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Maximise your PR with Thought as well as Action

Written by: Paula Gardner

Article Overview: How a PR pause can help you plan effective PR goals.

Maximise your PR with Thought as well as Action

Successful businesses regularly pause to take stock and make plans for their businesses and their future. Paula Gardner from PR Training company Do Your Own PR has put together some suggested suggestions to make the whole process much more painless and many times more effective.

1. Trim Off Some Fat

If you’re going to do some serious PR and promotion, and the reason that you haven’t actually done it up until now is that you’ve been too busy, you need to trim off some fat. And by fat I mean pointless wasting of time (my particular waste of time is Spider Solitaire). But sometimes wasting time can come in much more respectable packaging, like spending your time packing goods and carting them to the Post Office when you could easily pay someone to do that for you and devote the freed up time to PR. Or taking part in meetings and networking events that don’t really bring in the results to justify the effort. Take a look at where you are wasting time and work out what you can cull to make way for time spent on PR.

2. Take Some Exercise

Just as one session a month at the gym isn’t going to deliver results, one marathon PR session per month won’t either. You need to devote regular and sustained effort and attention. But the great thing is that done persistently and consistently most forms of PR – blogging, articles, press releases, tip sheets etc – will deliver results.

3. Read more

You wouldn’t believe how often I get people coming to me who want to get into the papers or magazines and yet look down their nose at actually picking one up and reading it. Forego getting your news fix from the Internet and start reading a daily newspaper. Not only will it will do your business and networking credibility no end of good to have all the latest news and gossip at your fingertips, but you’ll get ideas for stories, news of surveys, ideas for articles all delivered to you in one neat package every day. Vary what you read and make it a mission to once a month buy something you really wouldn’t usually consider, whether it’s Vanity Fair or Accountancy Age. Pinch ideas, get inspired – the more you read the more you’ll find yourself brimming over with creativity.

4. Think About the big Picture

Hooking your press releases onto events that are going on in the outside world can make them much more pertinent. Clients often ask me where they can find a list of special events and PR orientated weeks that they can hook into for their press. One of the free ones that I’ve come across is Count Me In where you can access a whole year’s events and even post up your own. More details here:

http://www.countmeincalendar.info/show_calendars.php?band_color=FE9900&calid=7&banner_area=1&sel_day=3&orange_box=1&choose_month=2008-01

5. Stop Smoking

We don’t want smoke, we need fire. Rediscover your passion, your reason for doing what you do in the first place and connect with that. Find out why your clients and customers choose you and use that as a driving force of your campaign. Half-heartedness just doesn’t work.

Do Your Own PR offers a range of PR courses to help you learn about running a Pr campaign for your business. Written by Paula Gardner, the author of the small business PR guide Get Noticed, available from Amazon, these courses cover Do Your Own Pr, Building A Cult newsletter, How To Write A Press Release, Writing Copy to Sell and Double Your Clients Through Networking and more.

For more details please visit:

http://www.doyourownpr.com/products.asp

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Article Tags: blogging, credibility, exercise, fingertips, gossip, magazines, marathon pr, neat package, networking events, packing, paula gardner, post office, pr 2, press releases, solitaire, spider solitaire, surveys, tip sheets, waste of time, wasting time



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