Blogging for Publicity

By Kim Dushinski - Aug 17 , 2007

Last week, I opened my email and found an urgent message from a Wall Street Journal reporter who wanted to interview me the next day. This week, I had a call from a Chicago radio show host asking me to be a guest on his show. None of this would be surprising if I were actively seeking publicity – but I’m not. So, how did these media opportunities fall in my lap?

My blog.

Both journalists found me by doing a web search. My blog showed up in their search results and consequently I was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal and will be on Chicago radio. While these opportunities for me were accidental, you can certainly launch a purposeful publicity campaign with your blog.

As it always does with a successful blog, it all starts with good, solid content for your readers. If your blog is a high-quality one, you will have completed the first step towards impressing journalists who find you online. By reading a few posts they can tell that you are an authority on your subject, can communicate effectively about it, and that your audience responds to you.

You will want to have an easily found Contact page on your blog. Not only will your readers be grateful to have a way to reach you to ask questions about your book, so will media people trying to find a way to interview you. Include a phone number, an alternate phone number, your mailing address (so they know where you are located), and an email address that you check often. You might even consider sharing your cell phone number so they can text message you. If you are the only expert they find who is text-able, you might get the story just because of that.

If you put all this information on your main contact page, you may find that you get too much contact from the general public. After all, it’s one thing to get an urgent call or text message from a big name reporter and an entirely different thing for that to be coming from a fan. To reduce the mainstream use of your contact data, put all the detailed contact information within your press kit. Granted, this is open to everyone, but most people will not venture into a press room if they are not media and, even if they do, can see your disclaimer that certain forms of contact are for media only.

By all means, create a robust press kit and put it online. This just makes a journalist’s job so much easier to find certain things at their fingertips. Your photo, bio, company or industry statistics, press releases, story ideas, and even sample questions and answers are all great resources for them. (If you need an online press kit, I highly recommend the ones at www.247presskit.com.)

But how do these reporters find your blog in the first place?

Most likely, it will be through search engines. And while search engine optimization (SEO) often sounds as complicated as solving world peace, I assure you it is not—okay, it is. But you honestly don’t need to go through all the gyrations that the heavy duty SEO guys do. Just blog regularly, take a few extra steps to help your ranking, and then sit back and let Google do all the work.

By blogging you are already doing the best thing you can do to help search engines find you. They are looking for regularly updated sites. By definition, a blog will get better ranking than a static website. Another very (make that VERY) important strategy is to use keyword-rich headlines. This is what will help the engines determine what you have on your page and serve it up when someone searches. And, of course, do all the usual traffic-driving techniques of a blogger as well.

If you want to get started blogging or make your blog better, check out the free Audio Workshop I did with Yaro Starak about how to use a blog to market your book. It has tons of great blogging tips and ideas.

See you in the blogosphere!