How to Get Attention and Grow Your Business

by Charlie Cook
Copyright 2005©. All rights reserved.

Want to promote yourself, your firm and get attention to grow your business. Writing articles that provide useful ideas to your target market can be the ticket. Without making a phone call or a request in the last two weeks my articles were published in dozens of publications. In addition I received the following requests.

Emily from Money 'n Profits, based in New York contacted me, asking if I'd be willing to provide content for a regular column for their one hundred and seventy-five thousand subscribers. Ashley contacted me from Utah for permission to run six of my articles in Sales and Marketing Excellence magazine, along with articles by gurus like Tom Peters, Stephen Covey, Tom Hopkins and Nido Quebin.

On Wednesday, Julie, a reporter from our local paper called. She wanted to know whether I'd like to be featured as the lead story in the Business section. The next day we did an interview over the phone and the photographer stopped by my office. Friday my photo appeared, front and center on the business section with an article on how I help firms to explain what they do.

Does this type of small business marketing publicity help? You bet it does. Getting yourself published for free is a sure way to get attention and grow your business. It's certainly helped my marketing services business.

After the article appeared in the local paper a number of friends asked how I'd managed to get my marketing services featured in the business section. The secret is, I didn't make a single call or make a single personal request to get all the above press. All I did was apply a strategy I've developed for writing and distributing my ideas on a regular basis.

Become a sought after expert. Whether you are a web designer, a financial services advisor, or an accountant, you have more knowledge about your field and than you realize. You know enough to write not one, but a dozen or more articles that your prospect market would love to read.

Stumped about where to begin? One of the best ways to come up with winning and engaging topics is to write down the questions that your clients and prospects ask you and use these as subjects for your articles.

To attract more attention and more clients, you need to spread the word about what you do. Each article you publish generates more free publicity and opens the door to new business by helping people understand the problems you solve.