Derry O Donnell

Tag Archives: magazine

Press releases and DIY PR

Posted on by Posted in Business, Life and Fitness, Publicity .

I decided to write up a Press Release to promote our new magazine Life and Fitness, and  announce that it will now be available in Northern Ireland as well.

For ideas and guidance I consulted Adrian Weckler’s post and Emily Tully’s ‘5 things you should know when sending out a Press Release’.

When complete I uploaded it to some press release distribution sites. One I had been using regularly for sourcing articles, IrishPressReleases.ie which as the name suggests is specifically for Ireland and the others I found through Google. I have used the links to my press release rather than to the home page of the various sites to allow you to see how each one looks across the various sites. I’m sure there are loads more out there and a professional PR would most likely know about them. They all had free uploads, but with www.1888pressrelease.com, maybe due to a better sales cycle, I opted for the platinum package of $25 which offered better promotion of the release than the free option. A quick look at site stats first thing this morning showed this one actually had send the most traffic through to the site (which will hopefully be looking a lot better very soon). So maybe it was worth the extra expense.

The other sites I uploaded to were PressReleasePoint.com (They have a list of options for you to bookmark on all the popular sites) and PR-Inside.com (who nicely display whatever picture you supply beside the release)

As yet, I haven’t sent to any journalists, newspapers, magazines, TV or radio stations. That’s next on my list. Again a professional PR should have all these contacts. Some would argue that you are better off doing your own PR

Like anything you take upon yourself to do, it is time consuming. But I like a challenge and learning something new. At least now I have the registration part with the various sites out of the way. It has also made me more aware of the need to have something newsworthy to write about, and if I don’t, to go and find something and make it newsworthy.

While writing this I came across these blog posts which have more information on the whole PR thing:-

Eoin Kennedy

Piaras Kelly PR

Whether the press release makes the mainstream news or gets published in any medium remains to be seen. But please do let me know if you see it in your local or daily favourite.

And if you have other ideas on DIY PR please leave a comment

Fantastic finds

Posted on by Posted in Useful Tools .

In order to write this post I have had to dig deep and battle my addiction.

Even as I type I feel the urge, the burning desire, the draw, the attraction, the pull of what I must avoid until I finish this. Surely one little Tweet wouldn’t do any harm.

But I know as soon as I open the door into Twitterland, that will be it. I will go off reading tweets, writing tweets, opening links, reading blog posts and thinking to myself ‘I should post something new’. It’s a kind of a guilt thing, tinged with the desire to do what I actually really like doing. Writing.

Deep down I know that it’s only a matter of getting into the habit of writing on a regular basis and disciplining myself to do so.

Anyhow, I’m waffling now, what I intended to do, was write a little post on some of the ‘finds’ I’ve had over the last few days. I use the word ‘finds’ to describe stuff that has typically been tweeted about or linked to from another blog or site.

As I make my living from publishing magazines, I was delighted recently to discover Issuu.com (via Le Craic who designed a book about The 2008 Blog Awards winners). Issuu.com is a site that allows you to upload various types of publications for onscreen viewing. No having to download pdfs or software to view a publication. You can see my latest magazine issues here and here

Last night I was preparing my first ever powerpoint presentation, so I had a little bit of learning to do. I happened to Tweet what I was up to and Darragh sent me a link to prezi.com. It’s a really cool tool for doing presentations. I have nothing to show you using that, as I was getting to grips with powerpoint and didn’t want to have to learn something else new at the same time.

Many people reading this will possibly already be aware of the aforementioned, but some will not. For anyone who thinks that ‘that’s last year’s news’ bear in mind that there will always be someone new coming along eager to learn and never assume that they probably already know about such and such a tool or website. This is more a note to myself as I am ready to admit that I am very often guilty of apologising to someone by saying ‘I thought you knew about that’.

Ok, enough, I’m off to Twitterland.