This is a guest post by Bonnie Harris, the founder of Wax Marketing, Inc. She has over 20 years experience promoting businesses and products of all kinds. Read her blog or follow her on Twitter for more ideas!

It’s easy to find articles and blog postings about the "new" PR—and how traditional media is dead. At the same time, everyone still wants a hit on the Today Show, even if it’s that dreadful fourth hour. National, traditional media reaches millions of potential customers at one time. Social media can reach that same number of customers over time, one at a time. The trick is not to throw away one medium in favor of another—the key is to find the right mix for your product or service that will serve up the highest number of targeted customer impressions consistently over time.

My greatest success comes when I find the right combination of messaging channels to achieve the greatest amount of promotion possible for my clients. Based on my experience across a pretty broad range of industries and products, the BEST results come from blending traditional media with social media and/or online PR. It’s not so easy to do! To give you a headstart, here’s my process for creating the right recipe for integrating your PR activities between traditional and newer media.

• Build a list of all the different places your customers get information. If your demographic is pretty small—maybe you’re targeting young men between the ages of 18 to 22—this is easy. But most of us want to reach a wider range of consumers—some may still read the print paper in their hometown, others might have sophisticated RSS feeds that bring their daily news to their Google homepage. Baby boomers are notoriously all over the board in terms of what they read. I recently did a pitch for a client that had print newspaper stories running at the same time as postings on their Facebook page. Note: if you don’t know where your customers get their information, stop. Go back and further define your target demographics so that you can figure it out.
• Take a look at the list and decide what’s realistic. For example, if you own a services firm, it might be really tough to get on television as they need really strong visuals. If you’re an author promoting your first novel, it might be nearly impossible to get a book review in the New York Times. Choose media that’s easier to get initially so your short-term results are good. But stay persistent and go for the big ones too because like winning the lottery, those national hits pay off in spades. One non-profit client of mine just taped a CNN national news package. Although the producers had never heard of them a year ago, consistent pitching plus keeping the producers apprised of their work via Twitter (love those @ replies!!) finally got us a huge hit.
• Make sure your list has a good mix of different types of media and includes both traditional and new. I would include at least one broadcast channel—public radio for example if you’re a non-profit, maybe commercial radio if you’ve got a great hook for your book. Don’t throw all your eggs in one basket—like social media—just because it’s the cheapest and you can do it at night after the kids go to bed. TV producers look online to find ideas for sources. Bloggers pick up story ideas from their local morning newscast. Different kinds of media feed each other The more you show up in multiple channels, the better your chances are for getting strong, possibly national, placements down the line.
• Figure out the story for each channel. If you’re going to do a strong online pitch, know what bloggers want and make your pitch short and snappy. If you want to go for broke and pitch national news, understand how to pitch that medium with a well defined segment outline. Each media requires a different approach—you can’t use the same press release for everything.
• Keep pitching your channels consistently and simultaneously. It will work in the long run, as long as you keep your eye on the prize and stay patient.

Dan Buettner’s first book, The Blue Zones, is an excellent example of this. Dan’s name was fairly known, but for other work involving his career as a world explorer. We were determined to find the right mix of traditional broadcast and online impressions to put the book on the New York Times bestseller list. Guess what—through national hits like Good Morning America, favorable reviews from top Amazon reviewers and sites like About.com, regional radio (Dan did over 100 interviews on commercial radio) and one very lucky AP story, the team led by the brilliant publicist Laura Reynolds, myself, Dan’s staff and National Geographic, did it. Not only for the hardback, but for the paperback also one year later.

We don’t all have the luxury of a major publisher’s promotional budget. But we can remember that by including ALL the potential media in our plan, the synergy between them can often make the difference between failure and success.

Tags: Marketing, New Media, New Rules, Public Relations

Note: This is a guest post written by Jan Felt. The author is a blogger at CyberFootprint, and a marketing and communication enthusiast. You can check out his blog, or follow him on Twitter.

This post won’t make you a better lover, just as it won’t make you rich or famous. Don’t switch to YouTube yet, it is going to be interesting. Let me share with you an insight into subconscious blogger behaviour that will help you to become a better, more self-aware writer.

A debate is going on whether regular posting guarantees success. In short, it doesn’t. Knowing that good content is what makes you or breaks you in the cyberspace, I’ve decided to study the approaches to posting and share the conclusions with you. There are two main points of view on writing frequency: drip feed and burst posting.

Drip Feed

Regular every day posting helps you to capture the readers and condition them to come for more information every time they open their browser or RSS reader. The obvious advantage of this type of posting is an increased chance to expand your readers base by following and reacting to current events. That drives traffic and attention to your blog.

The downside of this type of writing is an easy disappointment of the readers, should your posting frequency falter. The readers will come a few more times to see what has changed. If they find nothing new, they will abandon your site completely.

Bloggers are afraid of losing readers, so they often compromise the quality of their content only to put out a half-baked post. They are able to skim on the surface of many issues and topics, but the time pressure often detracts further pursuit of deeper analysis.

Burst Posting

Posting in bursts, on the other hand, gives you the time and energy to create high-quality content at the expense of timeliness. The significant advantage of this approach is no burnout syndrome to worry about, because the pressure to maintain continuity at all costs is much lower.

The disadvantages of this sort of posting are apparent—the lack of timeliness and lost opportunities to write about stories you might have missed. Be aware that readers’ patience and attention span are limited, so if you have to make up for low frequency by posting high quality content.

Finding the Optimal Approach

It is difficult to precisely determine what strategy will work for you. As a rule of thumb, I can say that you should post at least once a month regardless of what strategy you decide to follow.

Everything about your blog, even the posting frequency depends on your readers. Get some time to know them and then determine the optimal amount of posts per week or month. If you are not sure, ask them in a satisfaction survey. Send them an e-mail or ask them to fill in an online survey. As long as you listen to your audience, you will never get it wrong.

Tags: Blogging

Note: This is a GUEST POST by Edward Kung, owner of Seedin Web Development, a company in Vancouver, British Columbia, which provides complete web development solutions.

One of the biggest problems faced by search engines is duplicate content on the internet. Usually the content belongs to the same website but is placed on the different web pages. So when search engines perform a search they come up with 10 different pages with different URLs but the same content. SEO companies have also been plagued by the same problem.

Recently major search engines like Google and Yahoo! have come up with a new way to deal with the issue of duplicate content: the canonical tag. The canonical tag is the latest tool in the fight against the duplicate content on the internet.

How to Use the Canonical Tag

The canonical tag is applied to the URLs of the web pages that hold duplicate content. Since they are to be included in the head each of the duplicate pages, you will be simply adding the preferred version of a URL. You actually instruct the search engines that the URLs in question should direct to the preferred URL designated in the canonical tag.

The canonical tag is included in the desired web page’s head section, specifying the preferred URL in the following format:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.xyz.com/aboutus.html" />

The tag can only be used on pages that reside on a single site. The pages may be in subdomains as well as sub folders. You can use either absolute or relative links, but search engines strongly recommend that you use absolute links to eliminate chances of errors.

The tag is transitive in nature. For an instance, if URL X marks Y as canonical, and Y in turn marks Z as canonical, Z will be treated as canonical for both X and Y. For example: If test1.xyz.com points to canonical URL test2.xyz.com and test2.xyz.com points to canonical URL final.xyz.com. Then final.xyz.com would be treated as canonical for both test1.xyz.com and test2.xyz.com.

By using the canonical tag, all the links to all the URLs with duplicate content are simply consolidated into one URL which has been specified as canonical. This URL will be considered as a "strong hint" by search engines. The canonical tag will help search engines like Google with the task of identifying duplicate URLs.

Search engines will also understand that duplicate URLs with canonical tags are all actually referring to the URL that you want the visitors to see. Such URLs are known as canonical URLs.

Tags: Design/Development, Google