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Publicity plays a vital role in a successful business. Does that mean you need  heaps of money? Approaching even a small PR (Pubic Relations) agency would ask you to cough bunches every month! Never the less, thanks to technology which facilitate us to skip the initial PR work which costs quite a lot money when approached to an agency. A little of your homework can generate you free publicity, with a output of heavy smiles

• Connect and build networks with social networking sites: Few years ago, none knew the importance of social networking sites, for few it became a special means to find dates. However, things are looked professionally now, sites like Orkut, Ryze, Linkedin, Myspace etc, gained enormous popularity. All it takes to promote your business through this means is a few clicks, and a little text inputs. Posting your profile, interests, enabling people to access your contact information and link to your company’s blog would help people to find you. Next time when there are any important updates, or maybe even job openings in your company, just drop a sentence or two in these sites and wait and watch.Yes, potential clients do drop in these sites, and who knows may be you and your client may strike gold for each other in terms of money and business. Search for your old friends, add them, join the communities, which interest you, drop a post about your company, or may be just make friends, and make sure you watch your networks carefully. Your XYZ friend may be a friend of a company’s manager or CEO whom you wanted to do business with and this creates a link between you and the other person making your approach far easier than any offline party does.

Make sure you start or join few communities of your interests where likeminded people do bump and you make new friend leading to a brand new network.If you eye to build a business relation with a company, there are a lot of chances that the company is listed in the communities however small it is, just pop in and fiddle around the members of the community and approach the person whom you find essential, this simplifies your difficult old traditional approach to meet new people who are miles away. This is one of the successful ways to build your brand online free with priceless contacts.

• Talking through blogs: Blogs so called online diaries went a step further making itself a means of communication to customer and blogs have even become money making machines, I am regular reader of a blogger who makes as much as $8000+ just by blogging. More and more companies are implementing blogging as their company’s info material because blogging gives a personal kind of touch communicating with customer on a mass. Everyone can be a blogger, a stock market expert, an entrepreneur, a designer, a CEO of an IT company, or an individual. A person with a computer and internet connection can be a blogger, and the setups costs can be zero to a small amount for hosting, and domain name. The key to the lock is to drive more and more people to read your blog, by using your blog as a signature of your email, physical communication, and giving pings to sites like technorati, pingomatic, mybloglog…etc will spread your blog to masses. Blogging is a great way to position your business in your customers’ eyes.Pictures, videos, will make your blog look dishy and will attract more and loyal readers. RSS friendly blogs and enabling posts via email will help your friends and loyal readers to be updated about yourself or your company. Feedburner.com helps your readers to subscribe to your blog posts easily via RSS, and Zookoda.com offers your latest posts via email to your readers. I have been highly benefited by reading blogs, gathering information of my interests, and also lead me towards blogging

• Use of online PR (Public Relations) sites: From ages print has been the most valuable mode of building relations, be it newspaper adverts, or brochures. Putting your press releases on online PR distribution services like PRSI (www.prsi.in), PRCAI(www.prcai.com), Prdomain(www.prdomain.com) gives a major advantage of a free press release. If it gets picked by a newspaper or magazine directly equals to huge number of potential customerYes, you would require a small course on writing press releases (technology enables you to get few free contents online too), or hire a freelance writer to write about your business. May be you can just add up one more job to write few press releases to his existing business you are giving him. You can find good freelance writers on sites like scriptlance.com, elance.com, getafreelancer.com. Make sure you look at his previous work, and help him to tailor your needs.

I have been high benefited by the social networking, and blogging, yet to try the online press release once my company’s base work is ready. Although I never used blogging to speak to my customers, but it lead to indirect customers. I would be happy if you readers would like to add few more points though the comments section.