Press release might not get you inches of for national paper but they will enhance your online presence as well
as add new content to your site. And it might be picked up by someone who will  get you those columns on a paper whether online or paper.

Press release is also marketing to your current customers and your employees what you are doing. You can send out your press release to your customers (Email marketing), your employees, add to your website, add to online press release distribution website and many more.

What can press release be about? There are tons of reasons why have an press release and here are few;

* New Products
* Business Start-Up
* Partnership
* Strategic Alliances
* Restructuring The Company
* Going Public/Going Private
* Executives Comment On Business/Economic Trends
* New Branch Offices
* New Divisions Established
* Headquarters Relocating
* Major Anniversary
* Major New Client Acquisition
* Company Name Change
* Winning Major Awards Or Receiving National Recognition
* Company Presenting An Award
* Receiving Important Accreditation or Certification
* Major Company Milestone
* New Board of Directors
* New Website

Any there many more reasons why to do Press release. If you are not a writer yourself then it is better to outsource the writing part to specialist.

Great article by CBS MoneyWatch about marketing mistakes by companies. Read the article to ensure you are not repeating others mistakes! Read article here.

Many companies fail in marketing by sending the wrong message or having a campaign that does not reach target audience. It is not easy to juggle marketing, sales, advertising, SEO, finance as a solopreneur or small biz owner. We know, we have been there too! If you need help with your marketing let us know and we can help you with Email Marketing for example. We are trained experts for Constant Contact.

Here are five ways you can improve your LinkedIn profile to increase awareness about you and your business.
Starting point is of course your Profile page in LinkedIn. Consider your profile as your business card and/or advertising of your services. Take it seriously and make it as best as you can. Profile page can bring thousands of new business, and take away as well.

Picture
The thing that many people get wrong is surprisingly simple thing to fix, profile picture. Check quickly your connection in LinkedIn what kind of profile photos they have. Find many good ones? If you connections are like many others you did not find too many good ones unfortunately. I have seen pictures that have obviously taken on party night out, one with friend (so you do not know who is who) or at beach! These really do not portrait you as professional unless your job is to party or hang around on beach. I would advice you to take professional photos, it does cost but payback is most likely much higher than one off cost to take these pictures.

Connections
Do you have everyone you know in your LinkedIn as well on FB or Twitter? Can you think of other people you know but are not yet as connection? Think about networking event you attended recently, did you get business cards there? Add those. And in case you have not being to networking event - Go to next one in your area pocket full of business cards. You can also see who your connections are connected if you find someone you know.

Recommendations
Get some and give some! This is important and great advertisement of your skills. Ask few people if they are willing to write recommendation for you and offer to write one back. I would advice to ask only from those people who you are happy to recommend and can easily write up recommendations of.

Keywords
Use keywords wisely. What keywords do you use for your business website? If your business is about business plans, make sure you add business plans in your profile. Sounds simple but think these out, what keywords would people using when they are looking for you or services you provide? What is your core skill? Make sure it stands out easily in your profile from your other skills. People have very short attention span so make sure keyword is the first they see!

Ask
What others think about your profile preferably from someone who do not know you that well. Ask what they think your core skill is or what your business is all about. If they do not pick it up, most likely others wont either.

LinkedIn is great tool for marketing for you and your business so do take some time to perfect it. And do let us know about your !

As Twitter gains momentum and active users it can become more and more difficult to weed out the best people to follow. We went through our list we follow and want to share 10 great Twtiiter accounts to follow.

@NYTSmallBiz
A place where small-business owners can compare notes, ask questions, get advice, and learn from one another's mistakes. 

@OPENforum
Welcome to the Official American Express OPEN Twitter Page where you can tap into the collective ingenuity of other business owners.
This is provided by American Express but they do offer great articles and resources for small business.

@mashbusiness
News about small business, advertising & marketing, money & finance, plus careers and business apps from @Mashable. Tweets by @ToddWasserman.
Very good source of business information.

@jeffbullas
Social Media Marketing for Business, including Blogging, Facebook, Twitter,YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+, Search, SEO and Content Marketing 
Great articles on SEO!

@lollydaskal
Dedicated to bringing Heart Based Leadership to organizations and individuals. Consultant | Trainer | Coach | Speaker | Founder of #LeadFromWithin
Though provoking tweets, one of our favorites.

@yahooFinance
Y! Finance is the #1 financial news website. 100% feed free tweets
Know what is happening Finance wise.

@CNNMoney
The world's leading business and finance website and the online home to @FortuneMagazine and @Money Magazine.
Same reason as YahooFinance.

@techCrunch
Breaking Technology News And Opinions From TechCrunch

@wwf
Simply put: WWF is in the business of saving our one and only planet. 
And we like to help them!

@pinnacleplans
Plus 1 is US! If you are not following us yet find us on Twitter so we can follow you too!

Who do you follow that you would like to recommed to us? We love to hear it.

Here are four great free resources for business owners. Check them out today. You do have to give information of you in order to access these but it is small price to pay compared to what you get.

"13 Business Blogging Mistakes & Their Easy Fixes"

Find out how to publish a successful business blog.Creating remarkable content is a critical component of inbound marketing, and also one of the best ways to generate a steady flow of fresh content is by publishing a business blog. Whether you've only just decided to launch a blog for your business or you've been blogging for a while, 13 Business Blogging Mistakes & Their Easy Fixes will help prevent you from making the most common business blogging mistakes and teach you how to fix them.

"Let's Talk Social Media for Small Business"

Feed the Social Media "Beast" and you'll see it pay dividends.Not long ago, social media seemed so new and different that it was treated as an appendage of sorts—a kind of marketing that should be tried only by "experts."

While that view still exists to some degree today, it's become clear to many that social media is no longer marketing's new thing. It's now simply part of the way we do marketing today. Traditional marketing tactics such as advertising, referrals, and public relations are still very important, but social media tactics have now become a part of everyday marketing's fabric and need to be considered at the strategic level of your marketing decision-making process.

So, rather than asking yourself if you should or should not use Facebook or Twitter, the question is: "How can Facebook and Twitter help you achieve your marketing objectives?" It's the same as asking how direct mail or having two more salespeople might fit into the plans. From this integrated viewpoint, social media participation can start to make more sense for each individual marketer's needs and goals.

With this free eBook you will also receive weekly marketing news, tips, and advice you can use courtesy of Duct Tape Marketing. 

BtoB Magazine

BtoB Magazine, the magazine for marketing strategists, delivers timely editorial on all disciplines of business-to-business marketing.

BtoB Magazine is the only publication dedicated to all disciplines of business-to-business marketing. In print, through enewsletters and at BtoBonline.com, BtoB Magazine provides more than 100,000 senior marketers, with the information and analysis they need to develop a winning integrated marketing strategy. 

E-mail Essentials eNewsletter

E-Mail Essentials is a weekly eNewsletter (Tuesdays) that offers keen perspective on what counts and what works in email metrics and campaigns right now.

Email and e-commerce veteran, Sherry Chiger, offers benchmark metrics, close analysis and real-life case studies of email marketing that measures up. 

We just published Forum on our site! We want to get direct interaction with you, the readers, and help you with those tricky business questions.

We want forum to become place to get answers, get support and encouragement and also just to waste little time on non business related things. We all know somethings you just need to get you mind of from your business and do something completely unrelated. 

Do let us know if you have feedback of our Forum.

It might be bit daunting to be the first to start the conversation but don't be afraid - we will be there with you!

Buffer makes your life easier with a smarter way to schedule tweets. Work out all your tweets at one point in time during the day. Then fill up your Buffer with your tweets and Buffer schedules them for you. Simply keep that Buffer topped up and you will then be tweeting consistently all day round, all week long.

Track Campaigns. Measure Reach. Calculate Influence. Create Beautiful Presentations. Hashtracking is in Beta stage right now but looks very promising.

MentionMap provides a ‘live’ analysis of what a particular person is talking about on Twitter and who they are talking to.

We help you schedule tweets for maximum impact. It is very simple to use with big impact.

TweetDeck is your personal real-time browser, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Buzz and more.

I could have easily have 10, 20 or even 50 best twitter tools as there are numerous tools out there but decided to highlight just few this time. I will make more similar posts in coming days to watch the space!

What Twitter tool do you use or recommend? I am still looking for one tool that would do everything.

Google Analytics
This is a must have on your site! Why? Because then you learn about people who visit your site. You can see where they come from even to the city where they are surfing. Where they came to your site, was it via Google search or direct or link from another source. With analytics you can analyse your own marketing efforts and see what brings traffic and adjust accordingly. This is tool that I think every business owner must know and learn how it works

Keep it Simple
And by that I mean the site design. Make it easy for people to navigate your site. People have very short attention span so make sure you don’t loose people because they can find the information they came for from your site quickly.

Buy the Pictures You Use on Your Website
Get professional pictures from stock photography websites instead of using free creative license ones. You can use free photos on your blog but all other pictures on your website should be professionally photographed. Having professional quality pictures gives you also professional appearance. Nothing kills first impression quicker than un-focused, completely irrelevant picture on a website.

Can you Read it?
Although the world if full of fantastically creative fonts to be used it is better to be somewhat old fashioned and boring about this issue. Font you use must be easily readable by everyone, people are not going to stick around if they need to make effort to try to read you website. Remember, first impression counts.

Make sure people find it!
OK, you have shiny new website, great pictures and loads of information with great font but only thing that is missing is people! What can you do about it then? There are numerous options out there, some free, some paid ones, some easy and some darn difficult.

Let’s start with the easy and free. Tell all your friends, family, relatives, milkman and neighbours about your site. Open Twitter account, have Facebook Fan page, do networking both online and offline. Make sure you have links going from one place to another so you twitter profile has link to your website and your website has link to your Twitter account. Start a blog. This might be daunting idea at first but it can have huge impact on traffic to your site and effectively your Sales figure!

The not so easy techniques are the one you would hire someone else to do it for you. Your time it better spent on doing what you are great at and selling your services and hire SEO specialist do what they are great at doing. They can take your site further, and get high ranking on Google and other search engines.

Check out TED talk by Chris Anderson who says... 
"The rise of web video is driving a worldwide phenomenon he calls Crowd Accelerated Innovation -- a self-fueling cycle of learning that could be as significant as the invention of print. But to tap into its power, organizations will need to embrace radical openness. And for TED, it means the dawn of a whole new chapter ..."
Check out the video on YouTube on TEDTalk Channel

Spurred by aggressive promotions from retailers, American consumers opened their wallets over the holiday weekend in a way they had not since before the recession, setting records in sales and traffic.

The National Retail Federation said Sunday that spending per shopper surged 9.1 percent over last year — the biggest increase since 2006 — to an average of almost $400 a customer. In all, 6.6 percent more shoppers visited stores on the Thanksgiving weekend than last year.
Read rest of the article from The New York Times here.