revenue. In fact, you may actually come up with a remarkable innovation, one that could, say, catapult your business into the stratosphere of success. Imagine that.

The cherry on top of the PFA? Every quarter you get to take some of the money out and distribute it – TO YOURSELF. Eventually you’ll increase your percentage, transferring 10%-20% of each deposit into your PFA (at my company, we take 20% of every deposit). Whoa! Now you’re turning a massive profit for every single sale, building a multi-million dollar business one deposit at a time. Nice.

So, are you ready to party? Or you do you need to wait a minute for that transfer to go through?

Congrats!

This post was written by Michael Michalowicz. Mike is a serial entrepreneur, having successfully built and sold two companies. He is currently the founder and CEO of Obsidian Launch, a company that partners with young entrepreneurs to help them grow their businesses. Mike is a regular guest on The Big Idea with Donnie Deutsch. Check out his new book, The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, that hits the shelves today.

3 Comments | Innovative Reads | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zach Heller

10^100 Innovators

September 25, 2008

Though I am admittedly a little late on this one, I feel that this project deserves as much attention as it can get. And if my blog can alert one extra person to it, I will be satisfied. I hope that person is you.

The project I am talking about is Google’s “10 to the 100th”. Announced yesterday, Google is calling on the world to come up with the best ideas for helping people. They want user submissions of ideas, projects, organizations, inventions, etc. that they will fund to the tune of $10,000,000.

Submissions are already being taken, and will continue to be accepted through October 20th. Once they are all collected, they will be voted on by users, than reviewed by judges to determine 5 finalists. The goal here, according to the website, is come up with ideas big or small that will help a large amount of people. The ideas are broken down into categories, such as energy, environment, and health.

“There are so many great ideas out there that never get funded”, the website claims, “This offers people a way to voice their ideas to the public and have a chance to do something significant with them.”

I love this project. From Google’s end, they get interaction with internet users in a fun and interesting way. They use a contest to get ideas, and offer some great rewards to the most innovative people on the web. From a user’s perspective, this gives people a voice. The winners will be those people that have had this one great idea for a long time and nowhere to turn with it.

As you may have guessed, I have already turned in one suggestion. I would love to hear what you think about the project, and hear any submissions that you have entered as well. The best ideas may come from collaboration anyway, as most great innovations do.

2 Comments | Branding | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zach Heller

Start at Home

August 26, 2008

I realized that my last two posts have seemed kind of bleak, and very negative. So I figured today would lend itself to something a little more upbeat. And I was right. There is nothing like a reference in another blog to get the juices flowing again.

In a blog about working from home, the entrepreneurs over at Work-from-Home-Job.com, used my “Be Innovation” rallying cry to talk about starting a business on your own. Thanks guys, and I am glad you see exactly what I was talking about.

Starting your own business out of your home is a great way to focus on being innovative, and inspiring change from the bottom up. Many of today’s most successful businesses started at the smallest level. Apple, a company I love to talk about here, started out of a rented garage in California.

And technology advancements have made it easier than ever to do anything from anywhere. I know that sound s vague, but we live in a vague world. The boundaries of time and space are literally collapsing all around us. Think big, but start small. Start from home and build a business that you are in love with.

As a great example, a friend of mine recently told me about how his dad started a tutoring company. It started very simply from a single tutoring job at his home. He was so good that he got references on top of references. So he hired college students to help make all of his appointments. And so the company was born. Now they tutor elementary and high school level students across the county.

You can make a difference on any level. We all can. You just have to get started.

2 Comments | Features | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zach Heller

Just Like Lightning

August 12, 2008

I hope all of you have seen the video of a lightning strike in super slow motion that has been floating about the internet over the last week or so.  It made it to the top of Digg and wound up in blogs of all types by the time I saw it last Friday.  It really is a remarkable thing to see.

It “strikes” me that, just like lightning, any new business venture must act in that way.  What I mean by a new business venture is twofold.  It can either be a startup or entrepreneurial company that is looking to break into the market, or a longstanding company that is in a new business development phase.  Really, it can apply to anyone who is doing something new.

In the video, the lightning bursts out in all directions, seemingly looking for something to grab onto.  Once one of the “streams” touches the ground, the electric current is shot back through that one bolt.  In a business sense, this is how any good company will act.  You test the waters, not really knowing where or when an idea will catch on.  And when it does, even if it is not the expected outcome, you have to latch on and run with it.

Too many companies will target a product or service to one market and ignore potential users elsewhere.  Sometimes, in fact, companies will even stop selling when unintended customers become the main customer base.  Guy Kawasaki talks about this concept in the book, The Art of the Start.

Flexibility lies at the heart of innovation.  Being innovative requires you to adapt to changing conditions constantly.  When launching an idea, a product, a service, or anything new, strike like the lightning bolt.  Launch outwards in all directions and see what sticks.  You may find a market that you never expected.  And when you do, own it.

2 Comments | Theory | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zach Heller

Woot, A Million Dollars, and Simplicity

July 23, 2008

The web has paved the way for some of the greatest innovations.  We now have new ways of doing things that are unlike anything we have ever seen before.  The mail became email, which led the way for chat rooms, instant messaging, online telephone services, and social networks.  These are all major things that have developed out of grand ideas and designs.

But not everything has to be so big or daunting.  Take a look at Woot.com.  What they have done is successfully create a website that gets a huge amount of traffic each and every day by doing something unique.  They offer one, and only one, product a day at a discount.  The product changes every night at midnight, and a rush of visitors come to check out the deal and see if it’s the one for them.

The traditionalists among us would say, why limit yourself to selling one product?  Why not offer a variety of deals and draw in more people, increasing the chance that each visitor will make a purchase?  Well, quite simply, that has been done to death.  Why compete with Amazon.com when you can create something that much more remarkable?  The same people don’t go to Amazon.com on a daily basis.  Woot has created something with a very loyal customer base that continues to spread the idea around.

Another example is “The Million Dollar Home Page“.  Here is a site that bought an interest-peaking url and sold ads.  That’s it.  The page is one million pixels, covered in ads, with each pixel costing one dollar – hence the million dollar home page.  It’s a simple idea with guaranteed revenue and easily spreadable story.  It gets attention.

You don’t have to solve world hunger every time you innovate.  Create something unique, no matter how simple, and run with it.  The web allows us to do this quickly and easily, at a fraction of the cost.  Create something that makes people say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

5 Comments | Theory | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zach Heller

Throw Gas on the Fire

July 15, 2008

Fire plus gas equals bigger fire. Too often we have heard the phrase “throwing gas on the fire” in a negative sense. When things are going wrong, people tend to try and douse the flames any way they can, often leading to more problems. Hence the phrase, instead of putting out the fires, they are causing them to grow.

However, let’s take a look at this from the other side of the spectrum. When you start a business, or you have an idea, it’s like lighting a match. At first the idea is small, though to you it may be big. No one else can really see it, but you know it has the ability to grow.

Slowly but surely it does start to grow and spread. Your match has started a fire. Now what are you going to do to keep that process going? Throw some gas on it! Throwing gas on the fire is not forcing it to grow, it is helping the process along at a faster rate. Spread the fire by letting the forces of nature act on it.

Too many people and small businesses see that are starting to get the word out or starting to get some attention and get comfortable. You never want to get comfortable. When you are comfortable you sit back and relax, just waiting for the idea to take off. Instead, get excited. Get motivated. Get some gas and throw it over the flames.

How, you ask. Well you can come out with new products to keep customers interested. You can add upgrades and features to get noticed. You can start collecting feedback to get people involved. You can get media exposure to capture new audiences. It doesn’t matter what you are doing as long as you are spreading the fire. Doing nothing smothers the fire. And when that last flame goes out, you’re left in the dark wondering how it all came crashing down when all you had to do was add more gas.

2 Comments | Theory | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zach Heller

What Makes a Leader

June 29, 2008

The qualities of a strong leader are hard to quantify.  Whether you are leader of an organization, the leader of a nation, or just the leader of a family, it takes a variety of qualities to get the job done.  Many have written about the characteristics that you must possess to lead people to accomplish great things.

Can someone learn to be a leader or are the great leaders born that way?  I cannot answer that question, however there is one thing that defines strong leaders the world over.  It is an innate ability to empower the people around you.  You do not always have to know what to do, or be able to see the right moves.  But the ability to surround yourself with the right people who can get the job done, and then let them do what it is they are there to do, will always give you better results than you would get on your own.

Empowering others involves providing the right structure to give everyone in an organization a voice.  The free flow of information will always result in new ideas and new direction.  As a leader, you have to have the foresight to clear the path and allow others to speak for you.  You have to be confident in yourself and others simultaneously.  You have to let your ego aside and allow things to happen without interference.  The greatest leaders have not always come up with the ideas that lead to innovation, they recognize others who have the ideas and put them in a position to speak.

When people feel free to express themselves, they have the confidence to get things done.  By limiting the voices of those around you, you narrow the possibilities and lead to compromised decisions.  To be a truly great leader, you have to be able to encourage growth within every aspect of an organization.  Then, and only then, will the greatest ideas make their way to the front of the line.

With this is in mind, it seems that great leaders can learn the skills necessary to lead.  Some people are born to lead, but we all have the ability to choose to lead.  Leadership is about people, and the people you lead will guide you along the way.  Empower those around you and you will find that they have the solutions you are looking for.

4 Comments | Theory | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zach Heller

Reinvent the Steal

June 25, 2008

In reality, there is not a lot to this innovation thing.  Have you ever been sitting around and thought to yourself that there was a company that could be doing something, just one thing, differently?  If they did this one thing maybe they would be more successful, more efficient, better for consumers, etc.  Well that is an opportunity to innovate.  If they aren’t going to change, maybe you could.  Or at least force them to.

Everybody will tell you that you do not have to “reinvent the wheel” to find success.  There are not a lot of completely original ideas left in the world.  Chances are, most things have already been invented, or at least tried before.

Reinventing the steal is all about taking an existing an idea and making it your own.  Companies thrive on competition, and, in most cases, are defined by it.  There is room to improve on all the ideas that are already being practiced.  If you are looking to start a company, look to the companies that have found success.  Think about the things that they are not doing well, and build a company that competes.  Differentiate yourself on the one or two levels that you know you can do better.

This can work on all levels, and we have seen it time and time again.  Google was not the first search engine, but they do things differently, and better, than the others.  Starbucks was not the first chain of coffee shops, but they created an image unlike all the others.  This is not the first blog about innovation. Now its your turn. 

Take an idea that you like, that has worked, and make it better.  Change the marketing approach, change the level of service you provide, change the way your organization is structured.  These can all lead to success in a competitive marketplace.  Don’t ever be afraid to test the big boys, there is plenty of business out there for all of us.

3 Comments | Branding, change | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zach Heller

The Age of the Startup

June 21, 2008

It is easier now than ever before to start your own company.  The playing field is wide open and waiting for your idea.  The barriers to entry are lower than you think, and the startup costs are less than they used to be.  In fact, in most industries, new ways of doings things make the initial startup easier and more convenient than even 5 years ago.

So what does this mean?  It means that differentiating yourself is more important than ever.  The fact that it is easier to start a company means that more and more people are doing it.  To be successful, you need to be doing something that stands out from the crowd.  If you are not different, you are going to get lost in the shuffle and miss out on all of the fun.

Most people are afraid to stand out because it means taking a chance.  It means that if you fail, you fail in the public eye and you will be embarrassed forever.  We have this underlying fear that we will be outcast from society and seen as a fool for the rest of our lives.  Wake up!  It’s time that you realize that if you fail, you are in the majority.  We all fail.  People and businesses fail in this country every day.  Does that mean we all crowd around them and pelt them with cabbage and tomatoes?  There is no public shunning that takes place, and most often these same people or companies come back with a successful venture later.

Get over your fear of standing out, and you will free yourself up to rise to the top.  Get people talking about you because your product is so new, or your marketing is so fresh, or your brand is so simple.  The more people talk, the more opportunities you have to convert them into customers.  Innovation does not have to mean a brand new product that no one ever thought of before.  It can be the way you handle your operations, the way you help your customers, the promotions you offer, etc.  So if you decide to take advantage of the “open” market and start a business, make it worth your while, stand out.

2 Comments | change, Risk | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zach Heller

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