The Clean and Green Club

Ok, you read last month’s Frugal Marketing Tip and you’ve identified reporters who’ll be receptive to your pitch. What next? It’ll take two months to answer, because there are two different situations.

If you’re responding to a reporter query on HARO or PR Leads/Profnet

First of all, speed is essential. HARO has gone from zero to over 55,000 subscribers in its first year, and will continue to grow rapidly. Profnet and PR Leads have thousands of subscribers, and many of them are PR agencies with lots of clients to pitch. That means the reporter will pay much more attention to the first 20 or so queries that hit the mailbox. If you’re number 200, unless you manage to get opened and then just blow the reporter out of the water, the chances are, that reporter already has plenty of sources. Most reporters are on short deadlines, although if they’re working on a book, they may still open a late mail. HARO typically mails around 5:45 a.m., 12:45 p.m., and 5:45 p.m. every weekday, and Profnet comes out roughly once an hour between about 9:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. You should check your mail as soon as possible after these are mailed. (With such large lists, it may take a while to reach you–just keep checking until it shows up.) Remember also that both services post their most urgent queries on Twitter: follow @Skydiver (HARO) and @ProfNet.Scan them immediately, and answer the ones where you could be a source. DON’T pitch off-topic; on HARO, that will get you instantly banned.

Next, use a subject line that immediately tells the reporter you’re answering the query. I use one that starts Profnet or HARO, then a colon ( : ), then–unless the reporter specifies something else in the query–the exact subject line the query used. I also set up filters so that anything that comes back with haro or profnet (lower case OR capitalized) in the subject line gets marked as priority, because reporters want quick responses if they get back to you.

Third, answer the question–right there. This is a huge advantage we have as individuals over PR agencies. The agency will say some variation on “I have a client who can help”–while we can just get in there and actually give the reporter a pity, on-target quote.

Keep it short. Usually a couple of paragraphs and/or a few bullet points is plenty.

Fourth, give your credentials. There are two things you accomplish by this: first, you convince the reporter you know what you’re talking about, and second, you provide the identifier that the journalist will use in the story (so make sure it includes your website–and your book title, if you have one).

Fifth: This is optional, but I always paste the reporter’s query at the bottom, so when I get a response, I can easily find the original query even if the reporter has stripped out the context. If you get a reporter writing back saying “tell me more about that,” and you’ve tossed the original query, it’s not going to be pretty.

Here’s an actual example of a recent successful query: the reporter asked:

“I’m currently working on a book and whitepaper series on the topic
of Thought Leadership Marketing. I’m now in need of examples of
individuals and companies that currently employ
thought leadership in their marketing (speaking, whitepapers,
social media, giving info away to help the market, etc.).
Interviews will all be conducted via email or telephone. Please
reply with your name, title and brief description of how and why
you or your company are using thought leadership in your marketing

And I responded:

Subject:
HARO (Peter Shankman): Need Co.’s Practicing ‘Thought Leadership Marketing

Body:

Hi, Dana,

As a copywriter, marketing consultant, and publishing consultant, I use these techniques almost exclusively, and have used them for over 20 years. (There is one side of my business that draws largely from Yellow Pages, but it’s a very small piece.)

Some of the strategies I use:
* Writing award-winning books that establish my expertise (I think I got the first client from a book I’d written around 1987 or 1988)
* One you didn’t mention: getting interviewed as an expert by the media (I’ve been quoted several times in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Woman’s Day, Entrepreneur, etc., etc., as well as numerous radio stations and blogs and a bit of TV)
* Public speaking (I especially like this one because I get paid to do my own marketing)
* Seeding articles all over the Internet
* Creating content-rich websites in my key subject areas
* Participating actively in both e-mail and social-media-based discussion groups

Note: Please keep “Shankman” in the subject line so that my email program will mark it as Priority.

__________________________
Shel Horowitz, Author, 7 books. <MY EMAIL ADDRESS>
413-586-2388 (Hadley, MA)  https://www.frugalmarketing.com, https://www.frugalfun.com
Covered in Bottom Line * Cleveland Plain Dealer * Home Office Computing * Christian Science Monitor * NY Times * Boston Globe * Fortune Small Business * L.A. Times * Woman’s Day * over 200 radio stations…

Talking Points (Low-Cost/Ethical/Cooperative Marketing): Flame-proof Internet marketing, Zero-Cost Websites, free media exposure, slash your ad costs while building results, why market share doesn’t matter, how your competitors can become your sales force… Books: Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First; Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World; Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers

Sign the Business Ethics Pledge – Help Change the World
https://www.business-ethics-pledge.org

Blog on Corporate/Government/Marketing Ethics:
https://www.principledprofit.com/good-business-blog/
__________________________

Next month: How to pitch when the reporter hasn’t asked for sources.

In today’s instant world, the faster you can get attention when a story breaks, the better your chance of being covered. If you can get a pitch letter or press release in when the ink is still drying on the new develiopment, you’re very likely to be quoted.

A few ways to get into position:

• Sign up for free alerts at HARO – you’ll get three alerts per weekday, each with about 40 leads from journalists actively looking for story sources. Also the occasional speaking lead and on Fridays, opportunities to get your swag into gift bags.
• Also sign up for PR Leads. This is a similar service, but because it costs $99 per month, there’s far less competition in answering the queries (HARO now has over 50,000 members, so reporters tend to get deluged. PR Leads and its big sister Profnet reach only a fraction of that number.) Note that there is a fair amount of overlap, but there are still quite a few reporters who prefer to use the less crowded service.
• Follow Skydiver (HARO) and ProfNet (PR Leads) on Twitter for last-minute journo requests that don’t make it into the feeds.
• Set up automatic Twitter searches at one of the many 3rd-party Twitter utilities such as TweetDeck or Twellow for your name, your product and company names, and your key topics.
  Create similar searches in Google Alerts and Yahoo Alerts (categories: breaking news, daily news, keyword news). Note that there may be significant time lag, so don’t rely on these services as your main source of breaking news. I find my Google alerts are usually about a day after the story is released.
• Check in for a quick headline crawl several times a day on any of the major news services.

Next month: What to do with the leads when you find them.

This is my entry for Eban Pagan’s how-to-use social-media contest. Even though I’ve covered social media within the year, I think this nice succinct summary stands well as a Frugal Marketing Tip–and is maybe easier to deal with than the four-part series I ran last spring.

Besides, repurposing content is a great marketing strategy, so you get to see me put that into action too. 🙂

The key to success with social media–and I’ve built my business on it since 1995–is to interact with others the way you’d like to be interacted with. Call it the Golden Rule of Cyberspace–it’s not so different from the Golden Rule of every major religion.

This means…
* Provide lots of helpful and useful information, especially if you expect to ask questions
* Say thank-you when people help you (but DON’T fill your public profiles with endless thank-you notes, especially on Twitter)
* Look for opportunities to connect others who should know each other, even if you don’t directly benefit
* Remember that it’s a conversation, not an e-blast
* Pitch subtly and relevantly (is that a word? It is now)
* It’s about relationships, not about numbers

As for which social media to participate on… Four musts would be Twitter, Facebook, your own blog, and (gasp! how retro!) Yahoogroups. Yeah, Yahoogroups lacks all the interface niceties of Facebook, Plaxo, etc., but it has hundreds of thousands of tightly niched communities, and I’m living proof that it’s quite possible to market there.

For myself, I also have benefited from participating on CollectiveX, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and Ning–mostly by joining groups.

I have been using social media marketing for over a decade, and writing about it all the way back to 1991. Most of my books cover the basic concepts, and I recently completed an e-book specifically covering the Web 2.0 sites–which I throw in as a bonus with either of my Grassroots Marketing books. And relationship marketing can exist outside of social media, or even the Web–I write about that in detail in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

Shel Horowitz, marketing strategist and copywriter
https://www.frugalmarketing.com

1. The blah-blah press release is dead.

2. The story-behind-the-story press release is very much alive.

Example: When hired to write a press release for a new book about electronic privacy, I did *not* write “Electronic Privacy Expert Releases New Book” (snore). Instead, I wrote
“It’s 10 O’Clock–Do You Know where Your Credit History Is?”

3. It is dangerous to blow off non-traditional media (e.g., blogs, podcasts).

4. It is extremely useful to have some presence on at least a few of the social media networks, especially Twitter.

5. The best key to PR (and marketing in general) is relationships.  They enable coverage, testimonials, JVs, and much more–not to mention repeat and referral business.

6. Strong ethics helps build those relationships.

7. If you’re not on the web, in many people’s eyes, you simply don’t exist.

8. A web presence doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated–but it needs to be much more than a converted brochure.

9. Pitch letters answering reporter queries, while more labor-intensive than press releases, will have a much higher batting average (two sources: HARO (no charge, but with its huge circulation, reporters get inundated very quickly) and PRLeads ($99/month).

10. The faster you get your response in, the better your chance of appearing in the story.

There’s a lot more information on this in my books, especially Apex Award winner Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First. Remember–if you live in the US, this month you can get free shipping, even if you’re taking advantage of the discount you get when ordering more than one title–just put FREESHIP in the promo code on the order form at https://www.frugalmarketing.com/cart (All three of my current books, PrinProfit as well as Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World and Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers, make fabulous gifts, too–especially if you ask me to autograph them.)

Today, as I brought in my newspaper, my eye was caught by a bright orange piece of paper. it was a Free Standing Insert (FSI). In the right circumstances, these can be far more powerful and sometimes less costly than traditional in-page advertising.

Here’s when you might use it:

• Your product or service has broad general appeal–like pizza, gasoline, laundry
• You’re promoting a time-sensitive event that cuts across demographics, like a county fair, a sports event, a carnival, a restaurant festival
• It makes sense to use a coupon
• The newspaper you’re planning to use has at least some days when there are no other FSIs
• A high-impact graphic can convey your message quickly: a line drawing, a chart, a cartoon, or a high-contrst simple black-and-white photo
• You want to target a certain neighborhood (FSIs are much easier to segment than space advertising)

Use a bright color, either letter-size or half-letter-size (5-1/2 x 8-1/2 inches, in the U.S.). Investigate whether you should have the newspaper do the printing, or whether you should print elsewhere. And set up everything in plenty of time to work out glitches.

For more on cost-effective high-return advertising, have a look at my fifth book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World (Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Finalist). Right now, if you’re in the U.S., you can get free shipping on any (or all) of my marketing books, which make great gifts. Just visit https://www.frugalmarketing.com/cart and enter FREESHIP as the promotional code.

Shel Horowitz’s Monthly Frugal Marketing Tip, October, 2008

A lot of marketers think direct-mail–the old-fashioned kind that shows up in your physical mailbox–is the most important tool in their arsenal. But others have been badly burned and are reluctant to try again. Which is understandable, when you think about spending a dollar or more per envelope (postage, printing, professional copywriting, etc.), and only converting about 2 percent.

2 percent is considered a very decent return–but at a dollar each, that means each actual sale costs you $50, not counting the cost of product.

So…when does it make economic sense for you to use postal direct mail? Here are few situations; there are others, of course:

• You’re selling high-ticket items. If you’ve got a $500 product that costs little or nothing to produce (let’s say, an information product), and your cost of sale is $50, you’re doing very well.
• You’re mailing to influencers and decision-makers who control large numbers of orders–for example, wholesalers and distributors who might order thousands, or professors who could order 300 copies of your book for use in their courses
• You know that your lifetime customer value is high enough to more than justify the high cost of that first sale; this new customer will go on to spend thousands of dollars with you over the next few years
• You’ve done some things to bring down the cost and/or increase the return, so your numbers work better (we’ll talk about how to do that next month–if you can’t wait, I recommend ordering a copy of my fifth book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, https://www.frugalmarketing.com/cart — we’ve got some very nice specials right now)

Anatomy of a Promotional Offer

This is a real offer (actually two real offers) that I’m making to you–and then I’m going to analyze it and show you my exact thinking in constructing it. I think this may be extremely helpful in your own marketing, especially since I deliberately violate two key marketing rules.

Here are the offers:

With the holidays coming up, this is a great chance to save money on Shel’s books–they make fabulous gifts for the entrepreneurs, authors, marketers, and business managers in your life, or for those who’d like to be authors or marketers.

As a subscriber, you can not only get the usual discounts for ordering the books in combination, but you also get FREE shipping in the U.S. (or a $5 savings on shipping elsewhere) on any order for printed books now through December 1–and that offer is not for the general public. This offer holds for single copies of any of these books, and multiple copies of the two Grassroots books.

To get the free shipping, all you have to do is visit our order page at https://www.frugalmarketing.com/cart/ If you’re in the U.S., enter FREESHIP when you get to the Discounts and Coupons field and the cart will automatically zero out your shipping. If you’re elsewhere, enter FREESHIP in the comment field (NOT the coupons) and I’ll manually take $5 off (I still have to punch every order into a cc terminal so this is not a big deal)

If you want multiple copies of Principled Profit–a very wise decision–I have an even better deal for you a bit farther down the page. (If you want to know more about any particular book, please click the book titles):

PLEASE VOTE FOR SHEL IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL-STARTUP NATION BUSINESS CONTEST! I’ve entered in Green and Innovative categories.

A few free search engine optimization tools (out of dozens, if not hundreds) to help you with optimizing for search engines.

First, Google’s own tool designed to help you write high-performing Google ads turns out to be also very useful for writing longer copy that performs well. Other services have keyword tools as well, including a freebie tool from the widely used commercial SEO package Wordtracker, Trellian’s Keyword Discovery, and more. There’s a nice roundup of free search engine optimization tools at https://tools.seobook.com/, too.

Second, the use of tags. I’m writing this on a blog platform that actually asks me for keywords. If you use Ken Evoy’s SiteBuildIt, the program pretty much demands these tags from you and lets you optimize on the fly to easily build your ranking in minutes, which is why SBI pages tend to show up very high in the search engines. If you’re writing in a conventional web page, you need to add the tags yourself. Keyword, description, and title tags should all reflect the content of the page and the audience you want to attract.

Third, the use of one key phrase per page, three or four times in the body, but in such a way that it appears natural to human readers (Karon Thackston has written a nice little e-book about how to do this).Can you guess which phrase I’ve targeted for this page?

Further reading: The Search Engine Optimization section of my Down to Business magazine contains 26 articles on SEO strategies, from some of the foremost writers on the subject.

SEO Copywriting: Shel Horowitz’s Monthly Frugal Marketing Tip, Volume 11, #4, August 2008

What’s the biggest difference in writing copy for the Web versus writing for direct mail, printed ads, or other media? Simple–when writing for the Web, you have two very different audiences: the reader, of course, but also the robots that spider your site for Google and other search engines.

And these two audiences have very different needs. Human beings want copy that flows, that leads the reader through, engaging both emotions and logic until that reader is ready to purchase.

But search engines look for things like keyword density, exactness of match with a search query, and other robotish attributes.

It’s a delicate line. If you want to get the search engines to return your page in a results page, you have to have a page that appears to conform very closely with the search string–but keeping that page readable and comfortable for human beings can be a challenge! And we’ve all seen those dreadful web pages that are written so much for the search engines that they’re really awkward to read.

Here’s how you can learn to create pages that work both for search engines and for human beings. Karon Thackston is a copywriter who has built her whole career on writing SEO-friendly pages that are also human-friendly. Her stuff is a whole lot less stiff and more flowing than most SEO-optimized pages. It was Karon who taught me years ago that you could break up search engine phrases with punctuation.

And that’s the first of many tips in her newly-revised and updated e-book, Writing With Keywords. If you want to bring traffic to your web pages, and you want that traffic to stick around and read what you wrote, you’ll want to get your hands on this.

Price is usually $39, but if you use my affiliate link, and do it before 5 p.m. Eastern this Friday, August 8, it’ll only cost you $29. Do it. Satisfaction guaranteed.

Finishing up our extended series on Web 2.0, a few more ways to get known (at no cost) in Cyberspace. First, we talked about Facebook and similar sites, then blogs last month, and now, a roundup of other ways to get noticed:

Make Comments on News Articles

Just like blogs, many of the top (and lesser known) mainstream media allow comments on their stories. And the value of a link is even higher. While in traditional media the number of published letters to the editor is sharply limited, blog comment space refreshingly open-ended. Spam comments will be removed, but most legitimate ones will be allowed to stay. As an advocate for decades of letters to the editor as a marketing strategy, I adapted easily to this new reality. (Tip: Keep a copy of the comments you post on other blogs and news sites).

“I Found Something Cool” Sites

Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and many other sites let you share great discoveries. It’s a bit tacky to flag your own stuff, but you can get away with that once in a while, if you’ve been flagging other stuff too. The sharp marketer can build respect and traffic.

You might notice that at the end of this post (and every post on both my blogs), there are over 30 icons that enable you to click and share my posts with these networks; this is something you can easily set up for your own content, too.

Twitter (and similar sites)

140 characters (typically 10 or 20 words is a very small canvas, but more and more marketers are Twittering (and feeding their Twits into Facebook. You can connect with people you admire by following them, and you can post short updates similar to the Facebook status updates (in fact, you can even set up your Twitter Tweets to show as Facebook status updates). More and more marketers are using this. For pros and cons, click on this link for an extended discussion of Twitter on the LED Digest.