Planning your publicity

My friend Caryn Clark is not only a very talented voice performer, she’s a very good writer as you can see clearly on her blog. While reading through some of her recent posts, I came across this excellent piece chock full of valuable insights and suggestions for every month of the coming year about how to generate publicity for your business. I hope you’ll read the entire article, but in case you don’t have time, here are just a couple of tidbits.

The author of the piece Caryn is quoting in her blog post is Penny C. Sansevieri, CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc. She begins by helping you think about where you want to place your article or PR piece: a newsletter, magazine, trade publication, web site…what ever makes the most sense for your niche. Next comes what I think it one of the key paragraphs in this entire article.

Once you define your publicity targets and get an idea of what to pitch when, you’ll want to open up a calendar and start circling dates that will matter to your story. Get creative with this! Often dates are overlooked because they may seem too small (like peanut butter and jelly day) but everyone’s competing for the biggies: Valentine’s Day, Christmas, etc. so why not add some off-beat holidays to your pitching calendar and see what happens? If you’re looking for every holiday under the sun (including international ones) try downloading the Calgoo calendar – this is a free program used to sync Outlook with your Google calendar – but an additional benefit of it is that it comes loaded with every imaginable holiday. A great tool to start your planning session!

Terrific stuff, Caryn. Thank you for sharing it.