September 26, 2006

How to Get Attention for your Business

Getting attention for your small business in the major media is NOT easy, but it's not rocket science and it's VERY doable.

You can get attention via online media, traditional offline media including radio, print, TV. You can "do it yourself" or pay a PR firm to do it for you. You can do "PR" or buy attention in any of these media.

Whatever method you choose, do make a concentrated effort and DO IT. I'd highly suggest you read what StartupJournal.com writes.

Wendy Bounds writes Three years ago, fledgling New York shoe and dress designer Holly Dunlap hired a well-known public-relations firm to put her brand name -- Hollywould -- on the map. She paid roughly $6,500 a month as a retainer, small change in the PR world but a fortune for her small firm.

"For us, it was a lot to pay," the 34-year-old Ms. Dunlap says. "We didn't have a lot of patience for that amount of money. We needed to see results on a daily basis."

Ms. Dunlap, in fact, was seeing results -- just not so much from the PR firm. She had begun penning a diary on her Web site, www.ilovehollywould.com, chock-full of juicy details about her personal life, from late-night keg-party revelry in her downtown Manhattan boutique to boozy jet-setting jaunts through Europe. (A sample 2003 entry from London: "When your first words of the morning are 'Where am I and how did I get here?', you know it's been a long, long night.") The attractive, gregarious designer created an appetite for her entries by boldfacing names of acquaintances as well as those of famous faces she encountered. Soon people were checking to see if they'd made a mention, passing the links to friends around the country. As Web-site traffic grew, so too did sales.

Is this to say PR firms or professional service firms that help with marketing are bad? Of course not. But it is to say that you don't have to spend a lot of money to get attention for your business.

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