Saturday, January 1, 2011

The Importance of Press Release Distribution and Publishing Services for your Company

It does not matter how small or big your business is or if you have one or one thousand products, you must always communicate with your clientele. Press releases are one of the most efficient ways to do this. It should increase exposure and grow trustworthiness. It could even be thought of as an advert announcement. Despite, one should not disregard that however valuable and engaging your advert might be, most of people tend to regard it as embellished and overstated statement.

Really, in my understanding, few of potential consumers take your every word for its value in the advertisement. So how can you win the trustworthiness of your business? The integrity can be won if your announcement is appeared in reliable and upright information resources. Many studies show that the public trusts more the views of autonomous mass media and their representatives such as editors, journalists and commentators than the statements of salesmen and commercials specialists.

You can communicate with press by using press release distribution and publishing services issued to mass media representatives. Press release distribution and publishing services are one of the most valuable means to amplify the attention both of the public and media. How a press release should be written?! The most significant point of the press release is its newsworthiness.

Advertising these days is commonly well thought-out in corporation’s budgets to improve profits. Reaching out to your clientele has become more critical and complex as ever before. There are many methods offered on the web to publish and promote your company news, but one of the cheapest methods is to use online press release distribution and publishing websites, as many of these offers are free of costs or low-cost PR service providers. With online press release distribution and publishing services one can easily get to the targeted online community. Press release distribution and publishing websites offer press release submission database of free content and re-print those press releases.

Publishers, who are in pursuit of free distributed and published press releases and within their business community, who wishes to grow their market reach, make the best use of this major resource to boost their promotion strategy. Here are 10 powerful guidelines to write well drafted press release.

1. Starting should be captivating: Your press release title and initial lines should wrap, what you would like to get across. The remaining part of your press release should illustrate the complete information.

2. Prepare it for reporters & Medias: Reporters and editors obtain thousand of press releases daily. They most likely will grab your press release for publishing, if they can use your press release with slight editing or no revision at all.

3. Consider your audience’s interest: The audience’s interest concern is most imperative to be kept in mind. That if you were a part of the addressees, would you be paying attention to and read the press release, you have released.

4. Make it appear useful: Point out factual specifics of your business or company, as the public is also intellectual enough to make out what is factual and what is not? Present newsworthy information about your company’s management and administration, products and services, events and trade shows in what they might be interested in.

5. Tie the draft with authentic facts: Don’t put deceives and embellishments on your write-up. If you find the content using much added extras, make it natural and authentic. If content seems too good to be exact, rebuff the tenor a little, as it may perhaps harm your own credibility.

6. Use only essential verbal style: Don’t use superfluous adjectives, extravagant language, or pointless vocabulary like “The most powerful”. Illustrate your story with slighter expressions, as verbosity distracts from your content.

7. Avoid using jargon: Limited use of slang could be legitimate, if you intend to optimize your press release for search engines. The best practice to communicate your press release is to speak efficiently, using ordinary vocabulary.

8. Avoid exclamation: The use of exclamation point (!) may spoil your press release. But, if you have to use an exclamation point, use it but only once.

9. Company permit: Companies are very protective about their brand and integrity. Get written approval before putting in an announcement or quotes from officials or associates of another corporation or association.

10. Company information: The press release should wrap up with a short “about us” description of your company, which should illustrate your firm, products, service and a brief history of your corporation. But if you are drafting a collective press release of two or more than two, in such case you should emphasize a portrayal of all the companies involved.

Drafting a quality press release is a procedure that requires huge expertise and practice, as every sole word of a press release may be scrutinized. This is the ground why many companies appoint public relation firms for official press releases and other media relations. Inexact or poorly drafted specifics in a press release can develop into a key cause to harm the reputation of a company or destroy confidence in an organization.

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Understanding the Viral Marketing Power of Social Media

If you want to enjoy the benefits of viral marketing, you'll need to incorporate social media into your online marketing strategy. That's why it's a great idea to distribute your news releases through a PR service that includes embedded social media sharing buttons on each published document. After all, making your content easy for readers to share is one of the most effective viral marketing techniques that any business can use.

Understanding the Impact of Social Media

There are several reasons that social media have such a tremendous capacity to be effective. A few of the most powerful benefits of this type of online marketing include:

* Sheer numbers: A majority of consumers actively participate in social networking activities on a daily basis.
* Speed: Information distributed through social media outlets tends to travel from person to person very quickly.
* Credibility: Since people typically only to let individuals they trust into their social networking contact lists, it stands to reason that information passed through these channels is thought to have a certain level of credibility.
* Captive Audience: People who participate in social networking sites are there because they choose to be there. When your messages are presented in this way, they're being delivered directly to the desktops (or laptops or mobile phones) of a captive audience.
* Information Seeking: People who actively engage in social networking tend to utilize the sites and groups they participate in as resources for giving and receiving information. Social networkers who find useful information like to share it with their online contacts, and they also like to seek tips and suggestions from the individuals they network with in cyberspace.
___

Monday, June 28, 2010

RailsConf 2010: Gary Vaynerchuk

The Benefits Of Website Leasing

Website Leasing is a great way for small business owners to take advantage of getting their small business website online quickly while not using all of their capital in the process.

The Benefits of Small Business Website Leasing

1. Leasing a website allows you to spend less capital and utilize your capital for other business expenses, saving you money.

2. Leasing a website saves you time. Most companies offer a wide range of services meaning you do not need to seek out different professionals from multiple companies to handle your project.

3. Find a company you can trust! Make sure all of the fees are disclosed on the company website. Select a company that believes in ethical business practices.

4. Leasing a website can give you Flexible End of Term Options. Renew your lease, purchase your website or cancel your service and walk away. No strings attached.

5. By choosing to lease your website you are bundling multiple services and reducing the amount of your monthly expenses.

How It Works

Just like leasing a car, a small busines website lease agreement allows you to have a professional, search engine optimized CMS website built for your company now while giving you the opportunity to pay for it over time. At the end of your lease agreement you are given the opportunity to purchase your site and continue hosting it with your service provider.

How Much Does it Cost?

Different companies have different pricing structures. One of the best deals that we know of nets you a two year website lease agreement for as little as $24.99 per month. There are other costs associated with these types of plans including setup fees (typically a one-time payment).

What is a CMS Website?

A Content Management System (CMS) is used to structure your website's documents in such a way that you don't need to re-enter all of your information agai when it's time to change the look and feel of your site. All of your data is placed inside of a MYSQL database and this allows your data to be accessed quickly. Popular CMS platforms include Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal.

Why Is Search Engine Friendly So Important?

As a small business owner you should realize that 90% of people who use the internet use search engines to find what they're looking for online. Your business needs an online presence to allow your audience to find you quickly and easily.
___

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Do We Really Need Banks?

Imagine for a moment that you did not have a bank account. No debit or credit card, no access to an ATM. No checks, no loans, no savings account. In other words, no access to cheap, reliable, safe and convenient means of saving, borrowing, sending, and spending money.

This situation, which may seem truly frightening to you and me, is a daily reality for more than half the people on earth. The majority of people in emerging economies, and a significant minority in developed ones, are unbanked or under-banked. Even the U.S. is home to 106 million under-banked citizens.

Yet these underserved markets are now availing of financial services offered by an emerging and dynamic ecosystem of non-banking institutions, which include cell phone companies, small technology vendors and non-governmental organizations. By offering basic financial services that deliver more value at lower cost for more users, players in this emerging ecosystem are threatening the monopoly of banks on financial services, and questioning their very raison d'ĂȘtre.

In Kenya, for instance, only 10% of the population has access to traditional banking services. Yet mobile penetration in the country is higher than 50%. Sensing an opportunity, Safaricom, a local telecoms service provider which is 40% owned by U.K.-based Vodafone, launched a service called M-Pesain 2007 to enable people to send/receive and spend small amounts of money using their cellphones.

No bank account is required to participate in these transactions, and today, over 8 million Kenyans have subscribed to M-Pesa (more than double the number a year ago!). The Philippines has a similar cell phone-based micro-payments service which has been similarly successful. Meanwhile, in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India, millions of unbanked rural women have for several years now formed self-help groups to help them save and borrow money to generate income.

Developing nations like Kenya, Philippines, and India are leveraging technological innovations like M-Pesa and organizational innovations like self-help groups to drive financial inclusion without involving traditional banks.

If you were one of the unbanked of Nairobi, Manila or New Delhi what would prevent you from availing of the financial services of a traditional bricks-and-mortar bank? First, you may be illiterate, and intimidated by the formality of signing up to a bank. Second, you may be on a daily wage and not find the bank's monthly fees affordable or worth the expense. Third, there may not be a bank within easy reach of your town or village.

Now let's flip the question. What would prevent traditional banks from reaching out to you? After all, the unbanked represent a huge growth opportunity. In countries like India where over 50% of the population is unbanked, the Central Bank and several state-owned banks have had it as their mission to achieve broader financial inclusion. What has prevented them from making a dent in these figures?

The simple answer is the cost of reaching remote and relatively impoverished consumers. India for instance, has over 600,000 villages. Setting up a bank branch in each of these villages would simply, well, break the bank. But branchless services like M-Pesa could help circumvent this fundamental scaling problem facing traditional banks.

Now that non-financial institutions are encroaching into their territory, what should traditional banks do?

They have two options: fight off these new players or partner with them. While we expect many big banks to keep their heads buried in the sand, nimble banks led by creative CEOs will embrace the "if you can't beat them, join them" principle and plug into alternative banking service ecosystems. In India, for instance, YES Bank — a leading private bank — has partnered with Nokia and Obopay, a mobile payment platform provider, to deliver mobile banking services to even the remotest areas of India. Closer to home, here in the US, Obopay has teamed up with Citi, AT&T, and Verizon to deliver mobile payment services to the 106 million under-banked Americans.

As they recover from the recession, can banks regain their relevance globally? Or will the world increasingly ask: Can we do without banks? We believe that the future of banks depends on their ability to adopt and scale up innovations from nonbanking contexts, and transform their parochial culture and mindset in the process. Only then will banks ensure that the frightening scenario outlined at the beginning of this post never materializes (for their own sake!).