How To Get An AVALANCHE Of Free Publicity For Your Music Home Business!There are 2 ways you can get tons of free publicity in the form of write-ups in magazines, newspapers, and even radio and TV. The first way is to compose a printed news release on your product or service. Write the release like a news article in a newspaper. Tell who, what, when, why, and how interested people can benefit from your product. Avoid hard selling copy --- just give the facts, and if you can weave in an interesting story in the process, all the better. For example, once I created a giant musical staff out of plastic and turned it into a game that kids could play on the floor. In the news release about it, I told how my own kids used it, and included some dialog between them: “That’s a whole note!” exclaimed my daughter Kendra. “Is not! It’s got a stem, and whole notes don’t have stems” my son Kurt corrected her. “Is too!” “Is not!” “Is too! “Is not!” “Oh…what’s a stem, Kurt?” “It’s the line coming down from the note head, stupid.” “I am not stupid!” “Are too!” “Am not!” Finally Mom intervened. But henceforth and evermore both of my kids knew the difference between a whole note and a half note. For some reason, editors found that little story amusing, and wrote up the story pretty much as I sent it in. They also included information on how interested parents could get a “Giant Staff Game” for their own kids, and as a result we got orders from all over the states and some foreign countries from both parents and schools. It was written up in House Beautiful, Better Homes & Gardens, plus many music magazines and teachers’ journals. A press release –sometimes also known as a news release - is an easy and low-cost method of getting word about your product or service out to the public. With the advent of the internet, it is easier than ever to write and distribute press releases all over the world for next to nothing – sometimes literally nothing, and other times for just a minimum fee. Back in the early days of our home business we used press releases to get free write-ups in magazines and newspapers all over the country, from Popular Mechanics to House Beautiful to Sheet Music Magazine to the Portland Oregonian and hundreds of others. We even got a news release on the front page of the Wall Street Journal along side a picture of Robert Redford. My friends in Medford even started me calling me “Robert Redford” as a friendly joke for the next year or two. Ad agencies would like you to believe that mere mortals like you and I have no business in the publicity field – it s hould be left to professionals like them, at horrendous fees. If you’re Ford or Coke or Nike, great. But if you’re an individual working out of your home trying to promote a product on your own, you have no choice but to do it yourself. My mentor, Joe Cossman, author of “How I Made a Million Dollars In Mail Order”, used to tell a story about an ad agency that quoted him a price of $50,000. to achieve certain publicity goals that he had in mind. He then told the agency that he had already achieved those goals himself at a cost of less than $500. If I walked into an agency today and asked them how much it would cost for them to get me a write-up in the following publications and web sites, how much do you think it would cost? Yahoo news The Wall Street Journal (front page) The Portland Oregonian The Medford Mail Tribune Mississippi Educational Advance Farm Journal Cappers Weekly Grit Parade Popular Mechanics Opportunity Magazine Entrepreneur Sheet Music Magacine Clavier Music Educators Journal Sing Out Harmonizer …And over 500 other magazines, newspapers, newsletters, ezines and web sites. The answer is – they would laugh me right out of the agency, because they couldn’t begin to guarantee such coverage in the first place, and if they could, it would cost a medium-size fortune. And yet I have gotten all those write-ups (plus radio interviews and a couple TV interviews) by myself – no advertising agency involved, just by sending out news releases. And it used to be much harder and more time consuming and expensive than it is today, since it involved printing the release, inserting it in an envelope, paying the postage, and so on. Today it’s a snap: It can all be done at your computer by using the internet services listed at the end of this chapter. The advantages of press releases are obvious:
With the development of the world-wide web, even home businesses now have a convenient way to submit their press releases to thousands of magazines and web sites and writers and news papers with the click of a mouse. Press release distribution services are becoming increasingly popular for both web-based and real-world based businesses. How to Write a Press Release If you were a newspaper reporter, you would be trained to ask the “5 W’s”: Who, what, where, when & why. Writing a good news release is no different – you need to answer all those questions in the body of your release. If you don’t answer those 5 questions, your release will be incomplete and probably will be ignored by editors who receive many such releases every day. The easier you make it for the editor, the easier it becomes for your news release to be published. Here’s a news release I wrote in about an hour and sent out via a service called PRWeb. Notice the headline sums up the story in a concise fashion, while the body copy fleshes out the summary in terms of the 5 W’s: Headline: New E-book Published on 'Secrets of Exciting Chords & Chord Progressions' Summary: PlayPiano.com today announced the publication of a new e-book titled "Secrets of Exciting Chords & Chord Progressions" with links to 40 web pages which demonstrate each chord & progression in full-color photos and narrated sound. The book covers all major, minor, diminished and augmented chords, plus many extensions such as 7ths and 9ths, plus chord progressions and how they work. Body copy: (PRWEB) January 4, 2006
-- Despite the popularity of music in general and piano playing in
particular, most adults who took piano lessons when they were kids did not
continue with their playing and as a result play either very little or not
at all. This simple news release was read 23,226 times, picked up by 530 news sources, and downloaded 47 times as a PDF. Not bad for a home-made press release! Go thou and do likewise. Here’s a list of some of the places online where you can distribute your press release: - Express-press-release.com - Free-press-release.com - I-Newswire.com - OnlinePressReleases.com - OpenPR.com - Press-world.com - Press411.com - PressReleaseSpider.com - Pressbox.co.uk - ClickPress.com - PR9.net - PRLeap.com - PRWeb.com - PRfree.com Free publicity for your music home business Click on the link below to get started now... Start Your Own Home Business in Music!
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News about teaching music and music teachers Pulitzer Finalist Rebeck Will Take Part in Free Discussion May 28 (Playbill)Theresa Rebeck ? represented on Broadway earlier this season with Mauritius ? will chat about her work as a playwright and novelist May 28 at the Bryant Park Reading Room in Manhattan. |
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