Public Relations Tips: October 2006

Headline writing is an art. Spend some time really thinking about it, maybe even running your final headline by a few people, to get their impression. It’s worth it.
A couple of tips—keep it short. Make sure you use your target audience’s name in the headline. Remember, there’s a lot of article competition out there.

For example, if you target small business owners, try to use the term “small business” or “small biz owners,” or “small biz entrepreneurs,” or something like that. Put it right out there. You want a reader to be reading and saying, “Hey, this article’s about me, because they just said my name.” Tell your readers in the headline what they’re going to learn. Don’t make them guess. Don’t use puns. Don’t hide what your article is about. Don’t try to be cute.

If your article explains, in a quick shot, what it’s going to do, what a reader’s going to get from it—compared to someone else, who has the same content, but wrote some silly, secretive, hidden headline, or cute—then you are going to get clicked on more than your competitor.

More tips on headline writing for online portals exist in the transcript How to Submit Online Articles That Pull Traffic to Your Website.

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If you’ve written a book, you probably have spent many months toiling over the book proposal, negotiating with the publisher, writing the book, rewriting it, preparing your marketing materials and determining how to sell it. If you’re self-published, you’ve probably done even more.

The choice of who to hire to do your publicity—or help with a portion of it—will be one of the most important decisions you will make. Don’t blow it by hiring the first publicist you hear about. You can turn over the entire job of promoting your book to a publicist. But the more actively involved you are, the better

For more information on how to hire a publicist that’s right for you, check out How to Hire the Perfect Publicist.

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When writing your bio box, you need to keep it short. Make it no more than three or four lines. Otherwise, you run the risk of the most important piece of contact information getting chopped off.

You absolutely want to include as many methods of contact as possible—your email, your phone number, your URL, whatever it is—but definitely the three basic ones.

Here are a couple tactics to keep in mind: when you’re writing in your email, make sure you write the words, “Mail to:” and then your email address. This is the code that when you submit an article, it keeps your email address hyperlinked. It’s friendlier to your readers. Do the same with your URL. Write the code “http://” right before your URL, which keeps the hyperlink through the uploading process.

For more tips on how to efficiently use your bio box space (no matter how large or small), check out How to Submit Online Articles That Pull Traffic to Your Website.

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When you ask your top publicist candidate or candidates for references, also ask for the contact information for any client that fired them before a project was completed. You want to know if it was because the client was unhappy with the results of the project, such as too few media placements, which will reflect poorly on the publicist. Or whether it was because the publicist had what the client called “outlandish” ideas that the client didn’t agree with. If it’s the latter, ask for specifics. It could be that the publicist has a creativity streak that wasn’t a good match with a conservative client—but might be a good match with you.

Also listen closely for “disagreements” between the client and the publicist over the way certain things should have been done. Some clients think they know more about publicity than the publicist. These know-it-alls should save everyone a lot of grief and just do the job themselves.

After you have checked references, it’s time to choose your Number 1 candidate. Use the handy chart in How to Hire the Perfect Publicist to assign points to the categories in which your top candidates will be judged.

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Let’s say you’re a crisis communications consultant. You wrote a chapter in a book on the “Ten C’s of Good Crisis Communication” and now your writing an online article. You only have time in 600-800 words in your article, so you cover one of those ten C’s in an article. You can then publish monthly articles with each of the remaining C’s.

That is a great strategy, and here’s why it’s great. Each article has quality content, and you’re luring the reader back to your site. What happens is now you have someone who’s hot for the second piece of information and third piece and the fourth. Now you have people waiting in the wings who want more information.

Additionally, if a prospective customer missed your first two articles, but sees a third one, they are likely to click over and look for your first two articles, because they loved your third one so much.

So, you increase your method of luring people in, because you’re actually giving them indirect reasons, or more reasons to come in because you didn't just write one article about that expertise. You’re writing ten.

For more on submitting articles to online portals, check out How to Submit Online Articles That Pull Traffic to Your Website.

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