The first thing I always get my clients to do when we start thinking about how to get publicity for their business, is to get clear on what it is they want to achieve. Most people want to use publicity to help more people, and aside from that some people want to become the go-to expert, some people want more followers, but the most common thing people want to achieve, is to make more sales.

So how can you use publicity to make more sales?

Some of my clients have leveraged the power of publicity to massively increase their sales:

• one saw her sales rocket by 200% after being featured in The Guardian and the Daily Mail
• one doubled her book sales after appearing in her local paper
• one signed up ten new clients after being featured in a regional paper
• one signed up some high-end VIP clients after appearing in the a range of newspapers and magazines

Now, there are a couple of ways you can use publicity to make more sales.

The first tactic, is to actually use publicity as part of your sales funnel.  I know some of you may shudder at the phrase ‘sales funnel’, but I want to show that sales funnels can be fun. Honestly.

In fact, using a sales funnel will make your publicity efforts soooo much more worth it, as opposed to the haphazard, throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach that a lot of people have.

Ok, so how can you incorporate publicity into your sales funnel?

A typical funnel might look something like this:

Write guest blog post with link to lead magnet in author bio (builds awareness) >> send email welcome sequence to people who opt-in (nurtures leads) >> use sales page/sales emails to sell product (builds trust) >> up-sell to high-priced offer

As an alternative to writing a guest blog post you could try:

• being interviewed on a podcast and linking to a lead magnet in the show notes
• writing a guest article and including a content upgrade – a content upgrade is a free cheat sheet/download that compliments whatever you’ve written and gives readers a reason to give you their email address – (Hint – use something like Leadboxes from Leadpages to easily incorporate content upgrades into all your blogs)
• appearing as an expert in a newspaper and mentioning your ebook
• being written about in a magazine and having a link to your website with a welcome mat/pop-up on your homepage that advertises your lead magnet

The other way you can use publicity to make more sales, is to have your specific product or service featured in the article itself.

To do this, you need to look at the types of articles the publication usually runs, and see how they might be able to mention your product or service. Have they written about other products and services, and if so, what kind of format has the article been?

Now, this is rarely as straight forward as contacting a publication and saying, ‘hey, I’ve got a great product/service, write about it!’ Because, let’s face it, no journalist is going to want to give you free advertising for nothing.

But if you can give them a good angle – if you can share an interesting story about your product or service – that is a great way to get a journalist to write about it.

An interesting story would generally be something that looks at how you business came about, the motivation you had for starting your business, your big why. Get that right and the journalist will want to know all the nitty gritty about your product or service, meaning they’ll end up promoting it for you in the process of writing about it, leading to, you guessed it, more sales.

Got any questions or comments? Post below and I’ll get back to you…

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