Education used to be the big deal. If you had credentials, if you had a degree from a good university you could get a job in your industry or start gaining clients immediately after you graduated. While education is still important, the latest indicator of professional strength is coming more and more from good PR. The game is changing…
If you’re good at what you do, passionate, and dedicated… PR can be a way to get your foot in the door at your dream job.
So what is PR and how do I get good PR??
Today’s PR can be just about any public recognition or widely accepted accomplishment. Here are just a few ways to amp up your PR:
- Write and publish a book in your industry.
- Hold a few free seminars at local colleges.
- Write some articles for industry magazines.
- Find a few good online forums and post helpful solutions to people in your industry.
- Write a good blog with interesting and highly useful information.
- Enter contests for professionals in your industry.
- Teach a community education course
Any of these sound daunting to you? Well, they shouldn’t. These are all fairly easy ways to get yourself out there professionally and start getting recognized in your industry. If you’re serious about getting out there I recommend doing all of them!
Writing and publishing a book is easier now than it ever has been with all of the great self-publishing platforms that are out there. I highly recommend Create Space (Amazon’s self-publishing program.) And if you want to test out your idea before you put in a lot of hard work, and possibly raise some cash to put towards your publishing costs SlushPub.com is a great resource.
Holding seminars at local colleges is (almost always) as easy as deciding what to give a 1-3 hour seminar on and picking up the phone. Almost every university/college has lecture halls available after school hours. Just remember that you will need to advertise with many posters about 1-2 weeks before the event. You will also want to create some kind of hand out with your business name and contact info on it, such as power point slides. The other thing to do is to make sure someone can video tape the seminar. That way even if only a few people show up you will still have the benefit of creating a product that you can potentially sell on your site, or give away for free to get people to opt-in to your list.
Find some good industry periodicals and write a bunch of articles for them. Send them in and they can pick and choose what they want to use. This is great for them and it helps you get into that magazine without having to spend a lot of money to purchase advertising. The key to this avenue is to be prolific. The more articles you send in the more likely it is that they will use what you send them. The only price for publishing the article should be a by-line that includes your business name and website/contact info.
The most traffic-lucritive thing I have ever done for my websites has been to find some good forums and start helping others with issues in my industry. This generated tons of traffic for my sites. In fact, the site that I did this the most with (which I have not touched in over a year now!) still has the most traffic of all of my other (much more active) sites! Being genuinely helpful and knowledgeable on these forums does wonders to get your name out there and show people that you mean business, and you are worth their notice.
Writing a blog may sound passe, but trends among the masses pass with a ferocious pace these days. That has nothing to do with if they are still effective. As long as your blog contains useful and professional information, and is updated regularly (4-5 posts per week) people will come back for more and start talking about your site.
Contests are perhaps the best (and most fun) of all the PR tactics you can implement. If what you do has any sort of creative component or can be measured there is surely a contest out there for it. When I was in college I entered 2-3 short scifi/fantasy fiction contests and the experience was well worth the struggle to produce the works in a short time. I got excellent peer reviews, and I placed which at times has still gotten me recognition. If I had wanted to become a fiction writer at that time I could have easily followed the momentum of those contests and kept entering them and eventually gain a LOT of recognition. I have also entered web design contests and found that brings in clients just as well as any other avenue! And I didn’t even place in those. Entering contests makes you produce, gives you a chance to see how you stack up to your competition, and gets your name out there in a very fun way. And if you place you can add that to your resume and it is something unique that will catch the eye of a potential employer and make them curious about you.
Teaching a short community education course will start bringing in a modest income in the field you want to be working in as well as start to build a following. Make sure you do a good job of getting people excited about your industry, and make sure you actually teach them some seriously helpful information and you are going to be off to the races!
While I am a strong believer in education, it’s not everything, and you can certainly promote yourself without it as long as you are truly good at, dedicated, and passionate about what you do.