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Nataly Kelly spent years pitching publishers with an idea for a book on how language changes our lives and affects the world.

No bites.

She hired an agent who pitched it to the big New York publishers.

Not even a nibble.

Months later, after she severed ties with the agent, she got the bright idea to send a short pitch to the book editors in her LinkedIn network.

Bingo!

One of them, Marian Lizzi from Perigee, a division of Penguin, was fascinated with the tightly-worded, five-line pitch. She loved the idea, too, and said it was the first time an author had ever pitched her via LinkedIn InMail.

Fast forward: Penguin published Nataly’s book, “Found in Translation,” in October. The book is ***already*** in its fourth printing.

Not even a book agent could do what LinkedIn InMail was able to do.

You can’t ask for a better ROI than that. I’m guessing that Nataly laid the groundwork on LinkedIn long ago and started connecting with book editors and people who worked at publishing houses. Once she was connected to them, that made it easier to email them. 

Advanced Search + InMail = Success

Whether you’re looking for publishers to sign a contract, radio talk show hosts to book you as a guest, journalists to include you in their stories, or business people with specific titles who can buy your products and services, LinkedIn is a still a diamond in the rough if you don’t know how to use it.

LinkedIn expert Wayne Breitbarth knows EXACTLY how to use it.

He knows all the little tricks like using LinkedIn’s Advanced Search to find EXACTLY who you need, and then using LinkedIn InMail to introduce yourself and offer to help. That’s what he does, and he gets booked on radio talk shows regularly.

Wayne also knows intriguing ways to use LinkedIn’s new Professional Gallery, and the other new tools and tweaks introduced in the last several months, so you can put your best foot forward and tower far above your competitors.

Watch Step-by-Step How It’s Done 

Join Wayne and me from 3 to 5 p.m. EST on Thursday, Feb. 7, for a webinar on “LinkedIn Update: What’s In, What’s Out & Under-the-Radar Changes to Crush it in 2013.” He will go live on the Internet and demonstrate, step-by-step, how you can do what he and Nataly Kelly have done.

If the time slot doesn’t work for you, sign up anyway because I’m recording it, and I’ll send you the link to the download page where you can access the video replay and the package of bonuses.

On that registration page, be sure to read the testimonials from the many people who LOVED Wayne when they participated in his three previous webinars with me. Don’t miss this one. Register here.

If you want to read more about how Nataly pitched here idea, you can read The InMail That Landed Me a Book Deal. 

The Publicity Hound’s Blog

Never assume that people know what you want them to do. You have to TELL them.

Every time you write a status update on LinkedIn, or send an InMail, or answer a question in Groups, consider a call-to-action.

You might think that sounds “too promotional” on the world’s Number 1 business networking site. But not if you concentrate on actions that help people, not on the ones that promote what you’re selling and are more appropriate at your website or blog, or in your marketing materials.

Here are 9 powerful phrases to consider:

1. “Access our list of experts.” (Use this when connecting with a journalist or blogger.)

2. “Join the conversation at our blog.”

3. “Learn from our free articles.”

4. “Join my LinkedIn Group.” (Perfect to include in your profile, with a link to the Group.)

5. “Subscribe to free updates.” (Great for your Company Page!)

6. “Take our quiz.”

7. “Read our company bios.”

8. “Ask me a question about what keeps you up at 3 a.m.” (Your fellow Group members will love this one.)

9. “Join us in the fight against ____________” (A nice way to introduce yourself when inviting someone, who promotes the same cause as you do, to connect.)

Many of these are also appropriate in the new “Professional Gallery” feature that people see as soon as they land on your profile page.  

Learn New LinkedIn Tools Today

Today, from 3 to 5 p.m. EST, LinkedIn expert Wayne Breitbarth will demonstrate, step-by-step and live on the Internet, exactly how to take best advantage of the Professional Gallery and the other new tools and tweaks that LinkedIn has introduced in the last several months.  

“LinkedIn Update: What’s In, What’s Out & Under-the-radar Tricks to Help You Crush It in 2013″ will show you all the amazing things you can do to stand head and shoulders above your competitors. You can try Wayne’s tips on your own as soon as you’re done with the call.

One of the bonuses we’re offering is my list of “103 Powerful Calls to Action” that you can use not just on LinkedIn, but anywhere you need to show people what to do next. The nine examples I used above are on that list.

If the time is inconvenient, sign up anyway because I’ll send you the link to the download page where you can access the video replay and all the goodies, within 72 hours after the call.

Register here. If you have questions about the program, email me. 

What calls to action do you use on LinkedIn? Comment below.

The Publicity Hound’s Blog

Here are my Top 10 tweets from this past week, great for retweeting! If you missed these, follow me on Twitter.

10 places you can’t afford to publish mediocre marketing copy.
Use actionable words at the beginning of your meta description, like “Read,” “Discover,” and “Learn,” and explain what’s in it for the reader if they click on your piece of content to help improve conversion rates in the SERPs and social media.

How to get viral publicity.
Having your content go viral is also an incredibly powerful way to get your name known and build your brand.

LinkedIn InMail, NOT an agent, lands author a book contract.
Not even a book agent could do what LinkedIn InMail was able to do.

How Facebook Fan Page Photos = Engagement! [infographic]
Facebook Fan Page photos – how often do you post them? If you’re posting 1 per day, that’s one in 300 million photos uploaded per day!

3 Ways to Use Pinterest Secret Boards in Your Business
With over 11 million active users, Pinterest has drawn a larger crowd in a shorter amount of time than any other social network.

How to use YouTube to combat a bad online reputation.
Not only do videos get a lot of attention in the search engines ranks compared to just regular old links, they also work really well for reputation management.

3 ways marketers can use Facebook Graph Search.
The more fans that engage with your content, the more likely it will appear in the Graph Search.

EveryBlock, a great site for neighborhood news, closes its doors.
Though EveryBlock has been able to build an engaged community over the years, they made the decision to wrap things up.

Biggest Moments In Social Media Marketing — Wins and Fails
As the worldwide social media audience continues to grow, the impact of brands’ wins and fails are amplified that much more. If you create a big win, your victory is awesome. But if you fail, your mistake gets played out on the biggest virtual public stage.

How to leverage Twitter’s Vine app for B2B content marketing.
While Vine is still in its infancy, adopting another social tool can help showcase your business, humanize your brand and increase your awareness. 

The Publicity Hound’s Blog

Here are my Top 10 tweets from this past week, great for retweeting! If you missed these, follow me on Twitter.

When a journalist says “no” to your story idea, here are 5 things to do, and 2 things to never do. 
Pitch it to someone else whose audience needs to hear what you’re offering.

Pros & cons of free publicity in newspapers and magazines.  
If you know the advantages and disadvantages of each, long before the campaign begins, you’ll be in a much better position to schedule your pitches in enough time for certain media to cover your story.

Half of Facebook fans prefer a brand’s pages instead of the company website. 
A new study by Lab42 revealed that 50% of Facebook fans prefer a brand’s Facebook page over it’s website.

Why are we still writing press releases? Here’s why. 
Perhaps, most importantly, both an issue and a crisis require a thoughtful and proactive communications strategy.

Flo, the red-head in Progressive commercials, shows why you should review yr avatar during a crisis. 
Should a company in crisis consider reviewing and replacing its avatar to ensure that their words are aligned with their visual message?

5 ways to use Vine, Twitter’s photo-sharing service, for PR and marketing.
Users love the ease of use of what could be an app CNN says “may change Twitter” as we know it.

Twitter turns over info about its users to governments around the world, when asked, 7 out of 10 times.
Twitter offers plenty of detail about the number of times government agencies around the world have asked for information on users — and how often it complied.

6 ways to use a #Google+ hangout. 
Google+ is not yet a Facebook killer, but it has posted some impressive growth numbers and is slowly emerging as a formidable social network alternative. 

Is traffic coming from social media converting to sales? See Tip #2 on how measure this. 
Set up conversions as goals inside Google Analytics and simply measure the source of your conversions.

YouTube will start charging for premium content and wants your ideas. 
YouTube is asking media companies that have already gained large a YouTube following — like Machinima, Maker Studios and Fullscreen — to submit ideas for paid channels that would cost “somewhere between and a month.”

The Publicity Hound’s Blog

This is the third in a three-part series on the advantages and disadvantages of print, broadcast and online publicity. The other two posts in the series are The Pros and Cons of Free Publicity in Newspapers and Magazines and The Pros and Cons of TV and Radio Publicity.

*     *     *

Hands-down, online publicity ranks as my favorite form of publicity because it’s the most powerful and long-lasting. The list below should convince you. 

Advantages 

You can create online visibility for yourself through a variety of formats. Promote yourself through a blog, a YouTube channel, a podcast, or an archive of email newsletters. In other words, YOU are the media.  

It’s instantaneous. With print or broadcast publicity, you have to pitch your idea for a story and wait for someone to cover it. When you’re the media, you can write a blog post and publish it within minutes.

You can repurpose your own news in a variety of formats. Take a blog post and slice and dice it into 20 tweets. Record it and turn it into a podcast. Create a slideshow and upload it to a photo sharing site. Turn it into a video, or a series of videos, for your YouTube channel. Take the same information and use it to answer a question in a LinkedIn group, or on a Q&A site like Quora.com.

You can target a niche very easily. Whether you’re promoting yourself, or you want to generate publicity in an online media outlet, you can find places to target within seconds. One of my very favorite ways of finding lists of blogs or news outlets is to Google “top 10 small business blogs” or “best marketing ezines” or “most popular mommy blogs” or “aviation magazines.” Chances are pretty good that a blogger already has compiled a list. If you’re an author and you want book reviews, you can target niches very easily at the wide variety of book review and recommendation sites.

It has staying power. Often, blog posts, online news articles, videos and other content live online for years and can be found by the search engines.

You can gather and analyze statistics. What’s the Alexa ranking of a news site you’re targeting? How many people have subscribed to the RSS feed at your blog? How many people opened the press release that was distributed through out of the online services? Which websites, news or otherwise, are referring the most traffic to your website? How many people retweeted your content yesterday? How big are the LinkedIn news groups that include your target audience? Promote online, and you have statistics galore at your fingertips.

Social media builds relationships. On sites like LikedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+, you can meet people, share valuable content with them, and encourage them to follow you. If you do it right, some of them will eventually buy from you. 

Let Google do the work. Create great content, and the search engines will find it and deliver the content to whoever is searching for it. A service like Google Alerts will even send your content into the email of people who ask for it.

You can link to it. When you get publicity online, link to it from the Media Room or Press Room at your website. This gives you instant credibility.

It works for you round-the-clock. People can access articles about you, blog posts, video, etc. 24/7. With traditional media, like TV for example, a news show’s ratings will often determine whether or not someone sees your story.

Bloggers are often easier to pitch than traditional media. Bloggers are passionate about their topic, unlike many reporters who hate their beats and their jobs. Bloggers also have loyal followings. And they love to link to other blogs. Newspapers and magazines seldom refers to articles in other publications. 

Disadvantages

People can steal your content. If you’ve created Google Alerts for your important keywords, it should be fairly easy to find thieves who duplicate your content for their own websites or blogs. This happens to me occasionally, and I don’t always go after them and ask that they remove the content, either because the website looks like it gets little traffic, or I simply don’t have time.

You open yourself to scathing criticism whether or not your deserve it. Whether it’s a comment on someone else’s blog, or a book review on Amazon, the Internet makes it possible for anyone to say anything, often anonymously, and never have to face the consequences. Sleazy freelancers make money writing bad book reviews under fake names. Flamers go wild in the Comments section at blogs. And folks with a resentment against you can say whatever they please, for attribution or anonymously, even if their facts are wrongs. (See the next bullet point.)

Errors don’t have to be corrected. When you find a factual error written about you online, good luck trying to get it corrected. Most reputable bloggers will correct an error. But it’s often impossible to identify the owner of a website and obtain contact information. Errors can be cut and pasted into someone else’s article or blog post within seconds, multiplying the error. Others can link to articles or blog posts and never know that  they include errors.

That’s my very long list. I know I’ve missed many more advantages. Please add yours below. 

If you liked this series, please share it with your friends, followers and fans. 

The Publicity Hound’s Blog

Contests are powerful marketing tools, and not just for businesses and brands associated with beautiful images, like the ones on Pinterest for the Brides of North Texas.

A fun contest with an enticing prize can go viral within hours.

Contests can pull traffic to your website, build your email list, get you in front of people who never knew you existed, generate publicity, and sell more products and services.

Sponsor a contest on the world’s Number One social media site, and you have to adhere to a long list of Facebook promotion guidelines. Here are just a few:

—All promotions must be managed through a third-party app.  

—You can’t use Facebook features or functionality (likes, comments, videos, photos, cover photos, etc.) as a promotion’s registration, or you can’t automatically register participants by asking them to Like a page.

—You can’t use the Like button as a voting mechanism.

Not so on Pinterest, which has its own long list of Terms of Service but no third-party app requirement for contests.

Beth Hayden

In fact, Beth Hayden, an expert in Pinterest contests, suggests that you keep your contest simple. “Don’t ask contest participants to do five different things in order to enter. Make it a two-step process: Create a board, and tell them to tell you about it, whether it’s on Twitter, email, or in blog comment.”

That’s the easy part. Making your contest really work for you—by growing your email list, for example—is more difficult.

Beth will share tips on exactly how to do that when she’s my guest during a webinar on “How to Use Powerful Pinterest Contests to Grow Your Audience and Explode Your Profits” from 4 to 5:30 Eastern Time on Thursday, Jan. 31. Everyone who registers will receive:

—The video replay

—The PowerPoint slides we used for the presentation

—Beth’s report “Profile Power: 5 Ways to Bring in More Sales by Making Your Pinterest Profile Work for You.”

—Beth’s “Top Ten Ways to Use Pinterest to Drive Traffic to Your Website or Blog”

—My handy checklist that will help you remember important things to do as you’re pinning.

—The MP3 file so you can listen while you’re at the gym or walking the dog.

Go ahead and register for the Pinterest contest webinar  even if you’ve made plans for tomorrow afternoon because you’ll get the link for all the downloads and you can watch the video when it’s most convenient for you.

The Publicity Hound’s Blog

This is the first in a three-part series on the advantages and disadvantages or print, broadcast and online publicity. Part II will be featured next and focus on broadcast publicity.

*     *     *  

When it’s time to launch your next promotion, and free publicity is an important component, know the pros and cons of print, broadcast and online publicity.

If you know the advantages and disadvantages of each, long before the campaign begins, you’ll be in a much better position to schedule your pitches in enough time for certain media to cover your story. You’ll also be able to react quickly and know which media can cover you just a few hours after they learn about what you’re offering. 

Here are the most important things you need to keep in mind for print publicity. This includes newspapers, magazines, industry publications, alumni magazines, business journals, print newsletters and niche publications like church bulletins.

Advantages:

• You can take advantage of newspaper and magazine editorial calendars. Larger publications create these for the benefit of advertisers who need to know which topics will be featured in which issues. Even if you don’t advertise, an editorial calendar can help you determine where your story might be the best fit.
• Readers clip articles and pass them along to friends. Or they pass along the entire issue. Consider what happens to magazines inside your doctor’s office. Or on airplanes, where inflight magazines are stuffed into the seat pockets. Or in libraries, where a year’s worth are bound in big volumes, and can be viewed by patrons years after they were printed. Magazines published every other month have the longest shelf life of all.  
• You can target niches. Niche publications, like special interest magazines and newsletters, can have very loyal audiences and can let you target your message like a laser.
• Daily newspapers have short lead times for news. If you’re pitching to a daily newspaper on Monday, it might appear in the paper on Tuesday if it’s newsy.
• You can make reprints. Be very careful about this, however. Because the publication owns the copyright, you must ask permission to reprint. Some big newspapers and magazines have hefty fees for reprint rights. If you can’t afford the cost, buy as many copies of the publication as you can afford, as soon as it’s published.  Don’t assume you can reprint articles written about you.  

Disadvantages:

• Circulation has been plummeting at most major daily newspapers. If your story makes it into the print version of a newspaper, but not onto the newspaper’s website, it can be here today and gone tomorrow.
• Many people under 40 don’t read newspapers. If people under 40 are a significant part of the target audience for your publicity campaign, you need to concentrate on online publicity. Most of those people read their news online.  
• Lead times for various types of print media can be very confusing. While your daily newspaper might need only 24 hours notice, the big national magazine you’re dying to get into might want pitches a full six months before the issue is printed. Pitching a Christmas story? You’d better be working the phones in July. Weekly newspapers, on the other hand, sometimes want their stories a few weeks in advance.  
• Errors appear in print forever. If a fact in your story is wrong, it’s there for all the world to see for months and maybe even years. Even if you call the publication to correct an error in a front-page story, the correction might run on the bottom of Page 27 three days later.

That’s my list of pros and cons. Did I miss anything? Please add to them in the Comments below.

The Publicity Hound’s Blog

If you see a message in your email from “LinkedIn Email Confirmation” and with the subject line “Please confirm your email address,” it could very well be a fraud.

That old LinkedIn phishing scheme is back again. I got three identical emails within 90 minutes this morning. Notice the “From” line in the header below. The other two emails were sent from emailconfirm@locomp.net and from emailconfirm@eco.co.uk. 

While reading LinkedIn’s Account Security & Privacy Best Practices,  I noticed that it cautions against including your physical address, email address and phone number in your profile. My profile included my email address and phone number until  I deleted them a few minutes ago. That could be why I received the email. 

The Publicity Hound’s Blog

Google “books turned into movies” and here’s what you’ll find:

• A slideshow of 13 books turned into movies
• This list of young adult books either turned into movies or those that were being optioned for a movie
• The Top 10 mystery novels made into movies
• This Amazon list of kids books made into movies.

So what about your book? Could you sell it to Hollywood?

Yes you could. You could sell your story, too. You could even sell your message and have a production company turn it into a TV series. Here are six reasons why:

1. Video on Demand is the newest and one of the fastest growing markets in Hollywood, and authors would be crazy not to take advantage of this.
2. Hollywood is more dependent today on buying the movie rights to books.
3. “How-to” books are often perfect for being turned into TV series. Just look at the hundreds of programs on the air right now that teach people how to do things, from cooking gourmet meals to renovating old houses.
4. Thousands of cable stations and limited run movie releases rely on novel-length and short stories.
5. Companies that make TV movies want to know about personal and intimate biographies.
6. 5 of the 9 Academy Award nominated films for 2012 started out as books!

If you want to know more, join Steve Harrison on a free teleseminar on Thursday, Jan. 31, and listen as he interviews a Hollywood insider on “How to Sell Your Book or Story to Hollywood as a Movie or TV show…Even If It’s Self-published.” Choose from the call at 2 p.m. Eastern Time, or the one at 7 Eastern. 

Get Started Right Now

You don’t have to wait until Thursday to get started.  As soon as you reserve your spot on the call, Steve will send you a “Turn Your Book Into A Movie” worksheet that will help you write the perfect “Logline” for your book.  

What’s a logline? You’ll find out on the call. But it’s one of the most important first steps you need to take if you want to get the attention of a Hollywood agent or producer.

Don’t miss this one, even if you haven’t written a book or don’t want to write one. Remember that you don’t necessarily need a book. All you need is a good story or idea.

Even though the call is free, I’m a compensated affiliate for Steve’s company, which offers a variety of training programs and services for authors and authors-to-be.

The Publicity Hound’s Blog

Here are my Top 10 tweets from this past week, great for retweeting! If you missed these, follow me on Twitter.

3 great tips on how to use LinkedIn.
With 200+ million members on LinkedIn you are really missing out if you are not using this professional social media platform to your advantage.  

Simple tips to make your hashtags work.
Here are 9 tips to help businesses use hashtags to best effect

27 pre-designed calls-to-action in a handy PowerPoint template. 
Download a Free PowerPoint Template Complete With 27 Customizable CTAs

5 social media habits to make this year, from Inc. [My favorite is the first one.]
Target the influencers. Targeting 100 major influencers can be exponentially more effective than than getting 5,000 less influential followers.

3 more ways to drive leads on LinkedIn. 
These tips will allow you to better utilize the networking site to reach leads, customers, investors, partners, sponsors and more.   

20 of the world’s most clever Twitter bios.   [PH: But most lack all-important keywords]
Although they lack the all-important keywords, these Twitter bios are good for a laugh. 

6 NYTimes journalists say they’re taking buy-outs. More to follow.
If you think the buyout is something that works for you at this time in your life, we urge you to give the offer serious consideration if you haven’t already. 

New tools that scrape user images could be on a collision course with the law.
A New York judge has ruled that two news outlets infringed on a photographer’s copyrights by publishing the photos he posted on Twitter.

Armstrong interview. He’s sickening. Now they say he lied to Oprah. 
He told Winfrey that he was taking the opportunity to confess to everything he had done wrong, including angrily denying reports for years claiming that he had doped. So, why did he lie?

When to start selling your new idea or your new book.
Common Mistake of the Beginning Entrepreneur

The Publicity Hound’s Blog