Building your audience is crucial in building your business. Trying to establish yourself can take some time to gain respect. Leveraging publicity in your marketing will help you establish yourself faster, grow your audience and help you create social proof for your business.

What ways can you build your publicity?

I am glad you asked. Here are a couple ways to get some free press.

1. Pitch Your Articles

Everyone knows about guest blogging but I am talking about pitching ideas to larger websites so you can expand your audience. Having an article published on a successful website, online magazine or print magazine will build your reach, audience and your worthiness. You shouldn’t do anything without a plan and this is especially true for this!

• Make a list of places to reach out to that fall into your niche market.  You want to think about what your Ideal Client is reading and where they are getting their information from.  Focus on the larger sites to maximize your results and efforts.
• Create pitch topics for the appropriate resources you came up with.
• Create an Excel or Google Docs Spreadsheet to track who you contacted, their contact information, the date contacted on, the titles you pitched and anything else that might be helpful!

2. Hang Out Where the Reporters Hang Out!

Everyday thousands of journalist need to hit deadlines and in order to do that they must find experts to help them on their articles.  HARO (Help A Reporter Out) is a bad-ass resource that Peter Shankman created and is something you MUST check out if you want to get published as a resource! I’ve mentioned it on my blog as a must-have resource.  Here are some tips to be successful with HARO!

• Read the request very carefully and follow the instructions exactly.
• Act Fast! Make time for this email when it comes through so you can act fast in sending a reply!
• Create a relationship. This is your chance to build a media relationship. Use your social skills and connect with them on Twitter or Facebook.
• Only reply to queries you truly are an expert on. They are busy so don’t waste their time if you don’t know what you are talking about.

3.  Get More PR Opportunities from Social Proofing Yourself

Social proof is what builds your street cred. The more you build that up – the more you will be asked to do! Make sure that your audience knows about where you’re being featured at, who is interviewing you and what is coming up next.

• Use your PR opps on your social media outlets to let others know you are open for PR business!
• Display an “As Seen On” image proudly on your marketing material and website!

As your PR opportunities occur, you want to be sure to display them on your site for all to see!

Are you scratching your head wondering about how you can do this without paying big graphic designer bucks?

Keep reading or watch the video tutorial to see how you can make your own “As Seen On” badge image.

Watch the video tutorial or follow the steps below:

1. Email the source and see if it is ok to use their logo on your site.

2. Go To Pixlr.com

3. Create a new image. If you are using it on your sidebar, your width will probably need to be around 200-250 pixels.

4. Open up each logo image in Pixlr.

5. Drag each image to the blank project by clicking on the layer from the logo and dragging it to the blank project.

6. Resize and position the logos on your canvas, you can go to Edit | Free Transform or CTRL + T.

7. Save image and upload to your site.

Leave a Comment Below!

Please share the best piece of publicity you have received online with a link to it!! Do you have a link to a magazine feature or a guest post on a big named blog? Shout it out to the world because you rock. And post a link to your Facebook Page too so we can connect with you!