Online and offline publications looking to fill their growing pages are more interested in bylined articles. 

Bylined article submission should play a  part of every PR strategy but requires an extra layer of effort past drafting and pitching news releases. Bylined articles are simply articles written by the business on non-promotional topics and placed in their target media. Bylines are great for positioning of executives as thought leaders in their space. The gotcha here is that bylined articles can’t be self-promotional pieces where basically the author is telling the audience to buy his or her product. That is an advertorial. And that is where the landscape starts to blur.

Publications have long accepted advertorial submissions as part of a pay for play model. Normally advertorials are accepted with the purchase of a certain level of advertising. As such, advertorials are part of an advertising strategy and not a PR strategy.

Bylined articles have to more closely follow the editorial calendar of a publication and are subject to edits. That’s right, edits. And here is where things can get stickier.

Submit an advertorial and you’re pretty much guaranteed that it will run as submitted. Submit a byline and you have only slightly more control than submitting a news release. Editors still reserve the right to edit your byline for content or overall length. Further, they exercise control of the publication date, more so than the advertorial which usually runs when the ad is placed. That’s why building and maintaining a strong and respectful working relationship with editors is important and requires an investment of time and effort.

Does that mean you shouldn’t run the of submitting bylines? Certainly not. Just set your expectations.

Writing great subject lines, like headlines, is a skill. Remember, these are the attention getters that make people want to read more. Like book jackets and magazine covers, these are the advertisements for what is inside. They shouldn’t be an after thought but instead a strategic part of your marketing effort.

If you’re going to compose a great headline, make sure you can deliver on the inside else it is just more spam. Connect your subject, either directly or with a little humor, to the message inside so the conversation continues. Then be direct and get to the point quickly so you can connect with the recipient and deliver on your offer.

On closer inspection, I believe the sender of my message was marketing something to do with events. A face to face made sense for him to market his services but without a clearer articulation of those in the lead paragraph, with a graphic or in a bulleted list or table, he lost me. Think about that next time you’re trying to differentiate your email from spam.

Awards certainly lend credibility to a business but when your latest recognition is from 11 years ago it leaves the customer wondering: are they still any good? If they were good enough for press in 1998 and 1999, what has happened since? Dare I eat there now?

The same line of thinking goes for your print and electronic marketing materials. If you’re still passing out a brochure that celebrates the tenth anniversary of your business in 2007, it is time for a refresh. And even without dates, if you know that you haven’t re-written the web copy on your home page in more than 24 months then don’t think your prospects and customers haven’t noticed.

Content is king. It is the vitality of your communications (not YouTube) and what allows you to shout from a mountain top your most important thoughts and offers. You don’t need an award from the Daily News in order to have something to say. Your experience is your credibility. Your customers and prospects look to you for information on your area of expertise and you owe it to give them timely and updated content.

So this January in the time of New Year’s resolutions, make a pact with yourself to update at least one of the following:

1. Press Release Boilerplate — When is the last time you read this thing? Is it even current?

2. Web site home page copy — Make it about what you customer needs not what you do.

3. Corporate Brochure — If you need a printed piece, great. But make it sing!

4. Your Voice Mail Greeting — really, this is a super easy place to distribute content that everyone except you has to listen to.

5. Your autosig — Besides your contact info, what other info could you be sharing here? Add a link today to a special offer from your firm or a quick survey.

All too often clients will want to post testimonials on their website or in their newsletter from favored and happy clients. The problem is that most of these unsolicited testimonies are pretty weak and usually pay compliment to an individual on your staff and not to your organization as a whole. “Suzy is great to work with,” is valuable customer feedback when it comes time to writing Suzy’s review but doesn’t belong in any of your other customer or prospect communications. For testimonials to be valuable, they need to be specific to your organization, product or service offering and ideally include a metric like ROI or time to delivery.

In a post on GadPedal.com today on this same subject he goes so far as to put a limit on the word count of your testimonials as just SIX. I think six will be a struggle for some but it definitely looks good on the web, in the margin of printed material or pushed out as a Tweet. The challenge to you will of course be to provide quality in those six words.

For the un-indoctrinated, an ellipsis is those three dots you see in punctuation and not the oval you drew in high school Trig (that is an ellipse).

When used properly, an ellipsis indicates an intentional omission of a word or phrase or an intentional pause in thinking or speech. Most writers use this punctuation properly when composing their thoughts but poorly execute it as punctuation mark.

An ellipsis is always three periods (dots) and never four or five. As a punctuation mark, it is always followed by a space but never preceded by one.

There should be no spaces between the periods either. To make this easy, the most recent versions of Microsoft Word will actually adjust the formatting for you to ensure proper spacing. Try typing four periods in a row and you’ll see the difference.

Because an ellipsis is designed to provide emphases, it is important to avoid overuse. When a writer places one in every sentence or many times on the page it usually signifies that they’re too lazy to complete the thought or too inconsiderate to provide the details.

In the car this weekend I listened to a SunTrust ad about a new customer who after finding that his bank had been recently acquired and the new staff had no idea how that would effect his accounts decided to move to SunTrust. Why? Because they’d been in the same convenient corner location that he’d past for the last 5 years on the way to work.

The ad is part of their “solid” campaign and is designed to convince you that they have some greater level of stability than the other banks. Pardon me, but I think that is a risky message. I’m not a banker (nor do I currently have any banking clients) and this is far from a commentary about the stability of SunTrust but about the fact that you need to be careful what you put in advertising so it doesn’t come back to bite you.

Convenience is great and a sound reason for the actor to switch bank. Certainty that they will be the same bank in 5 years is a tough bet. Have you seen the bank failure rates in Georgia lately? And even after a recovery, there’s still no guarantee that M&As won’t continue.  That’s part of the evolution of the banking business, even SunTrust’s evolution. I remember when Trust Company of Georgia merged with Florida’s SunBank to form SunTrust.

But back to my point: be careful what you put in your advertising and marketing materials. Opinions and position papers are one thing and consumers recognize them as such but shouting messages in your advertising campaigns that may not hold water in 6 or 12 months may come back to bite you. And if banking customers are so fickle that they leave every time a bank merges, there is a lot of new account opening business to be had.

He pointed out that if performance is 90% what happens after the click then why do so many companies hire and fire based on clicks? The reality is that it’s not enough to bring people to the site if you aren’t equipped to convert them. As a matter of fact, a campaign with a high click through and a low conversion could be down right expensive. So perhaps, as Evan pointed out, a great many people are focusing on the wrong metric.

If you’re hiring a SEM (search engine marketing) firm to help send traffic to your site but aren’t working with them (or your design team) to set up appropriate and reciprocating landing pages then you’re wasting your Google dollars. Sending those dollars to Yahoo! and BING isn’t going to improve things if you don’t provide a welcome reception for the traffic when they get there. 

Time and again we find that a fantastic-looking site can have a high abandonment rate while a really ugly site with rich, up-to-date content will have great stickiness.Regardless of whether you’re talking about search engines or real-live eyeballs, it’s all about the content. If you’re not taking the time to invest in developing quality content that educates your customer on the value of your product or service then you’re wasting your money paying for paid search.

Your task is to serve as the educator. It’s not enough to tell them what you can/will do. You need to tell them how. How you do it. How it will benefit them. How they can buy. How they can measure. How you compare.

This trending response towards providing more information is driven partly by these emerging buying habits and partly by the search engines which crave content. The appropriate response? Feed the beast. Give them more information. Tell them what you know. Don’t be afraid to share what previously may have been viewed as intellectual capital but what today is recognized is content marketing. Establishing your position as an expert in your space is key to the continued success of your organization in an era where content is king.

As one of thevery  few viewers of Dirty, Sexy Money, I was familiar with the episode where the stars try to decipher an ‘explicit’ position from a home video asking, “isn’t that the Italian Banker?” The panelist then went on to describe what a fantastic job ABC had done tying their broadcast to their online presence in what has ultimately gotten legs as a YouTube phenom. Basically they’d taken an obscure term that had no other meaning and created lots of demand from the search engines, driving incredible traffic for what was certainly a languishing show.

For those of us who are not in the broadcast arena or cannot afford to promote our products on TV, the tip about link bait was even better.

As a fisherman’s widow, I thought I was familiar with all concepts Field & Stream. Au contraire. My new friend Stacy Williams introduced me to the idea of link bait as a fantastic way to meet one of the top three goals of SEO. Link bait, as she described it, was putting content on your website that other websites would want to link to. Obviously this needs to be relevant data but the key is to make it content which is interesting and highly searched.

The example I shared was a long ago blog post on Wachovia’s referral marketing program. I disagree philisophically with their program but it continues to generate more traffic than any of my other posts simply because of the number of people searching for info on that program. Lesson learned? It’s valuable to provide explanations and commentary on industry events, even when you disagree. This “link bait” doesn’t smell nearly as badly as live bait and really works for catching traffic.

This is a conversation we have regularly with clients, in our efforts to help them figure out how to get more from their marketing budget. Our answer typically revolves around looking for as many possible different ways to re-purpose content so that the cost of a single project is spread out over multiple deliverables. Here’s my list:

1. Press Releases used to be just for press but the truth is that your customers, partners and investors want to read them, too. After you pitch a release and put on the wire, don’t forget to place it on your website. Next consider linking to it from your monthly newsletter. Print out a few copies and place them on the receptionist desk (if you have foot traffic in your office), print out a few more copies and hand them to sales reps (if they are likely to become foot traffic someplace else) then consider emailing a copy to the prospect you spoke with yesterday, the guy who won’t take your call and your banker (it is always good to elevate your self-worth with your banker).

2. Don’t limit the recipients of your postcard to the folks on the mailing list that you just rented. Seed your list with customers, too. Carry them in your briefcase or purse when you go to meetings this week and hand them out INSTEAD OF business cards. Get a PDF version of the card and share with your sales force. Show them how to add it as a thumbnail to their autosignature.

3. Newsletters should live all month long. Whether you email them or direct mail them, don’t assume that because we’ve passed the first of the month that they are no longer newsworthy. Keep hard copies in an acrylic display in your conference room. Add the current issue to your press kit. Upload the articles individually to your on-line knowledgebase. Post them in an archive to your on-line newsroom.

More ideas coming later. It’s lunch time now so I’m going to practice these ideas on the folks at my lunch meeting.