Build a better website and they will come? Not a chance. The value of your website will depend on traffic, and traffic depends on marketing. A website without a marketing plan is as useful as a toll free telephone number that nobody knows about. If you have an online store, or simply use your site […]

The SWOT analysis is a valuable step in your situational analysis. Assessing your firm’s strengths, weaknesses, market opportunities, and threats through a SWOT analysis is a very simple process that can offer powerful insight into the potential and critical issues affecting a venture.

The SWOT analysis begins by conducting an inventory of internal strengths and weaknesses […]

Overview
Product and brand failures occur on an ongoing basis to varying degrees within most product-based organizations. This is the negative aspect of the development and marketing process. In most cases, this “failure rate” syndrome ends up being a numbers game. There must be some ratio of successful products to each one that ends up being […]

Every Web plan should include a clear explanation of the market segmentation, target market focus, and a market forecast. It should include detailed information about each of the target market segments.
To develop an effective plan based on your customers’ needs and nature, you should be able to answer these questions:

Who are they?
Where are they?
What do […]

Let’s say you have a uniquely innovative product/business/invention/venture on your hands… one that’s generated some nice media exposure/publicity (whether it was the product of your hard work or generated by a hired PR specialist or agency). Instead of using the mounds of tear sheets as wallpaper and those stacks of DVDs as door stops–USE YOUR […]

It’s a phrase I hear over and over again from many entrepreneurs, small businesses owners and inventors: “I’d love to hire someone to launch our publicity campaign professionally, but we can’t afford it, so I’m just going to have to do it on my own.”
Over the past several months, I have been conducting an informal […]

We all know that the Internet has taken away geographic boundaries in the business world. The accessibility and expansiveness of the Internet allows the entrepreneur/business owner anywhere in North America to search outside his local yellow pages for the best and most affordable services available. This is especially true when it comes to finding PR/publicity […]

When it comes to generating publicity for a product, business or website, one of the hardest decisions entrepreneurs have to make is whether to launch the campaign themselves. What makes it tough is trying to determine the amount of time it might take to launch and maintain a successful publicity campaign. This article will help […]

When it comes to putting together your initial business plan or making out your annual marketing budget, the amount of money you allocate toward “marketing supportives” can make a big difference in the success of your business’ impending public relations/publicity campaign. Although it sounds obvious, many new entrepreneurs don’t realize that typical sales marketing materials […]

When you think of public relations or publicity, what comes to mind? For some people (even for some PR types), it may mean hounding or even badgering the media to get them to generate a story about you, your product or your business. Sometimes that works, but often it doesn’t. As a PR professional, I […]