Web Based PR: Communicating Your Expertise to Your Market Via the Web

Consulting

Welcome to my new website for  “Web-Based Public Relations.” As many of you know, for the past 20 years, I have made my living as a PR consultant for private practitioners and other professionals – experts, all. As I wrote in my first posting to this site, through PR for Professionals, I help my clients to promote their practices by getting them:

• Targeted placements before their potential clients, patients and customers

• Speaking engagements before community and professional groups their target markets attend

• TV and radio appearances their potential clients and customers are likely listen to and watch

• Articles both by and about them in publications that will likely be read by their potential clients and customers

For 15 of these years, my husband Tim was struggling with the side effects and complications from the several surgeries, chemotherapy and radiation he underwent as a consequence of a very serious brain tumor. (You may read about our struggles in two articles here and here.)

As Tim’s advocate, I soon learned how to do online research. I also became increasingly aware of the shortcomings of the Medical System, and became passionate about educating people about the dangers of this flawed system.

After Tim died in November of 2005, I set up my first website, HonestMedicine.

HonestMedicine has become a website that I’m proud of. After a few months, I began to feel strongly that the information on my site needed to reach the public. But I had never really marketed a website before. The marketing of my clients’ sites had always been handled by someone else, or by a combination of experts – usually a webmaster, who often subcontracted with an expert in search engine optimization.

I was definitely not an expert in web-based marketing – yet.

But, with my own site, I felt strongly that these “mass market” promotional approaches would NOT be effective at getting my information out there – and getting me known as an expert.

I decided to experiment with promoting my own site through my own, very new, brand of marketing – which I would come to call “Web-Based PR.”

I found that I was right: Marketing an information-packed site was, indeed, very different from marketing a “salesy” one. I decided to try some innovative techniques to market HonestMedicine -- and hopefully, my own expertise, as well.

One technique I used was to go on other people’s blogs and leave well-written, well-thought-out, information-packed comments.

The other was to interview leading experts in the fields of Integrative Medicine and Medical Advocacy, and to post the audios on my site. I then promote the interviews, of course, by leaving comments about their content on other people's blogs. (You may listen to two of my interviews here and here.)

Both methods turned out to be excellent ways to promote my site -- and my expertise. In fact, leaving comments on other people’s blogs has led to several sites linking to mine, and to some site owners writing articles about HonestMedicine. These efforts also led to my being quoted in a Chicago Tribune article, which was, in turn, syndicated all over the country. For more examples of these successes, please see my article, “Why Communicate With Your Market Via the Web?” on this site.

Struck by how effective this kind of marketing was turning out to be for me, I started doing it for one of my clients. I don’t feel comfortable sharing the “trade secrets” I used to promote her website, but I can tell you that, because of my new-found web-based promotional skills – including leaving comments and conducting audio interviews -- her site is now being linked to by one of the top environmental websites.

However, I do feel comfortable sharing my own “trade secrets,” -- i.e., the kinds of things I am doing to build HonestMedicine -- and have set up this site to do that.

My intention is to work as a consultant to help other experts whose missions I believe in, to reach more people through their own, individualized web-based PR. (As you can see from my masthead, I now refer to Web-Based PR as “taking PR for Professionals to a new level.”)

I hope you will enjoy your visits to this site. Please take a look at the articles, as well as the links I have provided on the left-hand side. In the future, I will be posting other articles, adding more links, and sharing new case studies with you.

If you would like to talk with me about how I might be able to help you promote your own expertise via the web, please email me at JuliaS1573@aol.com, and I will be very happy to offer you a free initial consultation.

Who Is Your Target Market? The Most Important Question for the Expert to Answer Before Beginning Promotional Efforts

Before you start promoting your expertise -- either on the web or in the “real world,” or both -- your first step should be to correctly identify your target market, or markets. These are the people you will want to reach through your promotional efforts. If you decide to hire a PR expert to help you, be sure that the words, “your target market,” are brought up in your very first meeting. If not, you might be talking with a consultant who believes in using “mass marketing” techniques, which will probably not be as effective as the more targeted approach, for marketing your expertise. (For more information on why I believe “mass marketing” PR techniques are not as effective for promoting experts, please see my introductory article, Why Communicate With Your Market Via the Web?.)

Why is it so crucial for you to identify your target market (or markets) upfront? Because, if you don’t; if you just start getting speaking engagements, writing articles and leaving comments on other people’s blogs, without giving much thought to who you are trying to reach, one of two things will happen (or not happen):

1) You’ll start getting all the wrong kinds of clients (the ones you marketed to, almost without thinking)!

                       or

2) You won’t get much of a response at all.

So, how do you figure out who your target market is? Even if you think you know the answer to this one, please continue reading. In my 20+ years as a public relations consultant, I can’t begin to tell you the numbers of clients and potential clients who spent years marketing to the wrong people. Some of them brought reams and reams of articles written about them that had been published in magazines and newspapers, as proof that “PR doesn't work.”  But, when I questioned them about who their target market was, more often than not, they would answer: “anyone who can pay my fees.” That, they soon found out, was not a very good answer! In fact, it was probably the reason that they were getting so many “wrong” clients!

In fact, I remember one client, a financial planner, who began our first “get acquainted” meeting by telling me that his market was “rich people, executives, with a net worth of. . .” He couldn't have been more specific! By the end of our meeting, however, after answering my many questions about who he really enjoyed working with, he admitted, “Actually, I guess I don’t like very rich people much at all. My favorite people have less money, but have more of a real need to invest it wisely in order to survive.” We went on to promote him to the "right people," and he did very well. And, he told me, he was now earning “happy money.”

The more clearly you can picture who your ideal clients, readers, customers, and/or patients would be -- the more details you can give about them -- the better you’ll be able to reach them with your online and real-world PR efforts.

When I taught my continuing education class on “How to Promote Your Private Practice,” I would have my students create a fact-filled sentence about who their target market was. I told them that the more information their sentence contained, the better. But it had to contain the following elements: geographical, socioeconomic, gender, and age. So, one person might say, “My ideal client is a middle-class woman, age 35-50, living in Chicago.” Another might say, “My ideal clients are middle- and upper-income parents of college-age children, living in the Northern Indiana.” (In some instances, race would also be an important component -- for instance, in the case of one dermatologist I worked with, who concentrated her practice in treating skin conditions specific to African Americans.)

Some people have two or more target markets, especially if they tend to get referrals from specific professionals. For instance, a medical or legal specialist might get most of his or her referrals from generalists in the field.

Only after you have correctly figured out who your target market is (or markets are), can you begin to examine the best ways to reach them: via speaking engagements, media interviews, articles in professional publications; articles in regional or local publications; online articles; online interviews; audio interviews; or commenting on other people’s blogs. Most people will decide that a combination of these approaches will work best.

The challenge then becomes figuring out which of these approaches will be the most effective.

But it won’t make sense to even begin your promotional efforts if you haven’t carefully identified your target market(s).

Web Based PR -- The Nuts and Bolts: AN INTRODUCTION

As I have pointed out before on this blog, public relations is by far the best way for experts to showcase their expertise to their target markets -- their potential clients, patients and customers -- both in the real world and on the web.

In that article, I pointed out that, as a PR consultant to professionals, I promote my clients by getting them “real world”

(a) speaking engagements before organizations and professional groups their target market attends

(b) articles written by and about them in publications – often professional publications – their target market reads

(c) appearances on radio and TV shows their target market is likely to listen to and watch.

Also extremely important  -- but often neglected by experts who want their markets to know about their expertise -- is ONLINE PROMOTION. In my previous article, I introduced you to a few of the online promotional methods that work well to showcase one’s expertise.

They are:

(a) leaving well-thought-out comments on other people’s blogs, with link-backs to your own blog

(b) interviewing experts in your own (and closely related) fields, housing those interviews on your blog or website, and then publicizing your interviews through other people’s blogs

In this next series of articles, I will get into what my good friend, the late Hal Wright (author of the book, “How to Make 1000 Mistakes in Business and Still Succeed”) used to call “BLACK BOX”: actual information about HOW to use blog comments and audio interviews to showcase your expertise to your target markets -- i.e., your potential clients and customers.

In this upcoming series of articles, I will share actual examples with you, as well as case studies of ways to promote your expertise via the web.

THE SECRETS

**The biggest secret to leaving comments on other people’s blogs is to find “hot topics” that are being discussed in the media that you feel not only competent, but qualified, to comment on.

**Find an approach that is truly unique – most often a point of view that is unique to you, and not often discussed with relation to this “hot topic.”

**Write your comment – spending lots of time on it. Crafting your first comment may actually take hours. Don’t worry. Hard work upfront will be worth it. I will teach you HOW to write your comments so that they will bring you the best results.

**Find actual blogs that are discussing the topic your comments relate to, and craft your comment specifically to each blog before posting it.

**Find other places to leave variations of the same comment, and individualize your comment for each site.

**Track your work carefully, so that you can fine tune your approach to bring you better and better results.

In future articles, I will give examples -- actual CASE STUDIES of how to use these promotional techniques that have worked well for me in promoting my blog, Honest Medicine.

I will also teach you how to conduct audio interviews for your site:

**How to choose the right people (experts) to interview

**How to prepare your questions

**How to record and edit your interviews

**How to promote your interviews to bring more traffic to your site

A few examples of audio interviews I have conducted for Honest Medicine: (a) an interview with naturopathic physician, Dr. James Belanger, on "The Naturopathic Treatment of Cancer"; and (b) an interview with Dr. Elizabeth Lipski, on many nutritional topics.

Stay tuned. I hope you will agree that web-based PR can be FUN!!