If your product or service makes a great holiday gift, send the media a photo of it, along with a brief. During a teleseminar I conducted called “Briefs, Fillers & Quizzes: How to Write Them and Why Editors Love Them,” I explained that briefs can take one of several formats. They include: –A one-page news… Read More
Content Creation
Create a quiz for inflight magazines
Whenever I fly American Airlines, I pull the inflight magazine out of the seat pocket in front of me and turn to the back to see if there’s a Mensa Quiz. Then for the next half hour or so, I go to work filling in the blanks, or decoding a series of numbers, or playing… Read More
Another website wants your articles
Add to your media database yet another ezine article directory. You’ll find it at Smartads Article99.com. You can create a free author account and submit your articles, old and new. Articles at websites like this one help increase your search-engine ranking because your articles will be picked up by other editors and publishers who also… Read More
Ezine article directory wants your articles
Add to your media database yet another ezine article directory. You’ll find it at Smartads’ Article99.com You can create a free author account and submit your articles, old and new. Articles at websites like this one help increase your search engine ranking because your articles will be picked up by other editors and publishers who… Read More
Learn how to get a six-figure book advance
Almost every week, it seems, an author calls me practically in tears, panicked that she can’t park in her garage because it’s filled with stacks of cardboard boxes that hold hundreds of books she can’t sell. Sometimes, the author tells me that she once dreamed that her book would be a best-seller and that it… Read More
Use powerful subheads on press releases and other copy
Of the five stories that appeared on the front page of today’s edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, my local newspaper, every one of them had a subhead just below the main headline. In today’s edition of the Wall Street, all four stories on Page 1 also have subheads. You’ll probably find something similar if… Read More
How to find freelancers for news releases, media kits and more in a hurry
Within the last several weeks, two projects have been driving me crazy: something I needed written very quickly, and a PDF document of an ebook that I need to update. But the Word file that I used to create the PDF was corrupted. It’s possible to edit a PDF but it’s time-consuming and it would… Read More
EzineArticles.com adds eight categories
EzineArticles.com, the giant repository for thousands of articles that can be picked up by editors and publishers all over the world, is one of my favorite places for submitting how-to articles. Now, they’ve added eight new categories for articles: Data Recovery—Lost data? Got data? This computer related category covers all of the issues relating to… Read More
Media hungry for news on “citizen journalism”
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m fascinated by all the “citizen journalism” experiments under way throughout the U.S. I’m not alone. Blogger Steve Outing says he wondered if he was writing too much about the topic, but that the responses to his blog items, and queries from “real” journalists, leads him to believe this could eventually… Read More
Website to train citizen journalists
One reason newspaper circulation is plummeting is because people feel a real disconnect between real life and what they see printed in their daily newspapers. Complaints of biased and inaccurate reporting, too much emphasis on crime (when in fact crime rates are decreasing) and too little good news are encouraging people to take news-gathering into… Read More