Display great designs

Unless you show caliber of your tattoo designing, people will not acknowledge your talent. Thus, start displaying various tattoo designs done by you. Show a variety of designs – including things like floral patterns, animals, birds, religious and spiritual symbols, numerical, various fonts of various languages, skeletons, dragons etc.

Talk about hygiene, scientific approach

Many people stay away from tattooing in fear of lack of hygiene, safety and the like. You need to reassure those people by illustrating in detail the scientific hygienic method adopted for tattoo job. Bring confidence in your target audience by narrating the process in all your communication strategies. Reassure them of the painless effort taken by your specialists with 100% hygienic procedure.

Temporary tattoo can bring customers

Many permanent tattoo artists do not take temporary tattoo much easily, considering it as an amateur job done for less experimental people. Don’t do this mistake. With nice attractive temporary tattoos you are not only lowering one tier of your customers and roping in business, but you are also seducing them with your expertise. If the customer leaves satisfied, may come back again and consider permanent ones too. Make sure you inform them about permanent ones and show some good designs. Offer discount for early booking.

Reach out youngsters

Do not ignore the youth, they are your customers. Appeal them, persuade them. You may put up your shop’s advertisements, posters in places where youngsters are frequent to like – coffee shop, ice cream parlor, gymnasium, sports clubs, movie theatre, shopping malls, pubs, dance clubs, amusement parks. You may also provide some percentage of discounts for couples getting it done together. You may offer special discount on Valentine’s Day.

Testimonials

Make real people – your past and present group of satisfied customers do the marketing job for you. Quote their feedback. If you have a celebrity customer that’s even better, that’s like an icing on cake.

Content has to be powerful

Newsletter is totally dependent on its content and its relevance. Know what you wish to say, followed by the art of saying it. Know what you wish to convey in a specific month of the year. Suppose you are a restaurant owner and you wish to promote your mocktails during summer, then convey the same in that month’s newsletter. Pick up a topic each month and relate it to your product or service.

Know your audience

Define you target audience before starting with your newsletter. Know demography, psychographic construct of you audience. Knowing more about them will help you to develop content of the newsletter while keeping tone, manner, and mood of the newsletter apt. Suppose you are selling an anti-ageing crème to the middle aged women, you should know how to approach them, what should be your style of communication and the like. You can’t afford to lose their interest because of inappropriate style.

Claims come with research

Don’t make big claims without supporting source of facts. Do ample research before making statements. This way you will not land up into problems too. Include facts, statistics, graphs, expert opinions, quotes supporting your research. Such data always build credibility. But don’t forget to mention the source.

Interesting heading

It’s good headlines which instantly draw attention towards the newsletter. Make sure the headline is extremely hard hitting and catchy, evoking curiosity. To make newsletter easy to read break the content into few paragraphs with sub headings.

Audience friendly lingo

Make sure your newsletter has audience friendly, easily comprehensive language, which people can relate to. Avoid technical jargons, too long sentences.

Proofread is important

A newsletter filled with grammatical errors, spelling mistakes is highly avoided. Apart from the writer, ask someone else to do the job. Mistakes show writer’s lack of concern, interest, and unprofessionalism. If a brand is laughed at, it is hardly taken seriously. So avoid this.

Now get started with it.

Do not be too pushy

People hate salespersons that are too pushy and keep on nagging to sell. They are sure turn offs. Never consider your prospects as a disposal box of your product. If you find your prospect is not interested in your product, leave it there. If you become too pushy, you may end up losing the prospect forever and incur bad perception of your brand.

Don’t lose hope

With a failed trial or series of trials do not lose hope, it will show on your face and you may appear boring, sad and cold to a good prospect too. If you are not enthusiastic about your product or service, you can’t expect your prospect to find interest in it too. Staying motivated from street to door, under every circumstance, every atmosphere is important as it’s you who are ‘face’ of the brand. So appear enthusiastic, pleasant, motivated, and persuasive. Remember, your prospect is literally a ‘prospect’ for you, not your customer, so don’t expect him or her to be too receptive. They are the people who are not actively looking for your product and your visit is unexpected, interfering. Conversion rate in this type of sale is low, so accept the fact. In a failed attempt, just think it was a bad one and move on to the next with a winning attitude. Celebrate each successful sale, and stay motivated.

Little planning can be helpful

Rather than being random and ringing all doorbells on your way, with piled up rates of failure why don’t you start planning a bit and secure more chances of success? Good planning and research may help you. Know who is your target audience, where they are located, what promise they expect from you, what is their trust level, when are they available and receptive to your presentation, what motivates them etc. Choose locations accordingly. So before starting with your sales call do a thorough research on the demography and psychograph of the desired target group. Also, do not reach them in inappropriate time. Strike a balance between quantity and quality of calls.

And you are there. Go and shoot, win and celebrate.

Here are few effective marketing tips.

Know your niche

Many good photographers are often seen claiming to be good in every area of photography, which is actually quite impossible these days. So find your niche area. Find in which type of photography you are actually stunning. It could be any – wild life photography, fashion photography, product photography. Make sure you excel in one area and build a fabulous portfolio of the same. Soon you will be known for your niche specialization. Write your area of specialization like your business card, letter heads.

Get listed

It’s very important for people to find you. Get visible. Get seen on photography related directories, photography journals, search engine, magazines so that your target audience can easily reach you. Not only your target market, it will also help you to be recognized in the photography industry.

Photography websites

Put your best photographs in all photography archive websites. You may still reserve rights with you by maintaining copyrights. Your photographs in such sites will draw many people close to you, who will follow you and turn your fan.

Facebook page

These days a major a tool of online marketing is through Facebook. Own a Facebook page where you can build your fan list. Put your best photographs, it is more like virtual exhibition of your talent before the world. Update your Facebook status often, ask for people’s feedback, and also follow great photographers you admire. Eventually they will also get to know you and may love your work too. You may also join photographers’ communities.

Professional tips

You may soon evolve as the best expert of photography. Start your own web page or forum or blog, where you promote yourself as the solution provider to newbie or aspirants. You can help people with expert advices and suggestions.

Trial offer

Unless people try, not many people will come to know about you or take you seriously. So get seen, heard, and felt. Trying may result into conviction and final brand acceptance. Run free trial offers. You may offer a simple facial, pedicure, head massage, or basic hair spa treatment for free to the people. Take a temporary canopy or small shop in a mall, airport’s waiting lounge, fitness club, social clubs, office cafeteria where you run free trial service for a day. Free of cost offers always lure people. If satisfied they will definitely show interest, enquire about your salon and get back to you.

Discount vouchers

Distribute discount vouchers where your target audience is located or frequently goes to. You may have a tie up with corporate offices, providing 25% discount to its employees. This way, soon your salon will be popular and talked about. You can also have tie ups with fitness centers, bars and lounges, sports clubs entitling its members and visitors discount. You may also distribute discount vouchers nearby shopping malls, coffee shops, book stores, movie theatres.

Celebrity lure

You may run contests like bringing people to the limelight and making popular overnight. You may run ‘best hair’, ‘best stylish beard’, ‘best face’ and many other contests. Publicize these contests, so that more and more people come to your salon, get things done, and aspire to win. Promise the winner of titles to be promoted as the brand endorser for next few months. It will make them popular overnight. Everyone loves to feel like a star, they can’t afford to miss it.

Co-promote

Co-promote your offerings, the popular service with the slow selling one. Suppose, most of your customers come for haircuts and hardly anyone gets hair massage done, offer a very attractive joint offer, like haircut + hair massage = $40, whereas hair cut alone bears the cost of $30. Make sure you aggressively promote such offers inside and outside the salon. This way you will not only hike sales, but also sell the lowest selling service.

Try these tips today.

Here are tips about how to promote books online.

Use social networking sites

Social networking websites are the best choice for promoting a book. Especially when your target audience is youth, modern, educated Internet savvy bunch of people – social networking sites are ideal. Twitter and Facebook are great platforms. Publicize the book release date on Twitter and Facebook. Publish details of the event in advance including venue, time and send the invitation to all friends in your list or tag them. Who doesn’t wish to buy a book autographed by the author? Enrich your personal page with detail. Publish your day to day thoughts, photographs, achievements, goals, events, experiences. It brings author close to the readers as they come to know the author closely. It will make them even more interested to know you, respect you, admire, and follow you. Also write the thoughts that inspired you. You should include all big news channels, publishers, newspapers, journals, critics in your friend and follower list. Post book inaugural and book cover page photographs. It will hike interest among your prospective readers.

Start blogging

Start blogging. Publish small extracts from your book in your blog. Promote your blog link through social networking sites. While reader reads your blog post, put a link which will land the reader in your website, from where they can directly buy your book. Stir interest, curiosity and leave the rest to be discovered in the book.

Give online purchase offers

Put some attractive offers for online buyers like first 50 online buyers, buying from your website will be entitled to 20% discount. Publicize the same everywhere on social networking sites.

Get into email marketing

Send attractive mailers to prospective buyers, entitling them special discount. Mailers can be sent to those who subscribed for mails and newsletters on your website. Email marketing can be used not only to sell your book, but also to share news about your achievements, critic’s appraisal, launch date of the book etc.

Here’s a guideline for running a successful postcard marketing campaign.

Map your target audience and reach them

Mapping the right target audience is the most crucial part of postcard marketing. The marketer should know whom to reach. Once the target audience is mapped, it’s very convenient to figure out their taste and preferences, needs and wants. Thereby communication can be altered accordingly. Recipient can be individual person or a company. Don’t send postcards randomly to a big number of uninterested people. Even if your target group is small in number, stick to it and communicate effectively.

Always try to add an offer

Normal brand advertising is often ignored. People generally respond much better to campaign which contains attractive offers like – free gifts, free samples, free consultation, lucky draw coupons. The word ‘Free’ easily grabs attention of the reader. So always try to associate your campaign with an attractive offer. As for example a postcard saying ‘Get to know your skin type. Call us today for a free expert consultation and guidance’ gets more effective response than a campaign saying ‘Skin Expert, call @ XXXXX’. An offer adds spice to the campaign and draws in huge number of phone calls and email responses.

Use effective words

An effective hard-hitting headline, call to action words and signing off lines like ‘last date of sending entries’ and the like deadlines are must for an advertisement campaign. These words not only grab attention, but also arouse interest and help in purchase decision. An effective headline is soul of a campaign, grabs attention in the first look. A call to action word like ‘Buy now’ guides one towards the end decision and act as incentive. Do not use difficult words; rather stick to simple yet effective words. You can also include a deadline, like till when the offer will be valid. It sets an urgency to react.

Take care of the design

A good marketing campaign is often marred by a poor design. A good design not only grabs attention, but also makes the reader concentrate in the postcard and preserve it for long. An exceptional design innovation can make the campaign instant popular.

Do a test run and repeat if it works

Once the campaign is ready, test it in a small market. If the trial goes fine, launch it all over your market. If it brings good response and revenue repeat it again.

These web content writing tips could help you in coming up with a better website.

Unique content

First of all, produce good quality, original and correct content. Poor quality writing and grammatical errors get easily noticed. They destroy credibility of the site owner. Content should be 100% original. Don’t get tempted to copy from other attractive web contents. Copied content easily gets tracked by Google and other search engines. The content should be correct, valid and credible. You just can’t afford to fill up the space with wrong, misleading content. It should add some value to the reader’s mind.

Insert keywords

Insert keywords in your web content with great care. Keywords shouldn’t look misfit or irrelevant. Choose your keywords as per your target reader.

Clear, legible text

The text matter shouldn’t look blurred, distorted, cluttered. Font should be formal, easy to read and clear. Don’t fall for the super stylish calligraphic fonts. Use bullets, bold headings and sub points. They break the monotony.

Internal linking

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the latest craze. Post highest amount of links online which will direct traffic to your website. It will naturally increase your search engine ranking.

Simple vocabulary and short sentences

Short and crisp sentences keep the reader involved and interested. Keep the vocabulary simple yet rich, matching your target audience. People fail to read long sentences on the web and comprehend the meaning. They also lose attention. So keep sentences simple and short.

Following these few simple tips could actually make your web content appear great.

12 Promotion tips

1. First of all your institute should maintain good quality of education, at par with the global standard. Even good marketing effort cannot boost a weak educational institution for very long time. So if your institute falls short of quality education, updated course curriculum, quality faculty members, placement assistance or infrastructure check them before getting into promotional activities.
2. Unknowingly we all are exposed to millions of advertisements every day. And they actually sell. Advertise your institute in various media, which you consider your target audience is exposed to. You may consider educational journals, education column in dailies, educational portals, television channels youth and their parents are exposed to, outdoor media and the like. Keep a large pie of your marketing budget for advertising.
3. If you are offering job oriented courses like management or computer courses and have a good track record of successful students, flaunt them in your communication. You may flaunt the success story of your ex-students, their work, awards. You could put their testimonies. If your placement assistance is good enough highlight that along with names of companies people have been placed in.
4. Participate in educational fairs, exhibitions, meets; where lot of prospective students flock in, and even inquire, collect forms and brochures.
5. Make institute appear more enthusiast and updated by sending good bunch of students to educational quizzes, talk shows, competitions, debates, seminars. Good name of your institute will attract many prospective youngsters.
6. Create community, fan page for your institution in social networking sites like facebook, myspace, hi5, twitter. A growing number of fans/followers/members/friends will definitely boost image of your institute.
7. To draw more attention of the youth you could put posters or distribute leaflets in and around areas where youngsters hang out like – coffee shops, shopping malls, book shops, libraries, movie theatres, music shop. But don’t do this activity for too long, as it may appear you are desperately looking for students.
8. Word of mouth sells the most and specially when it comes from passed out students. Treat ex-students with care. Make sure they pass out with good experience, so that they spread good words about the institute.
9. While you advertise, make your institute look appealing from all aspects – quality of education, faculty board, placement, and infrastructure.
10. If you are a business school with ranking or an award winning school (be it in any aspect) flaunt your achievement in your communication. Put the source of achievement too.
11. Sponsor educational seminars, quizzes, talk shows to generate good will of your brand.
12. Keep good media relations. Press conferences, coverage of college events may look even better with a long maintained good media relation.

There are many more ways to promote a school. You are just limited by your imagination.

An effective advertisement copy is the one which successfully draws attention of its target audience, creates a favorable attitude towards the product and induces action. A good copy should have the following basic requisites.

It should be brief

Most important criteria for copywriting is the ability to craft short, crisp yet extremely interesting lines. That’s one major quality that copywriters often boast upon the content writers. Since our attention span is getting shorter day by day and readers prefer short, crisp advertisements it’s always recommended to keep the copy short and compact.

It should be simple and clear

Advertisements are means of communication and not means of confusion. So avoid the temptation of writing big, mouthful heavy words for the sake of showing your words prowess. Advertisements should be easily comprehensible, self-explanatory. Avoid ambiguous, incorrect words.

It should be apt

Copy should never be irrelevant to the target audience or the product category. Often the copywriter overlooks consumers or the product and get obsessed with the ambition of crafting award winning lines. An effective ad carries copy which matches with its consumers’ insight, product features and adds panache of creativity. Objective of the advertisement is not to be forgotten.

It should be personal

An effective ad is the one which portrays that it’s just talking to you. It carries personal touch. Words like ‘you’, ‘yours’ instead of a general message addressing all definitely works better.

It should be honest

Often advertising is accused of being manipulative and deceptive. But to remain in the business for a long run companies should always put forth honest and truthful communication. Communication can be wise and playful but not deceptive. It should not leave consumers with a false or wrong idea.

It should conform to the norms

All advertisements are supposed to conform to the standards, rules and regulations set by the advertising council of the country. Morally offending, community or religion humiliating, distasteful advertisement copies are banned all over.

An effective and nicely crafted copy is the backbone of any advertising communication.

Print advertisements typically involve several parts.

Headline

Headline is the most important element of a print advertisement. If it fails to grab attention of the reader rest of the things just go unnoticed. Headlines may appear on the topic or mid or side of the advertisement. Most of the times it is used above the picture, as it’s believed that pictures grab attention faster than the text. The headline may be the strongest part of the advertisement or may be secondary to a strong visual. A perfectly crafted headline could entice lot of interest and excitement about the ad. Headlines can be of many forms – statement, question, issuing warning, testimonial, news sort etc. It should relate to its target audience. It may use emotional or rational or moral appeal to convince the target audience.

Subhead

Generally, subhead comes just below the headline. It is an answer or support to the question or curiosity that the headline evokes. The subhead ideally talks about the product benefit, carries the mood set by the headline and expands upon the headline idea.

Bodycopy

Bodycopy follows the subhead. This part generates the detail information about the product, highlights product features and key benefits, rationally provides supporting facts or quotations, convincingly establishes superiority of the product and stimulates the desire to purchase.

Artwork

There are various types of visual elements of an advertisement. It can be in any form – photograph, hand-drawn illustration, graphics. An ad may have a single strong self explicit visual or many pictures instead of one. Some advertisements may have no visual in it, but carry few visual elements like decorative border or bullets or a shape. Often visuals carry captions below them like ‘Before’, ‘After’, ’20 years ago’. Such captions help the illustrations to put the message across.

Closure

End of the advertisement is not to be ignored either. This is the part which provokes action that is purchase decision. Closing idea should be striking. It should put the motivation to buy. Several closing ideas can be used like – ‘act now’, ‘visit our dealer’, ‘send enquiries, ‘buy now’, ‘hurry before the stock ends’, ‘limited stock, rush now’ and the like.

Contact information

An effective ad should always carry contact information like – logo, brand name, address, phone numbers, road direction, website url etc. Such details are generally furnished towards the bottom of the ad.

Extras

Certain promotional advertisements may also carry extras like – tear-out coupon, free sample attached, business enquiry form.

Print advertisements have always remained a major tool of communication. Print ads have great impact on the target audience as it brings along credibility, long life and detail information.

4 Writing preparation tips

One idea per post

Do not cram too many things in one blog post. It will confuse the readers, which will push them to move away from your blog. The more ideas you will insert in the post, the more users will move away from the blog. Find a core theme and stick to it. Do not wander off, or else you will never be able to finish your blog post.

Find the purpose of your blog post

Knowing the purpose of a blog post will help you draft your article better. Why are you writing the article? Do you want your readers to purchase something, or you want them to know more about the subject, or you want them to subscribe to your newsletter after reading it? Once the purpose is defined, writing becomes easier, as you choose mode, tone, and words on that basis only.

Who is your target audience

This is another important consideration. You need to define an ideal reader of your blog post. Find out what he does, how much experienced he is, and what is his qualification? You also need to find their interest level and intension. Is your ideal customer in the market to buy the thing you are writing about? Is he just researching, or reading casually? Knowledge of the intention will help you customize your language.

Write a draft headline

Write a temporary headline. It will give you a target around which you will organize your ideas. This, in no way, is the final headline that will go with your post. This headline is just the first draft. Revisit the headline, once you are through with the article.

You are much better equipped to write a headline after you are done with the article, as you are much more knowledgeable about the subject matter.

Follow the tips shared above, and you will produce better articles.

Better Website Copy Writing Tips

• Your copy should not be visually heavy. Make the copy easy to scan. You can do that by dividing copy using sub-headings, and bullet points.
• Keep one eye on the target audience and another on the matter you want to convey. It is necessary to strike a balance between the two.
• Always remember, in writing style is so important that at times style, in itself, becomes substance.
• Add relevant “call to action” at important junctures in your web pages. This will help you increase conversion.
• Do not talk about attributes, talk about benefits.
• Build the story until it reaches to climax in the last line where you should add the ultimate call to action.
• Do not make pages multi-focused.
• Define model target audience of the website before writing copy for them.
• Use short sentences and short and simple paragraphs.
• Keep the content jargon free.
• List the benefit.
• Make the benefit as clear as possible.

Copy is what determines the future of the website. The more time you will invest in creating the copy, better will be the future of your website.

Right?

Wrong!

All types of writing are not cut to be equal. The style, mood, tone, use of words, arrangement of paragraphs, objective, target audience, and even length of different types of articles are different. The article that may work for one medium may not work on another. For example: the article that you post on your website will not be same as the article you posted last night on ezinearticles.com.

Talking of ezinearticles.com let me explain how you should write for article directories.

Writing for article directories

Make it visual

No one likes reading text-heavy articles, not at least in article directories. Make your article visually scannable through the end by adding bullet points, and making the important keywords bold. The things that you have highlighted should give away the central meaning of the article.

Do not make it too long

An article between 250 and 800 words work like a charm in article directories, anything shorter or longer than that gets overlooked by the reader. I will recommend using 350-400 words articles.

Practice brevity

None of the paragraphs should be longer than 3 to 4 lines, and no sentence should be too long. Short sentences and simple words are easy to understand, which help you increase the readership of the article. Do not write complex sentences.

Proper grammar

I am not among those who are strict about the grammar usage, yet I recommend reviewing the article for obvious grammatical and punctuation mistakes. You must review it before submitting to the directory.

Follow the guidelines

Do not take guidelines set by article directories lightly. By doing so, you risk rejection. Read the guidelines carefully and follow them.

Follow these principles and you will get desired results from the articles.

Content

What is being said is the most important factor in communication. This is the first thing you need to decide. You need to figure out what you want to convey to your audience. Is it the product benefit, or is it brand camaraderie? Before making any attempt to communicate, you should decide what you want to convey.

Concise

No one likes a 1000-page epic, not even you-particularly in the context of marketing message. The longer your message is the slimmer is its chance of making any impact on the receiver. You should not use even a single useless word in your marketing communication. It does not only push the audience away, but it also costs more—after all, every word takes more media space.

Clear

This is paramount. Clarity is very, very important. No matter how concise and clearly defined your content is, if it is not clear, it will not be understood. You need to do a test run of every communication campaign, before releasing it for the entire population. Nothing could be more harmful for your brand then misunderstood message.

Marketing communication is an attempt to inform the brand’s target audience about the feature, attributes, and benefits, etc., of the brand, and the more closer it will be to the 3Cs described above, the better it will be for the overall health of the brand.

Key findings

Positive Indicators

• 45% hope to reap rewards (profit) from social media spending in next 12 months
• 57% have built online network using LinkedIn or similar websites.
• 61% uses social media to identify and attract new customers.
• 75% small businesses surveyed had a company profile page on any social networking sites.

Things that make them scowl

• 6% of survey participants said that use of social media has hurt them
• 17% of them said using social media left the companies vulnerable to consumers’ criticism.
• 50% thinks it takes more time than expected.

These findings (See image for complete detail) indicate that to be successful in the new socially-connected economy, the company has to be caring. “Meet deadline and bottom line” oriented company will have a hard time persuading its customers. The concerns that small business owners that participated in the survey talked about had more to do with their business and its operation and less to do with the nature of social media. They will grow and get accepted, if only they accept this fact and make required changes in their businesses.

Having sat on both sides of the table, I am pretty much in position to see both side of the picture, and from the position I occupy, both the groups are right. Copywriting is indeed salesmanship in words but it is no less an art. Although I will not qualify it as a high art, but will always give it the credit of being a commercial art.

As I see it, advertisement copy performs two specific functions:

1. It attracts retain the attention of target audience by use of sight and sound.
2. Create a ground (emotional ground) for marketer to pitch in his product.

An advertisement copy needs to be creative in order to reach these two goals and that too in very limited times (typically in 30 to 90 seconds or in a few square inches). Attaining any of the goal using graphs, charts, numbers, and presentation will not be possible, as each one of them lacks the ability to form any connection with the audience which a well-written advertisement has.

An advertisement tells a story: a story that converts features of a product into benefits for the audience; a story that helps audience make sense of data; a story that touches their emotional chord; a story that helps marketer sell his product.

Each one of them is important: no matter how creative an advertisement is, it will not be considered good, if it fail to sell.

Selling is the end goal of an advertisement copy, and creative story telling is the tool a copywriter uses to meet the goal.

Like me, millions of readers out there convulse at the sight of poorly written web content. No one likes bad content, no matter where your visitors are coming from. This is one thing that could be blamed for the increase bounce rate from the website. You may lure visitors to your website by applying the best SEO techniques or by buying the coolest keyword in the SERP, but you cannot retain your visitors if you do not have quality content.

Attracting visitors is one thing, and retaining them and making them come back again and again to your website is entirely different thing. You may use short-cuts like buying keywords in Google, Yahoo, Bing, or whatever, and even you can bypass the SEO security measure to use black hat techniques. But there is not any short cut to bypass the need of quality content.

Why you need quality content

• Well-written high quality content help you interact with your target audience at equal level, which in turn builds trust.
• A well-written product review can be persuasive.
• Good content gives the reader a reason to talk to you.
• It builds excitement, hope, and makes the reader think.
• It gives them the reason to keep coming back to read more.
• It helps you sale more.

These are the benefits that were at the top of my mind. I am sure, you also have a lot more benefits to add. Let’s discuss the issue here.

A press release is a marketing device used by the public relation department of the organization to inform media and public about the newsworthy development in the organization. It could also be targeted towards informing and building confidence in investors and other stakeholders.

There is a certain process of writing a press release, which I am discussing in the paragraphs below. Before you write a press release, you need to keep in mind that journalists (the primary target audience of your press release) are busy people, so you should not bog them down with your epic press release. Your press release should not be more than one page consisting of 4 to 5 short paragraphs.

Mechanics of press release

Paragraph 1

The first paragraph of the press release should contain the actual news. What has happened, who made it happen, when it happened, where it happened, and why it matters to the readers.

Paragraph 2

Build up on the above paragraph and describe succinctly about the news. This should also contain the information related to the release to put the event or the news in the right perspective.

Paragraph 3

This paragraph would contain further details about the news, and a direct quote from CEO, president or director of the company. You can also have a quote from the vice president or head of the department that is being covered in the press release. For example, you can also put a quote from marketing VP or marketing head, if the release talks about market condition.

Paragraph 4

A brief history of the organization, and its financial and other vital statistics could be provided in this paragraph.

Paragraph 5

Another direct quote from either marketing director, VP, HR head, IT head, etc., should be given to give an overall perspective on the news. You can also use CEO’s statement here. The only thing that you need to keep in mind is that the person who was quoted in the third paragraph should not be quoted here. Readers and journalists need two different perspectives from two different quarters.

Closing thought

Do not forget to provide contact information of the concerned person at the bottom of the press release. Journalists may need to talk to someone to get further clarification on the release.

Well, by considering which phone offers the features that will matter the most.  While both the Droid and iPhone look similar, and even operate similarly, they differ on some key issues that tend to be very important to user taste.  First off, the service providers.

Droid is on the Verizon network, which is widely regarded to be the best cellphone network.  This is because Verizon has the broadest coverage across the United States.  AT&T sort of pales in comparison to Verizon’s coverage area.  Many iPhone users complain about a high rate of dropped calls.  Something Verizon users don’t complain about as often.

Which is where you should consider, how much are they actually going to use this smartphone as a phone?  If you think your target audience would prefer to text or use the 3G network for email and internet, opposed to phone calls, either phone works.  AT&T has issues with dropped calls, but not with texting, etc.

Another major difference is that the Droid has a hardware keyboard accessable by sliding the screen aside.  This could be a great advantage if you can’t stand touch screen keyboards.  And let’s face it, touch screen keyboards usually leave something to be desired.  But the problem with slide features in phones is that they usually wear down and break quickly.  This means your Droid could have a shorter lifespan than an iPhone because of the sliding motion.  Even when protected by warranty, that’s still going to be a hassle.

The iPhone also has one other major advantage, and that’s the iTunes App Store.  The iPhone has over 100,000 different applications for every variety of uses you can think of.  The Droid store only offers 10,000 at the moment.  Apple as the more popular retailer will be the more likely to keep expanding it’s applications quickly.

So as an overall verdict, if you want the best gadget to play with, go for the iPhone.  The network isn’t as good, but more applications means more entertainment, and access to iTunes means more accessable music and videos.  But if you actually want to make calls with your phone, the Droid is your best bet for the Verizon network.