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Why Pay for Online Press Release Distribution?
We've all heard that "free advice is worth what you pay for it..." Shakespeare put it a little more eloquently in King Lear, when the aging monarch admonished his daughter Cordelia, "Nothing shall come of nothing..." And when it comes to distributing press releases online, I now know from first hand personal experience that "if you're going to play, it's best to pay." But the good news is, you don't have to pay much. In fact, compared to the return you get, your cash outlay is extremely well spent. Here's what I'm talking about. Last March I distributed a online press release through PRWeb.com I paid $1.00, even though PRWeb's actual minimum is $0.00. Now, PRWeb tracks results. You can find statistics on how many people actually accessed your press release, opened the link, printed it out, forwarded it to someone else, etc. I was pleased with numbers. The link to the release was opened 4780 times. Pretty good, huh? But wait!...as they like to say in all those infomercials you watch when you have insomnia. I submitted a similar release Tuesday morning, August 23rd. I paid $80 for it. By noon Wednesday morning, August 24th, the release had been "accessed" 41,090 times. Plus, when you searched for the word "publicity" on Yahoo News, links to my press release came number two *and* number three. In other words, for 80 bucks I got a chance to tell more than 40,000 people about the Publicity Pro website. Plus, think about all the one way, incoming links I got that will help raise Publicity Pro's search engine ranking. Not a bad return on my investment, wouldn't you say? All things considered, it's a whole lot of bang for 80 bucks. I'm not the only one who believes in the power of online press releases.A number of friends and colleagues have enjoyed similar success using PRWeb and similar services. All of them would agree, free is good. Free is very good. But there's another proverb that you've undoubtedly heard, and it applies to online press release distribution. "To make money, you have to spend money." As much as I hate to admit it, I guess it's true sometimes. But here's the good news. When it comes to reaping the free publicity an online press release can bring... A little money goes a long, long way. *** Resources: Marc Harty has a free special report called "The 7 Deadly Sins Most People Commit When Sending Web Press Releases And How You Can Avoid Them" Available at http://www.strategictraffic.com/7sins Also see Shari Thurow's article on the Publicity Pro website at http://www.publicity-pro.com/articles/online-publicity.htm and Ted Kushner's article "Online Press Release Mistakes" at http://www.publicity-pro.com/articles/onlineprmistakes.htm George McKenzie is a former TV news anchor and radio talk show host. During his 33 year broadcasting career, his work appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, ESPN and CNN. He currently helps people get publicity on radio, TV and in newspapers. George offers a free 7-part email "Publicity Crash Course" at http://www.publicity-pro.com
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Sell Big Ticket Items Now! - 1 Simple Step To Keep Your Fears From Holding YOU Back First, some background on today's topic. I've had a terrible week. Not terrible as in I got nothing done because I did actually get quite a bit done. But man, I struggled. And I didn't even really understand why. I have to admit, most of what I got done happened between Thursday and Sunday. Have you ever had a week like that where you struggled to get things done? Or worse yet, struggled and didn't get anything done? Or maybe it just FELT LIKE you didn't accomplish anything? I hate weeks like that and I rarely feel that way. So why was this week different? At first, I couldn't put my finger on anything specific. Looking back and replaying my week in my mind didn't cause anything to stand out either. In short, nothing really clicked as the cause for the way I was feeling and acting. So then I decided to do what I always do when I am trying to solve a problem. I just kinda let it go for a while and did something else. And THEN, I finally figured out what the problem was! It wasn't anything specific about THIS week. It was related to something I had done several weeks ago. And it's very ironic that this was the cause of my problem. You see, several weeks ago I had drafted my 90 marketing plan. This document describes what I plan to do in my Big Ticket Marketing efforts over a 3 month period. It's actually not that hard to figure out but it is something that you need to track closely and see which weeks of marketing effort have the biggest payoff. In other words, you want to track which things you did that resulted in the biggest payoff in sales, opt-ins by potential customers, joint ventures, branding, etc. Basically all the stuff we need to do to as part of our Big Ticket Marketing efforts. We want to repeat those things that give us the largest payoff in our next 3 month marketing plans and drop those things that didn't work out. And of course we always try new things that we think will work, as well. Anyway, the reason that I was struggling and feeling like I wasn't accomplishing this week was because... I was in OVERWHELM! I had a lot of tasks I wanted to accomplish, because I'm an ambitious guy. I want to do well and I have a lot of goals I want to reach. This is all fine, but the point of having a 90 day marketing plan is so that it will be easy to focus on the specific set of tasks that I need to accomplish each week by focusing on ONLY ONE main area each week. And normally, this system is very effective at keeping me focused. But, ironically, the act of creating the 90 day marketing plan made me look at everything I had to accomplish in the next 3 months and I was sort of stuck in that mode. I wasn't being effective at focusing on this weeks tasks because I was in OVERWHELM thinking about everything I had to get done, overall. Have you ever experienced that? I think we all have at one point or another. However, I am disappointed that I didn't recognize what was going on sooner. My background as a software engineer for Microsoft forced me to be pretty disciplined about focusing on what I needed to do and what our team needed to do every week to accomplish our goals. And sometimes the ship cycles lasted between 1.5 to 2 years. Plus I have a black belt in Hapkido (a Korean martial art like a cross between Tae Kwon Do and Aikido), which requires a lot of training discipline, patience, practice and long term view. But at the same time requires you to learn and work on smaller portions of the entire body of techniques, patterns, because that is the only way you can really learn what you need to know. Anyway, my point is that I should know better and yet I still fell into the fear from OVERWHELM. And I think everyone experiences not only overwhelm but other fears about what they want to do as well. The title of this article promised you a simple secret to keep your fears from holding you back - from selling Big Ticket Items. Can you guess what the secret is? I'll give you a hint. It's not really a secret at all. In fact everyone knows about this but unfortunately not everyone knows what to do especially in a case like overwhelm. Ready... the secret is ACTION! Yes, ACTION. Now you are probably wondering... "Hey, wait a sec, you just said you were in overwhelm, how can action possibly be the secret for that?" Napoleon Hill, in his book "Think and Grow Rich" said, "Action is the real measure of intelligence". Thomas Huxley said: "The great end of life is not knowledge but action." Intelligence means nothing, action means everything. I knew what I had to do this week and yet I was struggling to do it. I even had a 90 day marketing plan with each week spelled out for me and yet I was stuck. I got unstuck when I realized I was overwhelmed and decided to do something about it. 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Then after a little while you introduce another small step and continuously improve the situation or problem until it is solved. So in this way you CAN take action, even if it is very small, and slowly over time each action you take has an effect that builds on all the others and creates an unstoppable force until your problem has been solved. The fact that the action is so small makes it easy for you to do SOMETHING and not focus on how much you have to do. Maybe a short example will help. One of my goals is to increase the readership of my articles and to get more people exciting about Big Ticket Marketing. One of the best ways to do that is to get my blog and my articles out to as many readers as I can. So this week, I wanted to get my Blog and my articles listed in as many E-zine and Electronic List directories as possible. I even have software to help me do this. Guess how many directories and list locations there are? 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