Mike Landfair

Marketing Pro, Janelle Baglien

Yesterday. I sat down with Janelle Baglien, former marketing VP and PR woman and owner of Studio Art Direct.

Studio Art Direct specializes in corporate art sales and leasing.  We bring the gallery to your business and decorate your space with artworks created by Northwest artists.

Our mission is to bridge the gap between Northwest visual artists and the business community by providing professional art consulting and design coupled with an easy to access online gallery featuring hundreds of artists and thousands of artworks direct from the studios of regional artists.  Art is searchable by size, medium, price, and style.

I wanted to meet with her because her website, which includes her blog called a journal, is getting 22,000 hits per day.  She has been blogging on her site as long as I have at Landfair Furniture (Blog), yet my traffic has only grown to 4,500 hits per day.  Only 4,500 hits per day!  That’s darn good, but I wanted to hear some new things that would get me to her level.

Just talking with another marketing person got my adrenalin flowing.  More people should do it for the cross-pollination of ideas that develops.  

Janelle and I were talking so fast that it was sometimes hard to write everything down.  One thing she does, is use Google ads to promote her business, but she thinks “phrases” are the key to higher traffic rather than “key” words.  

She uses press releases and cautions that your business name should be in the headline, and it should be a killer headline with some juice in the story; some hook, some item of interest.  You want the reader to see that this is not just another piece of PR.  You all may have Google alerts come to your computer.  Alerts inform you that someone, somewhere, has written on an item of interest to you.  Your goal is to get your press release oicked up by Google. 

Same thing goes with your blog.  You want to write often and include those key words and phrases in your article, so it will be picked up by Google.  I have found from experience that if you comment in your blog about a story in a national newspaper, such as the New York Times, Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal and link to the story, you can be highlighted at those newspaper’s web sites as a commenting blogger.  

Janelle mentioned several resources:

Free PR websites

PR Leap - PR Leap is an online press release service that offers both free and paid distribution to search engines, newswires and websites since 2003.

My Free PR - One marketing tool that you can use for your business is called public relations or free pr. This is one of the most effective yet overlooked tools in the business world. It is a fact that businesses that make use of free pr as a marketing tool are far more successful in terms of gaining the public's trust.

PR News Wire - PR Newswire is the world leader in the electronic delivery of news releases and information directly from companies, institutions and agencies to the media, financial community and consumers.

Business Wire.com – Business Wire, a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffet is the most successful investor around), is the global market leader in commercial news distribution.

SEO News- just Google the topic 

Posted by Mike Landfair on December 6, 2007 | Comments (0)