Freelance Journalist M. Sharon Baker Offers Timely Tips to Support Do-It-Yourself Publicity Success

M. Sharon Baker worked as a reporter for the Puget Sound Business Journal for nine years before taking the leap to become a full time freelance writer and publicist. She is a loyal reader of the Authentic Visibility blog and shares three great tips to contribute to your do-it-yourself publicity success.

#1) Visit your local library for inexpensive media research. Don’t hit the stacks, but rather check out the bookstore. I picked up five copies of O magazine for 10 cents each at the Lynden library, saving myself $20 and picked up some 20 current editions of food and home decorating magazines. It’s a great way to pick up back issues as well as current editions – depending upon the generosity of donors – without paying the cover price. Of course you could also check out the magazines, but then you can’t rip out pages and features to group together to see what editors have decided to run over time, or see what kind of photography they include with certain features.

#2) If you need another resource to help pitch a lot of different magazines nationally, invest $49 for a MediaBistro account. It’s for freelance writers, and has a small smattering of PR stuff, but the real value is in how to pitch various magazines. Of course they are from a freelance writer’s perspective rather than a PR pitching perspective, but they offer great information – even though some of it hasn’t been updated in a while. It’s a lot easier to craft a PR pitch knowing some of this information.

#3) Savvy publicity seekers should pay attention to the buzz in the world of journalism where the old world is colliding with the new. Traditional print journalists and radio personalities are scrambling to learn how to create multimedia stories using photos, sound and video. Do-It-Yourself publicity seekers may want to add sound bites, environmental photos of themselves and their products, and short videos that showcase their stories visually within the next year. Journalists will begin hunting for this type of context for their stories and publicity seekers will have a leg up if they can provide it. Perfecting your sound bites and your key points will become increasingly more important as journalists begin taping more interviews for their multimedia stories and potential podcasts.

Thanks Sharon for these fabulous, highly useful, and relevant tips. I appreciate them, and I know the readers will, too.

And, if you have additional tips to share that will contribute to the do-it-yourself publicity success of the other loyal and readers of this blog, please share. I’ll offer them for attribution here so others can benefit.

By the way, the Authentic Visibility publicity tips booklets are on sale this month for just $7 for the pair. You get 147 powerful ways to boost your business and profit from free publicity. And, you receive the “Get Media Savvy E-Guide to Promoting Your Products, Services, and Ideas to the World” as a special bonus. Visit this link to buy now.