business promotion

How many of you read the article in the August issue of Wired Magazine on Julia Allison and online promotion? I found it intriguing.

While I have no interest in promoting myself online to become a celebrity (no money in it that I can see), I saw a great deal of potential in her methods for promoting your business.

Especially if you ARE the business such as a personal or business coach, a lawyer, a consultant, doctor, or CEO of a small ad agency. You need to get in front of people, You need to cultivate a certain amount of celebrity.

Roshini Rajkumar, guest hosting on the Al Malmberg Show on WCCO Radio, interviewed me from 4:30am until 5am. Listen to the interview.

I’ve known Roshini for quite awhile and I’m actually a client of hers.

Her firm, Roshini MultiMedia leverages her years of experience in front of the camera in TV news to teach others how to be comfortable if the news media come calling.

She also teaches people how to do their own PR work to get “Ink and Air”, as she calls it, from the media. Check out Roshini’s blog.

As you may have read on other occasions, I’m a big fan of Jay Abraham. I was reading his book “Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You’ve Got” last night, and came across the chapter on risk-reversal guarantees.

You might be asking yourself what does that have to do with web copywriting or marketing? It has everything to do with it. Jay is a firm believer (as am I) that hype doesn’t sell anything. Hype as in hyperbole. Hyperbole is making unsubstantiated claims or using adjectives to describe your product, service or firm.

I won’t say this is a really valuable resource but there are some great tips if you dig through the blog. Some of it is just worthless BS quotes from self-proclaimed “gurus” but there are some honest efforts to give good advice in some of the posts.

One I especially appreciated was on how one person makes money with their blog. In addition to blogging, they occasionally do an honest review of a product. Then they get an affiliate number for that product and put a link to it in their post.

A friend and business associate just sent me a link to a press release by WebVisible and Nielsen/NetRatings Report about their investigation into how Internet users interact with advertising. In the press release, they claim that their results show that “search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask have become consumer’s most widely used source to find a local business from which to buy“.

If you have a small business or derive a lot of your business from local customers or clients, you really need to read this report. As far as I’m concerned, the most important thing for you to note is that “Search engines are used by 73% of consumers when seeking local products and services — more than any other media type.”

I received an email today from a client who was very excited about a new customer. My client has a glue and adhesive marketing business in the Twin Cities. He contracted with DLCA Internet Marketing to study his current website and his online competitors and create a powerful new search engine optimized website for his firm. DLCA contracted with me to write the copy for the new site.

What got this client so excited was an order he received from Mexico. But it wasn’t the fact that the order was from Mexico that got him excited. It was the reason they ordered from him.