Public Relations Training For Startups, Steemers & Steemit: PART 1
Personal Message From Michael
Greetings!
My name is Michael, and I have personally helped train well over 20,000+ small businesses and entrepreneurs over the last 7 years in the realm of online marketing, paid and free traffic strategies, public relations and branding, news media releases, authority marketing, and of course SEO (Search Engine Optimization) & SEM( Search Engine Marketing).
Instead of the regular introduction post of who I am and where I live, I figured I would give you something meaningful to you and the community, in hopes that it helps jumpstart the project.
I have also been involved in the BitShares and Cryptonomex projects for a few years now. I hold a LOT of BTS, and am proud to say I have always held and never sold as I believe it has always had a future and still does. I have travelled to Ireland to represent my company and CNX, gone to multiple conferences to evangelize for our community, our blockchain and our way of life.
My employees and I have contributed in many ways to the BTS community in time, money, effort, building successful and unsuccessful initiative in hopes of creating adoption for our blockchain.
This is my very first post and attempt at using the Steemit platform, and I hope I bring some value to you all. This is only my first post, I plan on posting seminars and training courses I have released and taught to people all over the world over the last 10 years. This is the first of many, as I have basic, intermediate and advanced courses in many subjects regarding online marketing and exposure for any business type.
This is a beginner training course that I created to help startups and small business get started with PR and marketing. I am putting this here for you all to absorb and use because I truely feel that having as many evangelists and PR folks helping this project - THE BETTER.
If I can help train you all in the art of PR, SEO, Marketing, AND you put this into play for your posts, the community, the technology, and yourselves - we will all be more successful and have a much greater chance at adoption.
Not only that, but you can use the training here and subsequent training I post to get PR for yourself, your story, why you are in Steem, what you are about - ANYTHING YOU WANT. The world is your oyster, unless you aren't into seafood - in which case I weep for you.
The basic PR training is in some ways a distillation of the most effective free traffic, branding, and marketing lessons I have taught attendees at paid conferences and five figure masterminds, the best of the techniques that get real results for regular people and superstars alike, and supporting posts from which inspiration for this post derived.
Some of us may be able to afford expensive PR agencies, some of us may not be as fortunate...but after you implement the strategies and training in thisPublic Relations course, your customers will never know the difference...but your wallet will!
I appreciate any constructive feedback on the training, and I always enjoy hearing about the results you get from the strategies I have shown you here in this training course. Oh, and feel free to let me know how I look in a Jesus suit...or any other celebrity I look like (we have a few listed here now).
If there is ever anything I can do for you, please feel free to send an email or PM!
Stay Amazing,
Michael
Follow Me On Steemit - The Social Media Platform That Pays
Please Connect To Me On Linkedin!
You may find Part 2 here: Public Relations For Startups and Steemit: Part 3 found here.
You may also visit Public Relations For Startups and Steemit: Part 3 found here.
Greetings Public Relations Training Students!
I welcome you to the special training course I put together for startups and small businesses on:
- How to find prospects and email them a cold pitch that works
- How to get press & media to write stories about you
- How to track down any influencers contact details
- How to effectively pitch press and important people your product, service, or story
- How to build lasting relationships with the right people at the right time
You will find that the strategies explained in this Guerrilla Playbook are extremely effective at getting you more traffic, more customers, and more exposure; all without costing you tons of money hiring expensive public relations companies, buying tools that cost an arm and a leg, or wasting your time sending emails that never get a response.
What is Public Relations (PR)?
Public relations is one of the most important aspects of any successful startup or business, and also one of the most overlooked. Many businesses have attempted to skimp on PR, and at times seem to do fine without it, until they don’t.
Savvy businessmen like Mark Cuban, Sir Richard Branson, and even Bill Gates all say that PR is the MOST IMPORTANT thing you can be doing for your business, whether you are in the midst of success or still trying to get there. In fact, Bill Gates famously said ““If I was down to my last dollar, I would spend it on public relations.”
PR stands for Public Relations
pub·lic re·la·tions
noun
plural noun: public relations
- the professional maintenance of a favorable public image by a company or other organization or a famous person.
- the state of the relationship between the public and a company or other organization or a famous person.
- "companies justify the cost in terms of improved public relations"
Public relations (PR) is the practice of managing the spread of information between an individual or an organization (such as a business, government agency, or a nonprofit organization) and the public.
Public relations may include an organization or individual gaining exposure to their audiences using topics of public interest and news items that do not require direct payment.
This differentiates it from advertising as a form of marketing communications. Public relations is the idea of creating coverage for clients for free, rather than marketing or advertising. An example of good public relations would be generating an article featuring a client, rather than paying for the client to be advertised next to the article.
The aim of public relations is to inform the public, prospective customers, investors, partners, employees and other stakeholders and ultimately persuade them to maintain a certain view about the organization, its leadership, products, or political decisions.
PR is about building relationships.
Building relationships often leads to increased sales because customers want to work with people they know and respect.
Great public relations means setting up ongoing relationships with many important influencers (and therefore their audiences) and knowing how your business may become an excellent data source for the influential. However, this relationship is based on your organization's capability of providing these things:
- Thorough knowledge of the influencer's need
- Timely response to an influencer's requests
- Unique accessibility to important executives in your organization
- Truthfully stating your case
Why do you need Public Relations?
I am sure it is obvious to you that public relations is an important factor for a company to become successful and stay that way. It is no surprise that the biggest companies in the world rely upon PR to maintain their image, and to shape their image as needed. Even the Vatican uses PR on a daily basis.
PR's importance is changing for the better, according to The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR (HarperBusiness). American marketing strategists Al and Laura Ries argue that public relations has become the most effective way to build a brand. Well-known brands like The Body Shop, PlayStation and Harry Potter spend little on brand-name advertising.
The same is true for many entrepreneurial companies like yours. Business owners become known in their respective fields of concentration many times through public relations and the associated media generated.
In an article published in Entrepreneur magazine, several successful business owners that leveraged guerrilla marketing and PR had quite a bit to say about their PR approach.
“You have to get in the mind of your consumer and figure out, What’s the avenue they use to go about finding you?” Dingman says. “What’s the avenue they use to validate the credentials of someone they might do business with? Once you determine that, you do what you need to do to stay on their radar in a professional, legitimate manner. I think everyone is capable of that. It’s all about positioning. It’s all about how you sell it.”
He isn’t the first person to value doing things differently in the realm of PR. Look at this post from Mark Cuban in which he discusses the reason for businesses and startups to do their own PR, to NOT hire agencies, and to develop relationships with influencers to reach real levels of success.
Mark is a pretty smart guy...maybe it is time to take a play out of his playbook.
PR is communication in many ways with your target market.
Maybe instead of public relations we ought to call it target market relations or TMR. You may be communicating about a new product, spreading news about your company or making a major announcement. You want to communicate publicly, but the only people you care about are potential prospects, customers or investors, in the case of a partnership or a public company.
In marketing, you were taught to pinpoint the target market then serve them, in order to save money and time wasted on advertising to parties that are not the right fit. It is no different with branding and PR.
One exception may be communication to a group that you are trying to influence for the best interest of your company and target market. An example of this is lobbying government.
Public relations builds up credibility.
Public relations boosts an organization's credibility, because it'll operate through numerous trusted intermediaries. Plus, these intermediaries communicate to a certain audience which looks to them to filter out all nonsense. If messages are chosen to be communicated, they'll gain credibility due to the intermediaries' credibility.
Is the New York Times considered credible? Of course. Fast Company or Time? They will lend a lot of weight to your product, service or trust in you.
Make the most of this credibility by leveraging the influencers authority in your space, and watch the spectacular results that follow.
How Much More Successful Will You Or Your Company Become After Being Featured In These Publications?
What is Guerrilla Marketing?
guer·ril·la mar·ket·ing
noun
noun: guerrilla marketing; plural noun: guerrilla marketings; noun: guerilla marketing; plural noun:guerilla marketings
- innovative, unconventional, and low-cost marketing techniques aimed at obtaining maximum exposure for a product.
What Is This Public Relations Course Going To Teach Me?
- How to get a lot more exposure for you and your business on the internet
- Lots of easy to follow content to help you quickly setup your Public Relations campaign
- Why getting influencers on your side, authority marketing, and good public relations are are more effective than any advertising
- How to tap into top tier media and influencer traffic to get more traffic & customers
- Pinpoint the right influencer, member of the press, or investor to target with a pitch
- Conducting research the target and how to push their buttons to get them interested
- How to pitch anybody via email and get results
- The trick to get anyones contact information, anytime, anywhere
- 7 step method to help you create a successful pitch every single time
- The easy to follow guide to writing the perfect subject line
- The key to tracking and following up with your target
READY?? Let’s Get Started!
Example #1
Notice the results for the super keyword “How To Lose Weight”.
You will find that a majority of the results are all media sites. Of those results some are newspaper sites, some are top tier media types like Cosmopolitan and Men’s Fitness...but all of them are media sites.
Go ahead and type it in your browser to check the results. Try some keywords in your niche!
When you are ranking on the first page for keywords like this, it’s a lot easier to make big money and build huge subscriber lists.
Example #2
For this result on the first page for “Make Money Online”, the Entreprenuer.com article is over a year old and on the first page. It also got 2.9k shares, which means a lot of eyeballs saw it via just social media as a channel (average person has about 200 friends * 2.9k = 580,000 pairs of eyeballs estimated) not derived from search results, and not from Entrepreneurs organic traffic either.
Imagine what you will do with that kind of exposure and traffic to your products and services...
How many more prospects you could turn into clients? How many more adopters of your service?
Example #3
What will your friends and family think about you and your business after they see you featured on top media and news sites?
In this example, you will notice that this article reached 2.9k shares in less than 24 hours.
Imagine how much traffic (and sales) this article will generate for the author, and the business featured in the article.
It’s a complete no brainer to say that we know how much easier it would be to build your social media presence, and get more exposure if you are able to be featured in such places like NYTimes, Inc., Huffington Post, and many other top tier sites.
As you will discover further on, we will cover strategies that are used by PR agencies & certain “those in the know” people that keep the whole process very hush hush. They are very powerful strategies, and when employed can even make a business successful overnight.
You can see that it is more than substantial...and it’s amazing! Even more amazing, is the fact that regular people are getting these same kind of results by following the lessons contained in this course.
Imagine how many businesses, entrepreneurs, authors, speakers, and product owners that would hire you to produce these kind of results for them. They ROUTINELY PAY $2,000 - $10,000+ a month or more.
You should only need 3-5 clients to make over $10,000+ a month!
You can do it!
Example #4
“Get More Customers” is a pretty big keyword with a LOT of traffic (it gets hundreds of thousands or even millions of searches per month), and you can see 4 media sites on the first page ranking and getting search traffic.
Imagine if YOU could harness a tiny percentage of this kind of traffic.
FAQ
Is it really that important to influence influencers?
Yes! By “influencing an influencer” you are able to leverage their reputation, their platform, their megaphone, their traffic, their resources, and their trust.
Influencers may include the following:
- Investors, VC, Angels
- Network Marketers/Networking
- Press, Media, Newspapers, Radio, Television
- Celebrities & Bloggers
- Affiliates and Joint Venture Partners
- Potential Customers/Small Businesses (B2B)
- Local, regional and national news
How Can Influencers Help Me Get More Traffic & Sales
- They can promote you, your product, or your service
- Allow you to build a list of subscribers and social media following
- Tap into their sites organic traffic
- Leverage their authority and trust to build a reputation quickly
- Higher viral traffic and exposure you don’t otherwise get
- These strategies are designed to get you traffic in the short term and the long term, and help position you to prospects as an expert (which increases conversions)!
Will this help me rank higher in the search engines?
Yes! Using these strategies will help rank:
- Your sites
- Your social media profiles
- Your customer sites and products
- Any other web property
- Other Articles about you
- Press Releases & News Releases
- Videos or podcasts
Can I start a business using these strategies?
YES! Lot’s of people will pay top dollar for this type of service.
Are there tons of expensive tools I will have to purchase to make this work?
NO! Nearly all of the methods and tools we use are free.
How hard is this to do?
It’s pretty easy, as long as you can type, do some searches on google, and use email - you are SET!
How long does it take to get started?
You can start today without any prior experience or knowledge
Training Conclusion
I really hope enjoyed the training, take what you have learned throughout this course and put it to good use toward driving more traffic, customers and subscribers to your business. You can expect to see some real results from these strategies as you implement and continue to put the training into action.
It is my wish to bring value to Steem and the community by publishing content like this from time to time. If you like the content, please comment, upvote and support me and my time spent putting this together for you. By doing so, I will be able to spend even more time here helping the community flourish.
Stay Awesome,
Michael
Follow Me On Steemit - The Social Media Platform That Pays
Please Connect To Me On Linkedin!
Other Posts By MichaelX:
(Not The Corporate Entity) Hello, My Name Is :Michael Joseph: AKA Michael X
My Celebrity Lookalikes: Who Do YOU Look Like?
[HOW TO] Become Rich & Internet Famous
**If you find anything at all useful here please upvote, share on social media, comment, and follow me!**
Howdy Micheal, nice to see u around here as well (worked with Michael at BTS and CNX) - Happy steeming and hopefully we will get the chance to work together again. :)
Hey @cass, good to see you. I figured I would give it a whirl, try a few things here and do a few case studies to show people how this works. I have a few friends very interested in the capabilities...
Welcome to Steemit Michael! I haven't read all of it but this has got to be the longest original post on Steemit by far. Glad to have you here.
Because I think your account will become valuable fairly quickly, here's a couple security guides I wrote for users to securely post with their accounts and have safe offline backup just in case things go wrong:
Thanks @pfunk, for the welcome AND the resources!
This is FANTASTIC and generous of you to share, Michael. I'm going to share this post with my writing students. Wow. Can't wait to read more. Thank you!
Wow @michaelx this is some amazing and valuable content here. Thanks for sharing. Now on to part 2 and part 3...
Thank you for your kinds words - enjoy the other 2 parts :)
Great content! A good PR story is always better than an expensive ad. So true!
Dang! You got 25 votes in 3 hours before I noticed this!
Michael is an MVP and one of the unsung heroes of the BitShares community.
I predict he will be well-sung in the in the Annuals of the Legends of BitShares.
...Before the BTS cock crows thrice.
Thanks @Stan! It was my maiden voyage post here, I have lot's more where this comes from.
Love the BitShares community and everything it has accomplished and done. And I am proud of the continuing work there as well.
Great write-up! Thanks!
Thank you so much @tomkirkham !
Wow! This just illustrates the potential of Steemit, I feel as if this is the 'library' of the future!
I think so too @jholmes91 !!!
What a post! You wrote us a textbook. Great to have you on board.
Thanks @donkeypong, good to be here. I have lurked a bit, but been busy with other projects. I think it might be time to turn my attention here for a while...
I wasn't kidding when I said I wanted to drop some knowledge here. I am hoping I get upvotes BEFORE they start putting this to use! If you find anything at all useful here please upvote, share on social media, comment, and follow me!
I have been up for too many hours so I couldn't read this all right now but what I did read I like and I KNOW I need help with PR. I am bookmarking it now and coming back to it tomorrow. This could potentially really help me. -_- (yawn) Thanks! :)
Have a good sleep @lauralemons and come back to let me know your thought , results, questions, anything!
Thanks for the review!
Hi Michael
Thanks for letting me know about this post, you put lots of effort into this, very good content and insights...appreciated!
Regards,
Ricardo Goncalves (BNC Steemit Community Manager)
It definately took a bit to put together but I wanted to really give some love here. I have thousands of hours of video training on things like this I have never put out to public I am thinking of putting some up...What do you think based on this content?
Michael, I say go for it...and when you do please pm me in slack, I certainly would want to view. Steemit has a follow feature but I don't think it's working yet, so please pm me.
Regards,
Ricardo Goncalves (BNC Steemit Community Manager)
Will do!
omg this is really usefull. Thank you!! amaizing info in this post. love it
Thanks @zalmoxis! Put this stuff to use on your steemit posts!
OK on to Part 2...if it is easy as you say than I should be able to do it no problem, right? Let's see.... :)
YES! Keep going, this stuff works!
Hey great work Brother! keep it coming join slack channel #retweetlinks so people can tweet this stuff out
Thanks man!
That's another interesting post . Need to read through very carefully on my laptop Was a bit long for my phone
Thank you! You should have seen the original, it was about 11k words....
🐬🙌 sleepless nights since steemit
Great! Thx a lot. Lot of work to write this all.
I super appreciate the great feedback!
Michael, Really great, helpful, useful info. Thanks very much for your well documented, explained info. Will be using it. ~ljl~
TY @lynda-j-leonard - very much appreciated!
Far and above...the most sales that I've EVER had, came from getting free publicity (a niche magazine with rabid fan base)!
Great stuff michaelx!
quality post!
Thanks a lot for the appreciation!