Public relations can be defined as the practice of managing the information exchanged between an organization and those who are interested in – or potentially affected by – that organization. Effective public relations can be carried out by an organization’s own internal PR team, or it can be entrusted to an external agency. In any event, it is wise for an organization wishing to conduct public relations to devise a solid plan before acting.

An effective PR plan is one that satisfies the needs of both the organization and its various “publics” (i.e., those who are interested in and/or stand to be affected by the organization and its future actions). The organization itself benefits from a PR plan because the plan can help organize its thinking and actions related to how to best get their intended message out. Meanwhile, the intended recipients of the campaign’s message – and often many unintended recipients as well – stand to benefit from the process by being better informed about something that matters to their lives.

Whether your organization chooses to conduct its own PR work or to be represented by a PR firm specializing in the field, it is important to start with a solid plan.

Here are 5 tips for writing an effective public relations plan:

Step #1: Determine what message you want to convey, and to whom:

Every organization has its own challenges in terms of public perception. Some are looking to get more exposure, while others are looking to influence or change the public’s pre-existing perceptions . Still others want to highlight recent achievements in order to gain the attention of prospective investors, partners or customers.

Your public relations plan needs to start with a clear sense among the members of your PR team as to the nature of the message your company wants to convey. Then, your team needs to clearly define whom you would like to receive that message. For both items, be as specific as possible during the planning phase: they set the tone for the rest of your campaign.

Step #2: Gauge the current public opinion about your organization:

It is very important that your plan include your conducting of some formal or informal research about the nature of public opinion vis-à-vis your organization as it stands today. Rather than making assumptions about how your stakeholders – as well as your prospective investors, customer and partners – view your firm, it is important that you find out more about what they actually think. This type of research can take the form of secondary research such as reading opinion polls or articles about your firm, or it can take the form of primary research such as via interviews, surveys and focus groups. The bottom line: you need to know where you are now in order to know where you are going.

Step #3: Set a budget:

Effective PR can be done cheaply or even for free in some cases. However, as a rule you should anticipate some level of expenditure for your campaign,. Budget concerns are an important factor. Since your PR budget has a strong effect on the resources you can afford to put behind your plan, be sure to carefully set an appropriate budget by including all of the relevant stakeholders. Tip: if your CEO (or equivalent organizational leader) can be convinced of the potentially wide-ranging financial and reputation-related effects of the issue you are trying to convey to your publics, he or she will be much more likely to earmark the appropriate funds for your PR initiative.

Step #4: Decide how you will get the word out:

Good public relations work is a multi-faceted area of practice with a multitude of options available in terms of ways to communicate your message. For example, you may find ways to entice reporters to write special-interest articles written about your organization. Or, you might hold a public relations event, submit your organization for consideration for an industry award, or hold a press conference – just to name a few. The mode of communication you ultimately choose will depend upon many factors, including the nature of the message you want to convey, the current political climate around the issue (if applicable), the degree to which the issue is of general public interest, your PR budget, and other factors.

Step #5: Create a plan of execution, including a detailed timeline:

Every good public relations plan must include a step-by-step plan that outlines the key milestones of your PR effort and fills in the specific details for executing the plan. An important element of your plan of execution is to assign each task to a particular person, along with a deadline; this creates a sense of accountability for each task. Of course, once the execution phase is launched and some time passes, you will likely find yourself needing to adjust your tactics to meet an ever-changing environment. Still, this need to make ongoing adjustments to your plan is no excuse for skipping the mapping out of the tactical steps ahead of time. During periods of relative chaos, you will be glad to have a plan to which you can refer in order to keep things on track.

Every solid public relations plan should be built upon the basic framework highlighted above. Whether you conduct your own campaign or entrust your PR campaign to an expert PR firm, your plan – and the thinking you go through to formulate it – will go a long way toward helping you reach your PR objectives.

With the uncertainty of the economy, legal marketing agency Beyond All Reasonable Doubt Marketing is advising law firms to take a serious look at their budgets. While marketing, advertising and public relations dollars frequently are cut to reduce expenses, marketing experts agree that a down economy is actually the time when marketing efforts should remain in place, and if anything, be enhanced.

“When other law firms reduce their spending and cut their marketing, they have less presence in the marketplace,” explains BARD Marketing founder and president, John Sailer. “This means the time is ripe for a savvy law firm to grab market share – to reach the audience that is still there but who is hearing from fewer of your competitors.”

When planning your law firm’s budget, you should start by identifying how much you want to spend. While there are no hard and fast rules across the different types and sizes of law firms, it makes sense to budget your marketing as a percentage of expected revenue. Several studies have pegged overall law firm marketing budgets to be between 2 percent and 3 percent, with leading firms spending 5 percent or more.

Second, prioritize your initiatives by looking at both costs and expected benefits. This is easy if you tracked your efforts in past years. Remember that some of the lower cost initiatives may bring strong value while some of the higher cost initiatives may bring very little value. With this said, it is imperative to track outcome of every initiative.

BARD Marketing is experienced in budgeting and planning for short- and long-term marketing and advertising plans, and enables law firms to achieve and track ROI for their marketing activities. For more information or to request a report on Yellow Page Advertising Costs and Effectiveness, please visit www.bardmarketing.

A cardinal rule of business is to be well prepared in every aspect of your business. This can quickly become a hard rule to follow when business is booming and there is so much to track and prepare to be used in the most beneficial ways for your business. But ignoring the importance of being well prepared in all aspects of your particular business can stifle your productivity and cause you to lose clients and revenue.

Presenting your business, services, and business ideas to clients and prospective clients is an integral part of generating high interest in your small business and continuing to generate high interest in your business through the changes that are inherent in every business industry. Presentations help you to illustrate your business mission, services, goals, and ideas more clearly. Promotional materials given to attendees provide them with tangible reminders of what has been presented to them. Promotional materials are also used of course to help promote your business and they should not be restricted to handouts to attendees of your meetings, but also as part of strategic promotional runs.

This is all well and good. As most of us know, presentations and promotional materials are huge helpers in generating high interest in our businesses. Finding the time to develop professional presentations and promotional materials given that you have the skills required to fashion them, however is another matter for businesses of every size. Do we even need to say what a colossal waste of time, energy, and money it would be to eek out an opening in your tight schedule for developing presentations and promotional materials, if you do not have the skills to give them a professional polish?

You have a competitive enough road ahead of you as a small business trying to compete with not just other small businesses, but bigger businesses as well. Efficiency is important in any sized business. But it takes on even more of significance for the small business. You have less starting capital funds and resources to leverage with in the marketplace. Therefore you need to be especially efficient in the distribution of these for greater productivity, giving you added leverage over competing businesses.

This may all sound like an uphill battle to you as the owner of a small business. But there are solutions that can help you get to the top in business, whether you operate out of a home office or a small commercial building. A virtual assistant to develop and give your presentations and promotional materials professional polish is one such solution. This is a common service leading virtual assistants provide. Commonly working with the development of professional presentations and promotional materials, virtual assistants have acquired extensive training and knowledge in these and other areas that are crucial to operating your business the most efficiently and affordable way possible.

Presentations and promotional materials are also great aides to use in the training of your employees. Outsource the development of these to a virtual assistant who can create materials that clearly define the important role your employees have in the success of the company, and provide them with the necessary training for them to succeed in working for your small business. Having these prepared by a virtual assistant has several advantages. Virtual assistants can most often prepare them in less time and at lower costs than alternate presentation and promotional material developers. Training employees with the presentations and promotional materials developed by your virtual assistant ensures uniform training of all of your employees for the greatest productivity and meeting of expectations by them.

Outsource your presentation and promotional materials needs to a virtual assistant, and you will have the advantages for success that being well prepared offers to businesses. Inquire about the other assisting services your virtual assistant can provide for you that will help you to be even more efficient for greater productivity and success.

BY.-  http://www.MomentumStockTrading.com   

A beginner usually feels very attracted to the stock market while for example discovering a penny stock that’s being reported in CNBC or the news program and watching it rise steady fast and make new highs from $1 to $7 in just 2 months.

While learning about this successful news story he’s saying to himself “Oh boy if I was one of those lucky guys who bought that cheap stock back when it was priced at $10 I easily would have tripled my money by now… That means my 10 grand would transformed in to a whooping 70 K! hassle free … I would have been able to grab one of those big HUMMERs on the spot and probably pick up a nice Rolex by the way!”

The stock market news constantly reports of hot small cap stocks that are breaking out and making tremendous gains on the same day or doubling in price in just a few hours. Back in the bull market of the late 90’s you could easily see a good number of hot stocks sprouting out every week.

Those years surely made it look like every body could easily take LONG SHOTS and make a shiny pile of gold every day in the stock market. But today’s market is a different story. A totally different animal.

Some say that the stock market has gotten more realistic. Fantasy land is over and GAMBLING YOUR WAY TO RICHES is not an option anymore. You might get lucky a few times, but your constant loses can wipe you out sooner or later.

The fact that the bull market period has ended for now doesn’t mean that you can’t make a great deal of money in today’s market. A lot folks from many walks of life keep making excellent profits on a daily basis, pocketing hundreds & thousands of dollars by trading penny stocks online.

Success in penny stock trading starts by applying a wiser and REALISTIC methodology for choosing hot penny stocks as well as for getting in and out of them with profits in mind.

You need to look at the stock market more realistically. You got to learn that you can benefit when stocks go up and also when they FALL down.

You got to WORK SMARTER and get more selective about the hot stock trading opportunities that you choose. You need to embrace the nature of day trading and be fully prepared to take advantage of stocks that are poised for a BIG RISE on the same day.

The bottom line is you have to PREPARE YOUR SELF to be successful, just like you would do it in other areas of your life in order to achieve success.

Are you going to let the “Credit Crunch” crunch you? Even though the present negative press and media coverage is enough to make you pack up and head for the hills – don’t! Or, burying your head in the sand isn’t going to help either – you need to take some positive action!

In ignorance, many companies pull the plug on their marketing budgets when times get tough – but that is very short sighted. Why is your business in decline? It’s because you have less clients, or your current clients are spending less.

So what is the solution?

Yes, you need more clients or encourage those you work with to spend more with you. As a marketing company, we often have people come to us when they are in trouble. Through months or possibly years of neglect of their sales pipeline, they have reached difficultly where their cash flow dries up, and their forward forecasts will no longer gain them credit with their bankers. That’s such an awful place to reach! So, please learn from other’s mistakes and concentrate your efforts on sales and marketing.

So – how’s your sales pipeline?

Have you dedicated sufficient man hours or staff to ensure that new business will continue to flow your way? It’s highly recommended to introduce new practices in the current climate and here are a few suggestions to get you going:



Re-educate your sales staff to the new demands of business under the Credit Crunch i.e. you are going to have to negotiate harder than before and deliver more

Re-evaluate your current spend on marketing and where possible increase it

Adapt new methods of lead generation and find new sources

Network with increased intensity amongst your clients, prospects, collaborators, partners, suppliers and competitors

Rekindle your relationship with current clients and ensure you are getting your share of business if other suppliers are involved

Tighten your credit control to ensure constant cash flow

Take fewer financial risks than before, and if possible, increase the level of deposits on orders to spread your risk or costs (if applicable)

Introduce something new (Product or service) to make sure your visibility levels remain high with current and potential clients

Automate your sales pipeline using a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system like www.salesforce.com – so you never ever miss another lead or opportunity, and you can track your sales pipeline accurately

Ensure that you confirm at least 30% of this quarter’s pipeline – more if possible

Ensure you are using the internet to your advantage using Search Engine Optimisation, Web 2 practices such as blogging, and raise your presence in social networking and book-marking sites such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Facebook etc

If you think only big corporate names need to think about things like brand names, think again. Your brand says a lot about you and your business, and that’s as true for a one person home-based operation as it is for a multinational conglomerate. In this article we look at how creating a strong brand for your business can help you set yourself apart from the pack and lay the right foundation for the future growth of your business.

WHAT IS A BRAND?

Your brand is more than just the logo on your letterhead and business cards or your business name. It is your corporate identity. An effective brand tells the world who you are, what you do and how you do it, while at the same time establishing your relevance to and credibility with your prospective customers.

Your brand is also something more ethereal. It is how your business is perceived by its customers. If your brand has a high perceived value, you enjoy many advantages over your competition, especially when it comes to pricing. Why do you think people are prepared to pay stupid money for items of clothing with the initials “CK” on them? Perceived value. Perceived value as a result of very effective brand promotion resulting in very high brand awareness.

Now, I’m not saying we all need to rush out and start creating brands that are going to be recognized the world over. Most of us simply don’t have the time or other resources necessary. What I am suggesting, however, is that it is possible for your brand to dominate your niche.

WHY DO I NEED TO CREATE MY OWN BRAND?

=> Differentiation

We touched on this in the previous section when we looked at what a brand is and how it can be used to increase the perceived value of your products and services. The main reason for creating your own brand is to differentiate yourself from your competition. New websites are a dime a dozen. So are home-based businesses. You need to constantly be looking for ways to set yourself apart from your competition. Your brand can do that for you.

=> More Effective, Efficient Marketing

Another good reason for creating your own brand is to make your sales force (even if that’s a sales force of one – you) more effective and efficient.

Imagine if you didn’t have to spend the first 50% of your time with a new prospect explaining who you are, what you do and how you do it. What if your brand had already communicated that for you? You can spend 100% of your time focusing on sales rather than educating your prospects about your business

Another benefit of branding is that the efforts you expend increasing your brand awareness through promoting and marketing your brand to your target market automatically transfers to your products and services. So, even when you’re advertising your brand, you’re indirectly also marketing your products and services.

HOW DO I CREATE MY OWN BRAND?

OK, so you’re convinced you need to create your own brand. Where on earth do you start?

We saw earlier that your brand needs to say who you are, what you do and how you do it. It needs to do all these things at the same time as establishing your relevance to and building credibilty with your prospective customers. Needless to say, it is absolutely essential, if you are to build your own brand, that *you yourself* have a firm grasp of who you are, what you do and how you do it. If not, you’re going to have the devil’s own time getting that message across to anyone else, let alone establishing your relevance and credibility.

=> Write A Mission Statement

So, let’s start by creating a mission statement. What is the mission of your business? Obviously you’re in business to make a profit. But making a profit is a byproduct of a successful business. Focus instead on how you choose to achieve that profit. What are your core values?

A good place to begin thinking about your mission is to put yourself in the shoes of your customers. Put yourself in their target market. Let’s say your business is web hosting. If you’re in the market for a web host, what things are important to you? Different people will be looking for different benefits but you can bet that they want their website to be accessible to site visitors so reliability will be high on their list. Price is also likely to be high on the list as is 24/7 technical support. What about add-on features such as unlimited email aliases, cgi support and what-not? These things will be highly important to some and less important to others. So focus on the benefits that are likely to be highly relevant to the majority of your target market. Let’s settle for our purposes on reliability, price and technical support.

Your mission statement might read something like this: “I strive to earn a fair return on my investment of time and money by providing affordable webhosting with guaranteed 99% uptime and 24/7 telephone technical support”. That’s a pretty general statement and if you decide to focus on a particular niche of the webhosting market, such as small business, you may want to more narrowly focus on that group in your mission statement.Now that you’ve written your mission statement, you can begin thinking about creating a brand that reinforces and supports your mission. So, getting back to the fundamental questions of who you are, what you do and how you do it, you can now begin to think of your business in these terms. You’re a webhosting provider, you host websites of small businesses and you do that by offering cost-effective webhosting solutions, guaranteed 99% uptime and 24/7 telephone technical support.

When you create your brand, you need to keep the who, what and how firmly in mind but also use the brand to establish your relevance to your target market and build credibility with that market.

Let’s turn now to the nuts and bolts of creating your brand.

=> Describe What You Are Branding

List out your business’s key features and characteristics, your competitive advantages and anything else that sets you apart from your competition.

Using our webhosting example, you’ll focus primarily on the objectives from your mission statement namely, reliable, cost-effective webhosting solutions supported by 24/7 technical support.

=> Identify and Describe Your Target Market

Decide whether you want to target lthe entire webhosting community or only a segment of it such as small business websites. Describe your market.

=> List Names that Suggest the Key Elements from Your Mission Statement

The key elements from your mission statement were reliability, cost-effectiveness and customer service. List names that are suggestive of these elements. Let’s use Reliable Webhosting for our example. (I don’t claim to be a creative genius.)

Don’t limit yourself to real words, though. A coined name with no obvious meaning is a perfectly legitimate name provided it conveys something about your business. You will find coined names easier to trademark and secure domain names for too – a definite plus!

=> List Tag Lines that Reinforce Your Mission Statement

We’ll use: “Outstanding reliability and technical support at a price your small business can afford”. I know, I know. You can do much better, I’m sure.

HOW SHOULD I USE MY BRAND?

=> Create a Logo for Your Brand

Your logo is NOT your brand but your logo should allow your brand to be instantly recognized by those familiar with it. To this extent, your logo helps create and reinforce brand awareness.

The logo you create should be able to be used consistently in a variety of different media. It should be suitable for corporate letterhead and business cards, as well as for your website and corporate signage (if any). You do NOT want a confusing mishmash of logos and banners and heaven knows what else. Everything you produce needs to use the same, consistent style of logo so that, over time, your logo becomes synonymous with your brand. Instant recognition is what you’re going for here, so don’t dilute it by using several different logos for different purposes.

=> Consistent Usage of Company Name, Logo and Tag Line

Going back to our webhosting example, putting the brand name and tagline together, the physical manifestation of your brand will be:

RELIABLE WEBHOSTING Outstanding reliability and technical support at a price your small business can afford.

To establish brand awareness, this branding needs to be used consistently and frequently in everything your produce, whether that be letters to clients, business cards, brochures, quotations, invoices, advertising, promotion, on your website, on the front door of your principal place of business and on your products. And don’t forget to be consistent in your use of color schemes. These can be powerful brand reinforcers.

=> Marketing and Promotion of Your Brand

Once you’ve created your brand, you need to market and promote it, in addition to your products and services. This is how you establish your credibility and relevance to your target market. You can hopefully see why your brand needs to be suggestive of your mission statement. If, at the same time as you’re selling your products and services you also push your brand, your brand becomes synonymous with your products and services. And vice versa.

A properly descriptive brand and high brand awareness amongst your target market will allow you to more easily introduce a wider range of products and services when they’re developed without having to start by again selling who you are, what you do and how you do it first. Your brand has already presold YOU. Your job then is to sell your products and services.