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Every business owner today is looking, more than ever, for ways to gain a competitive edge and stand out. Yet we’re reluctant to spend money. So if you can find a way to get publicity for your company, it’s like free advertising.

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Today, we specifically talked about getting on the radio as an expert. Barbara, you have some great strategies to become a regularly featured expert on a few high profile radio shows.

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It’s like anything else when you’re doing communications – you have to have a topic and someone to listen to it. What I’d like to cover is how to get a topic that will get a radio station interested. What is hot? Because when you’re contacting them, you need something that will grab them and their listeners. One way to do that is to diagnose the pain. What are people really having trouble with and how can you help them? I’ve found that there are three easy ways to find out what the hot topics are. Think of yourself as a newsmaker, a trend setter, and a talk tracker.

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I really like that – newsmaker, trend setter, and talk tracker – the three easy ways to get up to speed on your topic.

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Yes, and once you put yourself in the place of someone else, and give yourself some authority in your own mind, it’s easier to assume that position in front of people on the radio or even in your conversations with your clients on a day-to-day basis. Let’s talk about what it means to be a newsmaker. For me, the easiest way to be a newsmaker is to follow who’s making the news. One way to do that is with Google Alerts. Google has this service where you can sign up to track what’s going on with a specific keyword. So for any topic you want, you ask Google to track it for you. Then Google e-mails you a digest of sites and blogs where conversations are going on around your topic. It might be a survey, the results of a test, press releases and blog entries. There will be a summary, too. So you can look at those and collect each one of them so you have an idea of what’s going on right now.

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This is how you begin to be the expert who knows what’s going on. You can use Google to get all of these notes and have your finger on the pulse of whatever your specialty is.

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Exactly. That makes you really attractive to a radio show host or even media in general over time.

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So, Barbara, now that you’re a newsmaker, how do you find receptive radio stations?

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There is a site, Radio-Locator. If you go there, you can type in your zip code or your city and it will give you all the radio stations within the radius that you select. So that would be a good place to start.

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Visit Barbara’s web site, Wired PR Works where she has 500 articles on marketing and public relations. The articles are free and she’ll tell you more about getting free advertising!

In the Expert Session, Barbara shared so much more. She gives a tutorial on setting up Google Alerts, tips on alerts you might want to set up and an example of how to do it. Even better, she doesn’t use “techie talk!”

She also talks about:

• how to be a trend setter

• how to tap into the virtual water cooler to listen in on conversations about your industry

• what you need to promote yourself to radio stations

• the most important words to tell a radio host that guarantees you'll get more calls

• what you should have in your promotional package

• and much, much more in four tracks of about ten minutes each

The Expert Session is available as a digital download for purchase. Click here for The Bigg Success Show Expert Session with Barbara.

Thank you so much for reading our post today. We’ve all heard of “child’s play.” Check in next time when we discuss child’s work. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes. 

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Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00269-112008.mp3

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