Ideas for Business

Good public relations begins with a media kit. And if you plan to do business online you should seriously think about developing an online media kit. But what should go into it?

Your online media kit should make it easy for members of the media to learn more about you and your team. What you do, why you do it, who your target market is, and anything related to community that you do as well. Your media kit is the resource that journalists and other media will refer to when they are looking for someone to interview or gain research and knowledge about a particular topic.

So does a good media kit consist of?

First, it should include your biography. Not a book, but a few paragraphs that say where you’ve been and what your credentials are. Ask the question, “Why am I the expert” and then give the answer.

Next, include some information about what it is you are trying to accomplish. The Small Business Mavericks media kit includes a backgrounder, which is a sort of online white paper that offers statistics and insights into the market that I’m trying to tap into. This can read as an HTML web page or a .pdf download. Something similar for your business that explains what you do and why should also be included in your media kit.

If you have other media mentions such as interviews, quotes in news stories, features articles, op-ed pieces - anything at all - then include those. Media people like to know that you understand what they are looking for and will be sensitive to the news cycle.

Finally, press releases. If you have any press releases that you’ve distributed online or have sent out to media in your local area or nationally then include those. Sometimes, a press release is all a media person needs to answer a question and they won’t have to bother calling you. They can just quote the release.

Other things you can include in your media kit are:

• Videos
• Podcasts
• Articles you’ve written
• Social media profiles
• Testimonials or endorsements
• Photos

Anything that will help a media person do his or her job and find information quickly is a good idea to have in your media kit. Take a look at the Small Business Maverick media kit.

Yesterday, I talked about different Internet marketing channels and which ones are most important for small businesses. What I didn’t mention was how one of those channels could the most important one of all.

In fact, I didn’t even mention it as one of the important ones at all. But I should have. So why didn’t I?

I left out Conversion Rate Optimization yesterday so I could talk about it today in more expansive terms. Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, is one of the most important Internet marketing channels for any businesses because without landing pages that are ready to close sales, you really have no Web business. You can perform the best SEO or social media campaign in the world, but if your landing pages aren’t converting sales, all the traffic in the world won’t be of much help to you.

CRO is the practice of working on your landing pages to make them the best converting tools they can be. The process involves more than SEO; in fact, it may not involve that at all. It may be something as simple as moving an image from one side of the page to another. But the heart of all CRO is in testing. The CRO professional tests various elements of a landing page to ensure that they all work together to close sales and increase conversions. After all, it is conversions that make you money, not traffic.

Hopefully you didn’t make the mistake of hardcoding a lot of work into the Wordpress code, so Wordpress’s upgrade process is very clean and straight forward. 1. Backup, backup and backup Before you upload anything to your server, make sure you make a full backup of your files and database. If your server hosts Cpanel, all you [...]

So I finally decided to upgrade, the problem is that there is plenty of hard-coded work to implement in the blog, so I am expecting a lot of surprises. The last time I attempted to upgrade, things went so badly that I had to roll back. Bracing for impact.

No, I haven’t dropped dead - I just haven’t had much time for blogging recently. On top of my copywriting work, [...]