How to Build Public Relations Media List [Video]

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In this installment of Tips in 2, our video series of helpful, two-minute small business marketing tips, Connie Sung Moyle, Public Relations Manager at VerticalResponse, shows you how build an effective media list quickly and easily. With a little help from the Internet and Excel, you can discover and organize key reporters, writers and bloggers that can help spread the word when you have big news about your product or service. Here’s how:


Search engine optimization (SEO) is consistently evolving, including how it’s referenced. “Most people have migrated to the term ‘search’ or ‘integrated marketing,’” says online marketing consultant and WebScout founder Laura Greeno. Buzzwords aren’t the only aspects of SEO that have evolved since 2006, which Greeno refers to as the time of smoke and mirrors. To keep your ‘search’ skills up-to-date as well, follow these four tips:

Tip #1: Have an integrated approach
SEO strategy used to be divorced from a content marketing strategy. Sites like Copyblogger that emphasize creating quality content, were not nearly as ubiquitous as say, SEO experts offering to “optimize” your text with keyword stuffing (which is now considered a big no-no).

Although many people are much savvier these days, due in no small part to uk phone number list Google penalties and algorithm updates, some still see SEO as wholly separate from other marketing efforts.

“In order to drive sustainable marketing today, you really need to have a fully integrated approach, and search marketing has to cross all those facets of marketing efforts,” Greeno explains. That means that you’re thinking about search (and what people are looking for and would be interesting to them) throughout your entire marketing scope: articles, press releases, social media, and even offline. The topics covered in all aspects are consistent.

Although it’s important to know which topics people are searching for, this goes above and beyond simply looking at keywords. You’re looking for what people are interested in learning and how your content can solve their problems. Using social media as well as engagement with posts on your site (and offline) can help you get to know your readers and guide your content. This goes beyond just figuring out which combination of keywords is optimal, to really understanding potential customers.

Greeno is quick to point out that search crosses into all the different efforts and cannot exist all by itself. She predicts that SEO may even disappear as a term as small businesses realize just how integrated it is. Creating and distributing valuable content to the right audience is far more important than optimizing for search, but combining all these efforts is even better.

Tip #2: Use synonyms, rather than just keywords, in your content
“Google has evolved over the last 18 months or so with understanding some of the synonyms that go along with keywords,” Greeno explains. ‘Inventory management,’ for example, may be a high volume phrase according to Google Adwords, but Google now also understands phrases like ‘inventory control’ or ‘inventory software’ or ‘management of inventory.’




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