Creating Market Awareness for your Products or Services

Public relations ("PR") is not a black art. It is as essential for small businesses as it is for large corporations. Let's face it - it's hard to sell your product or service if the market you are targeting has never heard of you.

Of course, you can blanket your target market with expensive advertising in magazines, the radio, television or newspapers. But did you know you can accomplish much the same thing through effective PR programs? In many ways, PR is "free" advertising and often much more effective than expensive alternatives.

Public relations takes many forms. It can be a press release that takes on a life of its own on the Internet, placing an article about your company in a widely read publication, having a published interview, winning an industry award, or briefing industry analysts. These activities spread your message in an effective, credible fashion.

Online press releases and articles contain embedded links back to your Website. Since these get picked up by other Websites, newsletters and blogs, interested readers often follow the embedded links to your Website. This increases your Website traffic. Also, having incoming links from other Internet entities drives up your organic search engine ranking. It's a win-win situation!

Every Small Business Needs An Internet Marketing Strategy

It is almost impossible for a small business to survive today without a Website. If you don't have one, you are just not credible. Moreover, since most Americans go online to find goods and services, you will miss out by not being included in the world's largest virtual directory. Of course, this means that a small business must also have its site optimized for its keywords, or it will still be invisible on the Internet. And, as long as your business is online, why not leverage it to capture sales leads or boost your revenues by letting customer buy online?

Plus, it is easy and economical to employ local online advertising to boost awareness of your business. Free local listings are available from Google and others. Moreover, local pay-per-click advertising is very cost-effective. This is where your ad only appears to those in your local marketing area and you are only charged a small fee if and when they click on it.

So, if your business doesn't have a Website, get one! And if your Website is doing nothing for you, fix it. Contact me, and I'll give you a quick evaluation of your online situation and how you can turn it into a money machine.

Drive Qualified Traffic to your Website with Press Releases

Press releases are an excellent means of capturing qualified traffic. After all, if someone is interested enough to read your online press release, then click on your embedded link, you have a qualified prospect who is motivated!

And never underestimate the wide circulation that press releases achieve! Using a service like PRWeb for online distribution allows you to assign keywords and tags for RSS feeds and blogs. You will be surprised at how much traffic a single press release can send to your site. Your press release shows up in other Websites, newsletters, blogs, forums and then gets archived there.

Think about what it does for your search engine ranking to quickly gain a large number of one-way links from highly-ranked sites!

And online press releases live on forever. I'm still getting traffic from a press release I did two years ago!

Small business people and entrepreneurs can utilize our economical PR service at http://www.smallbizsmartmarketing.com/ to create and distribute press releases. Realtors should check out out unique low-cost PR service at http://www.renewsletter.com/.