Reasons to Solicit Free Publicity

Public relations is one of the highest leverage activities you can do when building your business.  The problem is that it’s often hard to get started and people get discouraged when their initial attempts prove fruitless.  This article won’t go through the tactical steps to achieve success (although much of that information is available on my website).  Rather, it will discuss the reasons for pursuing PR as a marketing exercise.

Anyone building a business knows that time is the enemy.  In most cases, you know what you need to do.  You just don’t have enough time to do it all.  That’s why leverage is so important.  Leverage refers to any situation where you can do something once but have the effects of that something happen many times.  It means you can use your time and energy once but have the effort get magnified through some medium.

Public relations does exactly that.  It allows you to communicate some information once but have that information projected to hundreds or thousands of people without any additional effort by you.  Examples of this include interviews or media quotes where you are positioned as an expert in your field.  Not only do you look better to an individual listening or watching the program but you are heard (or watched) by many people at the same time.

Public relations allows you to build credibility and gain exposure in an extremely efficient way.  People are looking for guidance.  They are looking for a leader.  They’re looking for someone who can answer their questions and lead them through something they’re not that familiar with.  And believe me; being interviewed or quoted on the radio, television or the local newspaper will quickly put you in that roll right in front of your ideal customers.

The hardest part is getting started.  When the people who work at these media outlets don’t know you, it can be hard to get started.  But once you break in, you’ll get to know those people and they’ll get to know you and a relationship can emerge.  And that has other benefits as well.  For starters, once you have a press release, you’ll have people to call.  Relationships with journalists form the foundation for most successful press releases.

Essentially, the pursuit of free publicity boils down to three things: access, credibility and leverage.  By going through the process and developing relationships with journalists, you not only get publicity today but you also guarantee future access as well.  By getting publicity, you gain enormous credibility from the audience and you leverage your time by communicating a message once and having that message forwarded to a lot of people without any additional effort by you.

Public relations is a mystery for most business people but it doesn’t need to be.  As mentioned earlier, my website provides a lot of free resources to help you demystify the process and start seeing results.  This article has given you a lot of great reasons to undertake the challenge and I hope you begin to look at the media as a tool rather than an unknown.