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PR Through Free Advice

One of the most cost-effective ways of promoting yourself and your business is giving some free advice. We often do this automatically when we are in a face-to-face situation, and again with networking and public speaking, we are generally offering hints and tips to help other people.

When we are listening to people who are giving us good free advice, we usually get a nice warm feeling about the person. If they have explained themselves well, you will think of them next time you are in a situation where you need similar advice. They will be the people you turn to, and others think the same about you and your business if they are on the receiving end.

Face-to-face is one way to help others out, but there are many other ways you can do this as well. Online, there are many opportunities to help other people.

We have already mentioned LinkedIns’ section dedicated to asking and answering questions; where if you answer a question, the asker can vote on how well you answered the question. This can elevate your status on LinkedIn.

Blogging is another great way of offering hints and tips, and because your blog will most certainly be a wealth of information on a particular subject, your blog will be indexed well by the search engines. In fact, Google has a special search area just for blogs. The more advice you offer, the more content and keywords your blog will have, and the better it is likely to be ranked.



Commenting on forums where appropriate is another great way of dropping a few hints and tips for people to read. All these comments, answers, hints and tips help to increase your relationship with your public online. Again, there is the added bonus of the keywords you can use within the content and the title to ensure your blog and website can be found more easily. In fact, even the comments other people make on your blog can be found by the search engines, so the more correspondence you have with your audience, the better.




Alternatively, you can organize a webinar. This is very similar to standing up and giving a presentation, but it is done online. You just need a screen sharing software, a computer with microphone, you and your presentation. It takes a little organization to get the attendees, but it is well worth doing as it really helps engage your public and set you apart from the crowd of others in your field.

To help get attendees, you can also use social media. Twitter is great for getting news out there quickly and often, and there are many delivery sites that help you with “tweeting” and then monitoring the traffic you get back. It is important to make sure you understand your traffic, where it comes from, how it got there, etc. Testing and measuring is as important online as it is offline, but in general is far easier to manage.