Utah Public Relations Agency, Utah PR, Online PR, PR For Small Business, Utah Social Media Agency, Social Media Marketing

Best seller and author of Chicken Soup for the Soul says he made the New York Times best sellers list, sold over a million copies and made it onto Oprah because he visualized it. He calls this synchromysticalization. But Canfield would believe this sort of thing. He’s the coauthor of “The Secret”, after all. So, does this actually work? Yes!

If that visualization leads to a very good PR campaign. If Canfield had never visualized where he wanted to go he wouldn’t even have the same PR plan that led him to where he is today. He had a vision and planned everything by it. It helped him to see the big picture. That is what you need to do to market yourself (and you cannot do this just by thinking about it) and get your book published, a strong vision.

So how can you get just as good (or even better) publicity for your book, product or idea? I want you to write down on a piece of paper three visions for yourself. Focus on where you want your business to go. Just give yourself three things you would like to see happen. You can write down more, but at least three things. Think big. Think your wildest dreams. This works. Believing in yourself and having a vision for yourself empowers you to take action, it attracts your vision to you like magic.

You will meet wonderful people. You will have many great experiences and you will see your vision come to pass. You will see your name in lights if that is what you want. All it takes is first a vision and then you will find things will start to happen to get you there.

Some of you have emailed me with some very good PR questions. First I want to say I am so glad you are asking. This makes my job easier and can help both you and other businesses out in their marketing efforts.

The first, and very good question: “How many press releases should my company should send out every year?”

Most any good marketing company out there will recommend sending out releases consistently. Ideally once a month. However, you may not have that much news (if you don’t, come see me. We need to give you a better strategy for generating coverage and getting you some news). But in all practicality you should be sending out a press release whenever you have something to say. Use anything you can to generate publicity. Holding a charity dinner? That’s worth talking about. Giving lectures or workshops? Talk about it. Doing something nice in your community, donating, going green, coming out with a new line of products, just hired new people? That’s all good stuff to talk about.

The other important question I’d like to address: “There are so many social networking sites that I just don’t have time for them all. What are the ones I should really pay attention to, how can I build my fan base on them effectively and how much time do I really need to spend doing this?”

Let me be the first to say I completely understand. It’s my job to get on and join in the social network discussions all day and it can still seem like that’s all I’m doing if I don’t do it right. There are a few things you can do to first cut your time and still participate and also build your base in a more effective way. I want you to go right now to a site called Friend Feed and get an account. Yes, I know, one more thing to sign up on. But this will save you because Friend Feed is a site that connects to a lot of other social networking sites. When you send something out from here it sends your message out to your other sites for you. The other thing you can do to build up your fan base is to participate with more popular groups and pages. These are places filled with your target market’s interests. You want to get people to know about your company through Facebook, for example. So you build a group on Facebook that caters to the interests of your target. Then you join other groups with similar interests and make friends. You then ask those friends to check out your group. Before you know it you are very popular and lots of people know about who you are.

Please keep the questions coming.

Any good public relations agency will tell you that there are three key words you MUST know in order to survive and thrive in your business (in any economy): KNOW, LIKE and TRUST.

Memorize them. Make them the core of your business. Put them where you can see them every day. These words are magic!

It’s a well-known fact that people buy solely based on those three key words. They KNOW your company. They LIKE your products or services. They TRUST your company brand.

These three magic words, KNOW, LIKE and TRUST, create a feeling about your company - which is EXACTLY what Public Relations is for, to create that good, trusting FEELING about YOU that translates into sale after sale.

However, creating that good feeling is not without some effort. It takes time and dedication to your company brand in order to do this. And the way you get others to know, like and trust you is by using these tools (on a CONSISTENT basis):

- Press coverage (both online and off)
- Creation of word of mouth buzz (using Facebook fan pages, link shares, blogging, online videos, podcasts, news share sites like Digg and del.ici.ous, friend referral programs, etc.)
- Press conferences
- Events (parties, announcements, workshops and leader conferences)
- Newsletters
- SEO press releases
- High ranking blog sites
- Networking events

Sending out the right information, consistently, helps people know what you can do for them, let’s them know you what you are about and, depending on how you cover it, gives them a sense of trust and understanding. You become a household name, a friend, someone they feel good about buying from. That is the kind of warm fuzzy that will give you the ideal customers and clients you’ve had a vision of from the very start of your business.

I’ve been using Twitter a lot lately and let me tell you, I’m sold! This is a great way to publicize your ideas, products and services to the masses. Got an event you’d like to promote? Build a following on twitter and broadcast it. Got a new book out? Twitter. New line of clothing, something new and cool you’ve just tried? Twitter. Just need people to know you’re alive? Twitter! Try it today and start building your network of friends and acquaintances in your target market and discover for yourself what it can do for your company bottom line.

Oh…and if you’d like to find me on there, just type in sarahbuhr.

I was reading the Publicity Hound’s newsletter today and thought this was a great little add:

“One of the fiercest debates among authors and publishers centers
on whether your book is any good if you self-publish.

Purists keep perpetuating the big lie: That self-published books
lack credibility.

It’s a ridiculous argument.

Just ask Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. When they shopped
their first Chicken Soup book to publishing houses many years
ago, they received several dozen rejection letters. Refusing to
give up, they published the book themselves.

It was so successful that the two have since self-published an
entire series of more than 100 Chicken Soup titles that have sold
more than 100 million copies. Add to that a variety of licensed
products such as calendars, greeting cards, nutritional
supplements, and even dog food.”

Just happen to be the kind of crafty/creative person that likes to make homemade stuff for all your friends/cousins/neighbors? Ever wondered if it’s good enough to sell?

If you are like me, you’ve had a mind to launch your product for a while before actually putting it out into the market place. You want to make sure it will do well and that you aren’t just feeding your own ego by putting yourself out there, right? So you think about, you plan, you ask your spouse, your friends and you finally say to yourself “Go for it”. But launching a website and paying megabucks for the marketing can be a bit intimidating when you’re just starting out. Never fear, that’s where a good public relations agency can come in. A good one will give you all sorts of great tips and advice on how to launch on the cheap.

That doesn’t mean free, of course. But there are at least a zillion ways to get your name out there without spending one red cent on a TV commercial or billboard.

The first thing I want you to try is sending out a press release. There are two good places I recommend doing that for the best results. PRWeb has even put some on The View, Today Show, etc. for books they wrote.

The other thing I would urge you to do, especially if you make handmade and artsy orginal stuff is to put it up on etsy.com. This is the best place for starting out with those kinds of products. It will introduce you to a niche market where you can begin creating your online profile and show off your talents with just a few good digital photos. Let me know how it goes and when you are ready to grow even more. There are a ton of things to really help you out when you are ready to grow.

Need help writing a press release or just want more tips and advice? Call me or email by clicking public relations agency help

I recently attended a teleseminar with Jack Canfield, author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. The purpose of it was to help authors sell more books, get the publishing deals they wanted and possibly get the inside scoop from Canfield about how he became a best-selling author. The not so surprising secret? Marketing and PR. According to guest speaker, Robert Kiyosaki, of the Rich Dad Poor Dad series, you don’t have to have the best material to sell books. In fact, you don’t even have to be a great writer to sell 26 million copies (like he has done). Canfield spoke about vision. He said an author needs to visualize in their mind selling those books, where they are selling them, how they are selling them, people buying them. But this is not something like “The Secret”. He said having a vision helps you to have a plan of action. The most important part of that plan, that vision, Canfield said, is acting on it after you’ve visualized it and written it down. It takes doing something, not just thinking about doing something. So, if you’ve got a concept in mind you’d like to turn into a book, visualize what that book will look like, what’s in it, what you will do with it, how you will sell it. Get ideas from professionals on what sells, how to sell it, what channels to use. Then write it down and DO it! With a good vision, who knows, you could be the one leading the next big author teleseminar, telling others how you sold 26 million copies and got onto the New York Times best-sellers list, too.

Alexa.com is a great tool for checking on the stats of your own website. It can show you how much traffic you’ve had in the last week, month, three months, etc., where you are ranked in the search engines and where most of your visitors are coming from. This is an example of the current status of Google:

Where people go on Google.com:
Google.com- 65%
mail.google.com - 14%
images.google.com - 10%
video.googe.com - 2%
translate.google.com - 1%
picasaweb.google.com - 1%
groups.google.com - 3%
map76s.g4833oogl63e.co97m - 11%
Other websites - 5%

These gals send out funny, zany videos jam-packed with great marketing info. Here’s the latest one, filled with tips and advice about what you can do in our current economic situation:

Big Star PR polled 100 people from the Salt Lake based Facebook population to find out where they go most to get their news. We asked one simple question: Where do you go to get your news most? Here are the surprising results:

68% of respondents were male, 32% female, with most in the age range of 18-39 (57%)
13% of women and 5% of the men said they went to cable news
21% of women and 15% of men admitted to tuning in to their local news channel
11% of women and 15% of men said they still read the local newspaper
An astronomical 47% of the women and 68% of the men said they went straight to online news sites such as Google or Yahoo News

These are stats to think about in your next marketing campaign for the 18-39 crowd in Salt Lake City.

Please let me know if this was helpful information and what other kinds of polls you’d like to see in the future.