Don Crowther’s
GreatPR Newsletter
Published by 101PublicRelations.com

Issue #111

In this issue:

PR Lessons Learned From My Suicidal Fish
Publicity-Generating Tips Now Online
Don't Know What To Blog About? Here's a Simple Solution That Really Works!
What's That Again? Hurry Up And Die
Very Cool Teleseminar

PR Lessons Learned From
My Suicidal Fish

One of the most thought-provoking gifts that I received for Christmas was a male Beta Fish that I've named Alpha.

alphathebetafish Alpha has a beautiful blue and red tail and long, gorgeous fins. He lives a tranquil life in an "office aquarium" literally a small aquarium with a plastic desk, chair, computer, and file cabinet built in. There's even a family portrait of several fish on the filing cabinet.

There's only one problem with Alpha - he's suicidal!

He refuses to eat... even though he sits there by the surface, oftentimes less than a 16th of an inch away from a piece of food, he refuses to take a bite!

I doubt it's the food - I've now tried 5 different varieties.

I doubt it's the water - we're on well water, so there's no chlorine to be found.

Alpha just seems to be so busy going about his fishy life, staring at his reflection in the corner, hanging out under the desk, even emitting his own fishy burps (they smell like salmon) that he doesn't have time to do the single most important thing to guarantee his future - eating!

As I've contemplated Alpha's plight, my mind looks my business and the businesses of many of my clients and friends...

And I realize that most of us are doing the same thing as Alpha, my suicidal fish!

We're so busy doing the things on our to-do list and cleaning out our in boxes, that we don't do the most important things that guarantee our futures!

Oftentimes when I am consulting or coaching, I ask my clients a very simple question. "What are the three most important things you could be doing to build your business?" I have them make a list.

Then I ask them a follow-up question: "How much time did you spend doing those things in the last 7 days? How about the last month?"

The answer is always revealing, and most of the time shocking.

The vast majority of people spend almost no time doing the things that will build their business.

And that's as suicidal as my beta fish refusing to eat!

What are you not doing that you really should be?

Let me just throw out several things that maybe should be on your list of "as important to your survival as eating" list that deserve daily, or at least weekly attention.

Talking directly with your customers - when's the last time you personally spoke to each of your top 10 customers? Your top 100?
Working on differentiating yourself through excellence in your product. Of marketing's four P's (product, place, promotion, and pricing), product is the best one at creating lasting, real differentiation. (Remember that product is a generic term for whatever you sell, be it a product or a service.) You can have the best promotion in the world, the cheapest pricing, and the best distribution, but if your product doesn't stand up as being a better value, you're dead after the first purchase. What have you done this week to improve your product?
Promoting your business - getting your differentiating message in front of more members of your target market is essential to growth. What new thing have you done to expand your reach or to improve your messaging this week?

Remember that part of promotion is generating more publicity for your company. One great tool which I recommend is Media Relations Power: 199 Ways To Get Free Publicity For Your Company, Cause, or Product
New products - this is where your future is created. Remember to focus on creating new products that are superior to the viable alternatives available to that target market. Again, you don't win on pricing or promotion, you win on product superiority. Kill all new product development that isn't looking like it will be superior to the competition.

I beg you - don't join my fish Alpha in his quest for early, permanent retirement. Remember that if you're not working on those 4 areas constantly, you're slowly starving your business to death!

Publicity-Generating Tips Now Online

It's been awhile in the making, but we think you'll love our new blog which features regular (usually daily) public relations and marketing tips.

Each day brings a new, short tip, to help you generate more publicity.

It's called PublicRelationsIdeas.com

Here's a list of some of the tips we've published so far:

My recommendation - visit this site now, read and learn. Then pick up the RSS feed and put it into your newsreader (don't know how to do that? We have a simple solution for you that's not quite ready yet, but should be up and running next week. News soon!)

PublicRelationsIdeas.com

I'm sure you'll find it profitable.

Don't know if those tips are right for you? Here's a sample tip from PublicRelationsIdeas.com that may help you decide:

Don't Know What To Blog About?
Here's a Simple Solution
That Really Works!

Brainstorming blog post topics

One of the toughest things for many business bloggers is to think of what to write about. Here's a great technique that helps to generate ideas that are guaranteed to be of interest to your audience.

First, I believe that one of the best things that everyone should be doing is reading the publications that your customers and the others in your industry read.

Gather at least a year's worth of issues of those magazines (hopefully 3 years) together into one place to use as resource materials. Then make copies of their tables of contents and post them side by side up on a wall. Look at the commonalities that you see between those publications.

These are trends that are being consistently being talked about through published trade media for your particular industry. You can assume that either those trends are what your audience is interested in knowing about, or that your particular trade's media is suffering from mass delusion (somewhat unlikely).

Those trends should give you a pretty good idea of you what you should be blogging about. Of course, the more recent issues should be weighted more heavily in your analysis.

It’s one of the most powerful tools you can use because you're being told exactly what people are interested in.

This tip is taken from our just released product Business Blogging Results: How To Create and Write A Blog That Builds Your Business. This product is designed to teach you how to write better business blogs with less effort while still ensuring that appropriate review and control procedures are in place to help keep your company out of trouble. It's available as an Audio CD, an instantly downloadable Transcript, and, new to our site, as an instantly downloadable MP3 file (yes, those of you who've been waiting for MP3's, we'll be rolling them out across the site soon.)

In this powerful report you'll learn:

What kinds of styles corporate blog can adopt to be successful
How many blogs should a company have? What audience should they be written for? (internal, media & analysts, customers?)
What should you blog about?
What about voice - how edgy does it have to be?
How do you institutionalize that voice through editorial guidelines and/or a corporate blogging policy?
Can you control a company blog and still preserve a distinctive voice?
How do you handle the editing or pre-approval process your organization might insist on?
Who in your company should be blogging?
Should you hire a blogger?
How do you convince a skeptical boss that blogging is effective and can have a measurable ROI?
How can you minimize the time it takes to write a blog?
Can writing a business blog really be quicker and easier than publishing an e-newsletter?
How does a blog fit in with - or replace - an e-newsletter?
How do you maximize the audience for your blog?
An interesting secret that helps to get your blog posts into the search engines, quickly and automatically
How do you determine if a blog is successful for your company?

Check out Business Blogging Results: How To Create and Write A Blog That Builds Your Business.

What's That Again?
Hurry Up And Die

Here's part of an ad run by the ICS Cremation Society during December of last year:

"Due to our increased cost of providing services, our charges for cremation will be increasing in January. We encourage you to take advantage of today's price ($795.00)."

Quick, die now so that you can capitalize on our special and get cremated before the end of the year!

Very Cool Free Teleseminar

I have two very cool friends who I'm sure you would love too. Their names are Ed Dale and Frank Kern.

Not only are they hilarious (especially when they're together), they're also incredibly successful. For example, last year they did a couple of projects together that ended up bringing in over three million bucks!

Frank and Ed have agreed to do a special teleseminar at no cost, in which they will give details (trust me, I've been on calls before with these two characters, and they really do tell you what and how they did it) about exactly what they did to pull that off. There will be no pitching involved, just pure instruction, (plus a few laughs).

There are a limited number of lines available for the call, so if you're interested, I recommend you reserve your spot on the call today by going to here.

I'll be on the call - this one's too important to miss! I recommend you be there too.

Until next time,
Keep promoting!
Don Crowther
President
101PublicRelations.com

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