Spring is here, and to welcome the season PRChannel is running a promotion.

Starting today, if you sign up for a featured listing on PRChannel we’ll give you a banner ad on this blog for free!

We have several featured listing options available, and signing up for any of them will get you the promotion.  You’ll have to supply your own banners (120 x 60 pixels please) and they will remain live on our site for 1 month.  Just sign up for your listing and go through our automated process – after  your listing goes live one of our staff will contact you about placing your banner.

Read more about our listing options here, and hurry – this offer ends May 1st!

Wow!  We’re pretty excited about this…

PRChannel has passed the 1,000 follower mark on Twitter!  We joined mainly as another way to stay up-to-date on current PR related news and topics, but have since found a range of other great uses as well.

We use it to share ideas and thoughts that don’t quite make it into full-fledged blog posts, we tweet PR related news items that happen to catch our eye, we give ’shout outs’ to new companies that sign up for the directory (that now reach over 1,000 people), occasionally do a bit of self-promotion and, probably most importantly, we use Twitter to interact and network with others in the public relations industry.  We don’t tweet every 2 minutes (not even every day), and it’s always meant to be of real use to someone.

Thanks for following! (If you aren’t yet that’s OK…follow @PRChannel here!)

Tip sheets are essentially lists of a half dozen or so ‘tips’ that tell people how to do something or how to solve a problem.  They are a great way to get free publicity.  Traditional editors and reporters love them – they’re a ready to go piece that requires little to no extra work, and they cross into different formats (print, TV, radio, etc.) well because they can be used as short lists complete with bullet points.

Best of all, tip sheets are easy to write and can be pulled together relatively quickly.  Everyone has seen a form of a Tip Sheet in traditional media: “8 Ways to Lose Weight Fast”, “Top 10 Biggest PR Blunders of All Time”, “6 Proven Tactics to Lower Your Energy Bills”, the list goes on.

For those of you who spend time on, or are at least familiar with, the various online social networks (as any modern PR person should be) those types of titles should look familiar.  Go to the first page of Digg.com and at least two or three of the top posts will have titles similarly structured.

The ‘tip sheet’ tactic has crossed from traditional PR to new online mediums, except the online marketers and SEO types coined a new term for it: Link Bait.

Hey, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”…

5 Great Tips for Putting Together a Great Tip Sheet/Link Bait Title Article

1. Use numbers in the title and try to work in words like ‘Best’ or ‘Top’ – the whole idea is to make it exciting and easy to digest.
2. Be Concise.  The first sentence should give the instructions, the second sentence should explain them – that’s it.
3. Avoid promoting yourself or your client too much.  The temptation is there, but people will not trust your advice if they feel they’ve been pitched to.
4. Use ‘action language’.  The tips should read like well-written instructions, start off with a verb whenever its possible.
5. Make it short and sweet.  Limit the whole thing to a page; you want there to be enough information to  actually be of use, but people will not read through a huge laundry list: 5 to 12 tips is a good guideline.

You know what?  Not everyone gets to be on the Today Show or Oprah…and that’s OK.

Example: You’ve got an awesome new product/service etc. so naturally you write up a press release.  Now you can either submit it to Oprah and wait for them to find and notice yours out of the thousands they receive daily and call – OR you can tweak your release to be SEO-friendly and submit it to a distribution service.  Ensuring that your press release reaches a wide variety of search engines, blogs, websites and even journalists who are actually very interested in your product/service and will write about it.

Maybe you do both, but the point is that you’re going to be better off diversifying and letting a larger number of people find you, even though they may be in smaller niche markets.  David Meerman Scott had 2 ideas on how PR is evolving that are particularly applicable to this strategy (from his blog):

1. The old ways to get noticed were to buy expensive advertising and beg the media to write about you and your products.  The best way to get noticed today is to publish great content online.
2. Don’t talk about what your products and services do.  Instead talk about how you solve problems for your customers.

PR and the world of the press release is changing, traditional media sources are on the decline and online distribution methods are more accessible and producing better results than ever.  That is why we say go ahead and reach for that low hanging fruit.  While all your competitors are fighting each other for access to the top you’ll be building a solid base of customers and attention.  And who knows, maybe if enough of the small-time players are singing your praises the big media outlets will take notice eventually anyway.

There are tons of opinion pieces and articles/posts out there about corporate blogging, and most of them seem to have a negative spin.  They focus on the risks that a company takes by having a blog and all of the potentially negative outcomes associated with them.  We’re of the opinion that a bad corporate blog is just that, bad – bad for your reputation, bad for your business, and ultimately a risky venture.  However, when corporate blogs get things right it can be a public relations gold mine.

Here are 5 of the top reasons that corporate blogs succeed:

1. They Take It Seriously. Blogs are extremely easy to set up and pretty difficult to maintain in a meaningful way.  Corporate blogs who succeed take it seriously, often dedicating an entire team of staff members to their maintenance.  They put a specific plan in place so that content is created on a regular basis and realize it is a long-term investment.
2. They Take the Time to Brand their Blog. Successful corporate blogs take the time in the beginning to define how the blog will fit in with the firm’s existing corporate culture and set up specific objectives/goals.  They realize that a blog is just another type of communications tool, and they make sure it fits together with the rest of their PR efforts.
3. They Don’t Use the Blog for Blatant Self-Promotion. Yes, we all know that the reason a company has a blog is probably to promote itself.  However, no one will bother to read it or get involved in a discussion if the blog is just a glorified advertisement.
4. They Research the Blogging Community Before Launching a Blog. The human voice is a big part of why blogs are different than websites.  Bloggers will want a certain level of interactivity (comments/feedback) and will be turned off by overly corporate-y, structured, or impersonal language.  Corporate blogs who realize this fare better, and it is a reason that a blog may not be the best option for all companies.
5. They are Original in Both Structure and Content. Successful corporate blogs realize what makes a blog a blog and structure theirs accordingly – using visual elements, links, comments, and layouts that make the content easy to digest.  Blogs that just type up their latest press release for the next post, or only serve as a news feed suffer.  Also, blogs that are doing well are contributing to the community’s discussion in an original way, either by offering a new idea/point of view or putting a new spin on an old topic.

The PR Dashboard has had a great start to the new year and we have a few new visitor submitted resources that have been added!

First up is Online-pr, a great site with lots of information on making your PR campaigns better and less expensive.  Someone also suggested Manta.com, a great way to gather background information on both private and public companies online.

Last up for this set of additions is AdHat, where you can enter a keyword, brand name or agency to find appropriate promotional campaigns on display. Great for inspiration and brainstorming!

We’ve had a great response to the PR Dashboard so far, and we’ll post new additions here from time to time, but we can’t list them all so make sure to check back often.  And keep sending in suggestions…