Marketing: Are You Backing Up Your BIGGEST Asset?

Are You Backing Up Your BIGGEST Asset?

Written by Alexandria K. Brown

Have you ever accidentally lost an important file on your computer? Perhaps your computer crashed (again) or your cat sauntered over a dooming sequence of keys. Remember that little pang in your stomach you felt when you realized that file was gone for good?

OK, now imagine losing your entire e-zine subscriber list. Did that pang just get a bit more intense? (Ouch!)

"Master List Builder" Joel Christopher asked several Internet marketing gurus repparttar question, "If your office was burning down and you could save one thing, what would it be?"

The unanimous answer among all of them was, "my list "!

Your list is your goldmine. It's your pool of warm prospects and clients with whom you've taken months to build a level of credibility and trust. They're your ticket to a steady stream of income.

It can take years to build a large collection of opt-in subscribers. But they can disappear in a flash if they're not protected. So, are YOU backing up your list on a regular basis? (Be honest!) If not, let's get you started today.

<< If Your List Resides on Your Computer...

If you send out your e-zine or e-mail promotions from your own computer, you MUST make backing-up your list a daily habit. And by "backing-up," I mean saving your list to a disk or location other than your hard drive. For example, you can save your list to:

1) a Zip disk (you'll need a Zip drive) 2) a CD (you'll need a CD burner) 3) a floppy disk (these don't hold much data though) 4) an external hard drive (these are less expensive now than they used to be) 5) a secure, Web-based file storage service.

I currently use option 5 for my computer files. The service I use is called I-Backup (http://www.ibackup.com/) and there are many others out there, starting at as little as $3 per month. I prefer this option because I have so many large files on my computer that I'd have to backup my files to several separate disks or CDs. And because this method is so EASY, I'm more likely to follow through and back-up my files on a regular basis! I also like I-Backup for traveling, as I can upload files that I'll need to access on repparttar 121001 road. This way I don't have to bring disks with me.

Get Inside the News Reporter's Head

Written by Rusty Cawley

The first rule of PR Rainmaking is to approach reporters as customers.

Find out what they want, then give it to them in a way that benefits you and your company. This requires us to learn how to think like a news reporter.

For this journey, there may be no better guidebook than James B. Stewart’s “Follow repparttar Story.”

On first blush, this would appear to be nothing more than one more how-to book on how to write non-fiction articles for a mass audience.

But Stewart is repparttar 121000 former editor of repparttar 121001 Page One Features for repparttar 121002 Wall Street Journal, perhaps repparttar 121003 most influential feature columns in repparttar 121004 United States. He is a Pulitzer winner and repparttar 121005 best-selling author of repparttar 121006 non-fiction books “Bloodsport,” “Den of Thieves” and “Blind Eye.”

His “Follow repparttar 121007 Story” provides a treasure trove of insights into how reporter conceive of their stories, and how they then sell those stories to their editors.

“Even repparttar 121008 best ideas need to be ‘sold,’” Stewart writes, “in repparttar 121009 sense that editors have to be interested and readers ultimately must be persuaded to read.”

Since our aim is to develop stories that we can sell to reporters, who can then sell those stories to their editors, you can see how “Follow repparttar 121010 Story” is invaluable for repparttar 121011 PR Rainmaker.

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