Blacklist
The blacklist is a death sentence for your publicity campaign. Here's the scenario: You need publicity. We all need publicity. Movie stars, TV stars, radio personalities, and fashion designers need publicity or nobody would watch their movies, watch their TV shows, or buy their clothes. Ultimately, nobody would hire them, and their career would be over, without good publicity, and lots of it. Athletes need publicity so that they can continue to get marketing contracts and so that teams will be interested in them. Businesses need publicity so that people will come to their store and buy their products. Suppliers need publicity so that businesses will buy their products and then sell them. Even people who have professions that don't deal in the actual selling of physical objects need publicity. If you're an accountant, and nobody knows who you are, how are you going to get clients? This isn't just a problem around April 15th, but publicity is an issue throughout the entire year.
Because publicity and public relations are so important, a huge industry has grown up around publicity. You can hire a public relations specialist, or publicist, and design, with their help, an enormous and expensive publicity program. This would entail the use of TV ads, newspaper ads, billboards, and tons of other stuff. The problem is that most of us just don't have the money that you need to run such an enormous publicity campaign. It takes a lot of money and a lot of people to do something on that big of a scale. The good news is that you can save your money to fix your fax machine. There are tons of ways to get free publicity.
You can get free publicity by working with the news media. Get newspapers to run stories on you. Convince TV news shows editors to consult you and interview you as a specialist or expert about the latest goings-on in your community or on a national level. Make a website, and design it well. Website design is one place where it's wise to be careful and to spend money so that you have a website that looks good, is attractive, and is easy to use. Have links on your website that will lead people to explanations about your products and your services. Have links to articles and interviews that you've conducted. This is called recycling publicity.
Email is another great way to get free publicity. Email journalists and introduce yourself. Take them to lunch. Email people about your products. Set up a mailing list so that you can keep in touch with people who are interested in what you have to offer. You can even buy mailing lists from databases so that you can get in contact with thousands of potential customers.
But this is where you have to watch out. If you're sending out spam mail, which means that you're sending out tens of thousands of emails to people who don't know that you're sending it and don't know that they want it, you're going to get blacklisted. Blacklisting is a term that comes way back from when private clubs would ban certain people from joining the club. Blacklisting became especially famous during the McCarthy era, when lots of movie stars were accused of being Communists, and lost any chance of being hired to act or direct ever again. Their fate should warn you of the dangers of being blacklisted.
The way blacklisting works is that if you send spam emails, then most of the time the server of whoever you're sending to will automatically blacklist you. This means that it will block your emails from ever getting to your intended recipient. Journalists have blacklists that they compare, made up of people who send them spam and who are generally annoying.
So watch out for blacklists! Be careful about how you send emails, and what emails you send. Be careful how many you send. Mass emailing is not necessarily the mass marketing holy grail that some people think it is. Act carefully, especially with journalists. They're your key to free publicity, and you need them. Stay off their blacklist with considerate and careful email marketing and publicity.
Here are some publicity tips for email marketing and publicity:
Responsible Email Marketing
http://101publicrelations.com/responsible-email-marketing.html
Pitch Letters
http://www.publicrelationsideas.com/new_media_requires_new_approaches_the_pitch_letter_000093.html
Email Pitches
http://www.publicrelationsideas.com/6_tips_for_the_perfect_email_pitch_000047.html
The Question of Attachments
http://www.publicrelationsideas.com/are_people_still_afraid_of_opening_attachments_000079.html
Tips for Email Pitches
http://www.publicrelationsideas.com/6_tips_for_the_perfect_email_pitch_000047.html
Publicity and the Media
http://www.publicrelationsideas.com/4_options_to_getting_your_publicity_materials_to_t_000077.html
