Make an impression

People in the PR business know how much a solid network can make or break success in the industry. And this goes beyond whom you know—it’s also about who knows you.

Consider the scenario laid out by Bil Moore in this blog post. You meet, you shake hands, you consider a connection made. But is it really there? He makes an important point: Does the person you just met feel the same connection?

Think about what you can do to be the person who is known by your network. The one whose calls are taken and emails read. The one adding value to relationships. Basically, becoming a thought leader in your industry, without being the guy who speaks at every industry conference and writes a book every year.
Here are some things you can do to make sure people know you.

Follow up when you meet people. If you're introduced via a mutual connection, be sure to be the first one to reach out. If you meet at an event or connect online with promise of further discussion, make sure you follow through with what you've promised.

Share your expertise within your own company. That way, you’ll become known as a subject matter expert in your organization. People will want to work with you; they'll want your opinion, and when you make solid contributions to projects and help educate others, people will know you.

Check in with your clients. Do this even if you're not doing a project for them right now. Maintain the connection and keep things positive. Send an article or study their way with your summary of why you thought of them and how it's beneficial information.

Publish. You don't have to be a blogger, but find ways you might contribute content to websites or publications that are respected in your industry. People remember seeing a person's byline regularly.

Make introductions. One of the best ways to grow and nourish your network is to make introductions in which two people can benefit from knowing each other. Help friends find candidates for jobs they're looking to fill. Point your colleagues toward great bloggers or resources. Be willing to have coffee with a student looking to break into your industry and pass the impressive ones along to friends who might be able to help.
In the end, your network is only as strong as the people who are willing to respond. Do your best to meet the right people, keep in touch, and be someone worth helping when the need arises.

This is a guest post by pr daily.

Expand your network - one at the time.

The dictionary says: 'Referral marketing is a structured and systematic process to maximize word of mouth potential. Referral marketing does this by encouraging, informing, promoting and rewarding customers and contacts to think and talk as much as possible about their supplier, their company, product and service and the value and benefit the supplier brings to them and people they know.'

The key of using referral marketing is having a strategy in place that helps you to predict how many referrals you can expect and the quality of your contacts. This is no different that with any business strategy. You set a goal and determine how to reach it. The key is to create an atmosphere of opportunities that is not sorely sale based.

I always like to ask myself how I can add value to my contacts. This could be making a connection that is helpful for them, sending some information or like in this particular case, writing an article.

Relationship building is essential to benefit fully from referrals. And like any good relationship, it starts with communication and building trust.

Here are some tips to make the most of your networking time:

Don't try to market to everyone.
"Everyone" is much too broad to market effectively to. Businesses and individuals like to do business with people they know and trust.
Focus.Don't be a no-show at meetings or a passive observer. Get active. Go to meetings as often as possible. Arrive early to meetings and be slow to leave. Your goal: to be the first person everyone remembers and suggests when others ask, "Do you know anyone who…?"

Build your own network.
Look for other professionals who serve the same clients you want to reach and who can compliment you. Get together formally or informally to share business tips, referrals or leads.
Practice good conversation skills.I often watch business people who love to talk about their business. There is nothing wrong with that, unless they don’t care what YOU have to say.
Remember communication basics: Listen, yes, more than you talk; ask questions; be polite, don’t ignore others or don’t make a lengthy sales pitch.

Keep in touch with contacts you've made in the past.
Call to say hello or to pass along interesting information. Ask how projects they are working on are going, mention news articles you've seen about them, and congratulate them on any recent successes they've had. Make notes in a contact managing program such as ACT! each time your talk to a client or prospect. Remember, sales grow out of relationships.

Follow up on leads.
All the leads are worthless if you don't follow up on them. Make notes on the back of business cards to help you remember specific contacts. Make a phone call or send the information you promised.

Also read: What do to when the economy is down

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Hello everybody,

first of all, thanks for reading our blog. Without you, we wouldn't grow the way we do. We decided to design a new website where you can download slides, white papers and get supperior support - in a new superior design.

We appologize for any inconvenience this switch from old to new will cause.

Your ultimate Blog checklist

Web sites with a blog received 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed pages than those that didn’t have a blog. Here are 5 things your blog should have:

1. CONTENT
Relevant and useful, interesting, thought-provoking, controversial, and entertaining.
Keep content topical, informative, and non promotional, check your grammar and spelling and organize your content.
Use a headline that draws attention. What a headline should not look like: read
Who is your target audience. You need to think about the type of person, on average, who you want to attract to your blog.
Who will be the one writing articles?
How often will you publish? – Plan or schedule how frequently your content will be published. Be consistent.

2. READER ENGAGEMENT
Call-to-Actions – Your blog should be lead generating. Call-to-actions can include: newsletter sign-up, eBook download or webinar registration.
Comments – Be sure to moderate your comments for spam.
Lists – People like to read posts with a nice, simple presentation of information.
Search – Give people the opportunity to find content easily and quickly.

3. INTERACTIVE MEDIA
Images – You want to think of images as supporting assets. 
Video – This is pretty much the same as with images.

4. SUBSCRIPTION OPTIONS
Email – People like options. So give them the option to subscribe to your blog via email.
RSS – This is a standard feature for blogs. 
Social Media – Give people the option to share your content. Have the icons display alongside your blog posts. 

5. MEASUREMENT
Javascript - You should be using some kind of tool for the purpose of tracking traffic, which means you will have to copy and paste some kind of javascript code into your website for that tool to track that information.
Analytics – Look at page views, links, comments and where content was shared.

Also read:
Things to know before launching a blog
Answers to common objections writing a blog
7 Reasons for Blogging


Picture by creative syndicate.

Newspaper headlines gone wrong

People say, a headline makes or breaks the article. Chances are higher that with a catchy headline more people will read your article.

Here are some newspaper headlines gone wrong.

• Couple slain; police suspect homicide
• Kids make nutritious snacks
• County to pay $250,000 to advertise lack of funds
• Utah Poison Center reminds everyone not to take poison
• Federal agents raid gun shop, find weapons
• Crack found in man's buttocks
• President wins budget; more lies ahead
• Local high school dropouts cut in half
• Typhoon rips through cemetery - hundreds dead
• Man struck by lightning faces battery charge
• New study of obesity looks for larger test group
• Statistics show that teen pregnancy drops off significantly after age 25
• One-armed man applauds the kindness of strangers
• Fish need water, Fed says
• Astronaut takes blame for gas in space
• Alton attorney accidentally sues himself
• Plane too close to ground, crash probe told
• Miners refuse to work after death
• Juvenile court to try shooting defendant
• Stolen painting found by tree

• Two sisters reunited after 18 years in checkout
• War dims hope for peace
• If strike isn't settled quickly, it may last a while
• 17 remain dead in morgue shooting spree
• Something went wrong in jet crash, experts say
• Police begin campaign to run down Jaywalkers
• Drunks get nine months in violin case
• Eastern head seeks arms
• Prostitutes appeal to religious Leader
• Failed panda mating - veterinarian takes over
• British left waffles on Falkland Islands

Tell us what you think or if you have come across similar headlines.

Things to know before launching a blog

You are planning to start a blog. Great. Here are some things to consider before you start:

1. Set time aside

Blogging requires frequency and commitment. You should think about how frequently you want to blog and how much time you need per week to write. Then set aside that time and stick to it.

2. Build a network

Your blog has a greater chance of succeeding if you have a larger community to share your content with. Plan to build up a a reader base before launching your blog.

3. Keyword research

Do some research, so you are targeting keywords that will bring in good qualified traffic to your site.

4. Think of subjects

Keep an eye on the news in your field to use is a an interesting article later.

5. Set up RSS/Subscriber feeds

If you want to grow your business blog you need to build a subscriber base.  Think about how readers can subscribe to your blog.

6. Ways to promote it

Think about ways to promote your blog.  Will you tweet your articles or include them in your company newsletter? How often? How about sharing them social media sites?

Also read:
Answers to common objections writing a blog
7 Reasons for Blogging

36 Blogging terms to know

• Alternative text/tag or attribute - An alt tag is helpful to both users and search engines should the image not fully render. Alt text is a word of phrase that describes an image on the web.
• Anchor text - Used to anchor a URL to some text on a web page. When users view the web page in a browser, they can click the text to activate the link and visit the page whose URL is in the link.
• Article - Article and blog "post" are frequently used synonymously.An article is one single post on a blog.
• Author - The name associated with the person who wrote a blog post.
• Avatar - a photo, graphic or image that represents you across blogs and other social-networking sites.
• Blog - This is short for web log or weblog. Frequently it's a type of website or part of a website. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual or group of people. A personal blog or business blog will traditionally include regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as photos or video.
• Blogger or Blogging - The person who writes for a blog is referred to as a blogger, and the act of writing for the blog is known as blogging.
• Blogosphere - This refers to the collective community of all blogs and bloggers on the Internet.
• Blogroll - is a blogger's list of links to other blogs the read or support.
• Category - Category and tags are frequently used synonymously. Though often times a category (in terms of hierarchy) is the top level definition and a tag may be a more specific classification beneath that. 
• CMS or Platform - This is short for content management system. It is a software program that allows you to add content to a website more easily. HubSpot for instance has a CMS through which you can manage your website pages, landing pages and blog.
• Comments - The opinions of your readers left in response to a blog post. This is a useful way for you to connect with your audience. It's recommended to freely give users access to and make it easier for them to connect, which usually means not monitoring comments for approval and only deleting truly offensive comments. If negative comments come up use this as an opportunity to proactively share your knowledge and respond back positively.
• CSS or Stylesheet - This is short for Cascading Style Sheets. Written in HTML this is commonly used to style web pages. Styling options including page layouts, colors and fonts are typically preset to help control cohesiveness and an overall professional look and feel for your website and/or blog.
• Directory - A blog directory is a website that lists blogs, usually ranking them by their popularity and ordering them by subject or category. It's a good idea to add your blog to directories to help generate more relevant traffic, especially when you are first getting started.
• Favicon - This is the small graphic, typically your logo or other representation your website that appears in a browser's address bar, favorites or bookmark lists.
• Feed - This is a news feed used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it in RSS reader or via e-mail.
• Header - This is the top part of your blog, appearing before any pages or posts. Headers generally include items such as logos, taglines, and navigation menus, which are meant to set the tone or theme of your blog.
• Hyperlink - Used synonymously with the word "link", this is clickable content within a web page that takes the user to another page, website, or within part of the same page. The text that comprises the hyperlink is referred to as the "anchor text".
• HTML - This is short for Hypertext Markup Language, the language used to write web pages. Most HTML elements are written with a start tag  and an end tag , with content in between.
• Keyword(s) or Keyphrase(s) - These should be used as a topic generator. Picking keywords is the process of determining what topics are most relevant to your target audience or buyer persona and crafting content around those topics. They should be used in a strictly creative sense for structural composition, reasoning, and comprehension, and should showcase your knowledge in a given field.
• Meta Description - Your description should be a short description of that particular page or post. It's a great opportunity to place some very targeted content for your audience to see on the search results page. A good description is approximately 2 sentences (no more than 150 characters) using your target keywords, phrased to cause a person to want to visit your site.
• Meta Keywords - These have historically been the most popular and well known element describing content of a web page. Search engines, however, quickly came to realize that this piece of information was often inaccurate or misleading and frequently lead to spammy sites. As such this tag is no longer followed by search engines.
• Meta Tags - A comprehensive term that is comprised of meta titles, descriptions and keywords. These three items together are what are referred to as meta tags. The tags are elements that provide information about a given web page, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly.
• Meta Title or Page Title - The Page Title is the phrase that shows in the blue bar at the top of your web browser when the page loads. The page title is also the bold text that shows up on a search results page when you rank in a search engine.
• Permalink - An address or URL of a particular post within a blog.
• Redirect - Used to specify an alternative URL and in order to redirect the user (or search engine) to a different location. The most commonly used redirect is a 301 permanent redirect, which is applied when you change the URL of a page. To ensure that people, who have linked to or bookmarked that old page/URL, can still get to the updated page/URL.
• Robots - Commonly filed as robots.txt, which provides information about a given Web page, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly.
• RSS - Short for Really Simple Syndication, a means by which users can subscribe to a feed, a blog feed for instance. Because content is published in a frequent basis subscribing makes it easier for users to follow content and updates.
• Sitemap - A public directory or index of sorts to help users easily access pages of your website. Basically this is a page on your site where you tell users about key pages of your website by listing them in almost an outline format and then linking to those internal pages. This makes your content easier to find by users including search engines.
• Social Media Sharing - Your content should not exist in a vacuum. Give people the opportunity to share your content for you. A lot of platforms have this built in or at least available as an add-on. There are also tools like sharethis.com or addthis.com that make content sharing easy.
• Subscribe - Your blog should have multiple means through which users can subscribe to your blog content. These should include email and RSS.
• Tag or Tagging - A tag is a bit like a category in that it is another way of classifying blog post. It is a word or set of words that help define what the post is about.
• Title or Subject - The title of your page is frequently an H1 tag.
• URL - is the address of a piece of information that can be found on the web such as a page, image or document.
• Widget or Module - Areas of your website that are uniquely designed to stand out and commonly found in the side bars of your website (left or hand side of a page). Within a CMS these are easily interchangeable sections that often provide links, call to actions or other helpful resources.
• .XML Sitemap - A file you can use to publish lists of links from across your site. This is easily generated and there a lots of free tools out there to help you generate this sort of file. Sitemaps do not guarantee all links will be crawled, and being crawled does not guarantee indexing. However, a Sitemap is still the best insurance for getting a search engine to learn about your entire site.

Also read:
Answers to common objections writing a blog
7 Reasons for Blogging