Be The Media's Dream Guest! Publicity Pro Tips For Smash Hit Success!

Thanks all for your wonderful interest in our publicity tips. The series is a set of tried and true publicity tips to use while working with the media. You'll learn 4 of the top pre-interview tips, on-camera or on-air tips, media etiquette tips & lots more PR pro tips to help position you as the media's dream guest!

Don't miss this series. When the media calls, you'll be ready!

TIP #1 Don't Try To Change The Segment Or Story Idea

During the pre-interview with the producer or journalist, please do not attempt to influence the producer or journalist to slant or change the original segment idea. This is because the article, story or segment idea is most likely already set in stone by Managing Editors or Executive Producers and your contact has very little flexibility. They are assigned to develop a story or segment idea according to a specific set of directives and appreciate your support in moving the story or segment forward.

Always give the media the info they are looking for first so they can complete their assignment otherwise, they might decide to move on to another expert! If you do a great job for them, that is, you are on target and on message without meandering off topic or discussing topics that fall outside the scope of the placement, they will use you again!

Of course, if they ask you about other ideas you may have, feel free to give them your best stuff!

TIP #2

Never Cancel A Segment Or Appointment With The Media!

Once you represent that are able for the media opportunity, please do not change your mind because the producer or journalist moves immediately to finalize the media placement on their end.

If you pull out you upset the booking process you leave the producer or journalist in a tough spot. This business is built on trust so never do anything to jeopardize the trust the media has in you.

When you make a commitment, stick to it, even if something comes up that you feel is more important. Your word should be worth gold in this industry!

TIP #3

Prepare Talking Points For The Pre-Interview With The Journalist Or Producer

Prepare your talking points in advance of your pre-interview or interview with the media. This way, you will appear to have command over your area of expertise and knowledgeable about the issue under discussion. You will avoid stumbling for thoughts or concepts.

If the media doubts your ability or expertise in the pre-interview, they will not use you for the placement. They simply have no choice. Their job is to book top qualified experts and if you indicate you are not that, they have to move on. As Annie Jennings PR has said for many years, think of any contact you have with the media as an audition. Everything you do is evaluated by the media with the thought in mind - is this person the perfect expert for the story or the segment?

You can make the media contact confident in choosing YOU if you are ready and prepared to discuss the topic. Create at least five discussion points on the topic before you speak to the producer or journalist.

You'll be happy you did!

TIP #4

Make Sure The Media Has Your FAST Contact Info!

Always provide the media with your contact info including your cell phone and fast contact info. As we mentioned, when the media moves, it moves fast. If you are actively seeking PR or are booked for a media opportunity already, keep yourself available and able to be reached immediately. If you give out your cell phone be sure it is working properly and also check your messages immediately so you don't miss a thing.

If you are traveling to a location for a TV or radio segment ask for the emergency contact info to the producer and of course, only use it for emergencies. This way, if you have trouble finding the location you know how to reach your media contact immediately.

Copyright 2006 Annie Jennings PR

Annie Jennings PR is a national publicity firm with over 16,000 experts available to the media. Major media calls everyday with their expert requests. Annie Jennings PR offers a variety of publicity programs including the new HOT PUBLICITY Branding Program. Interested in letting us know about you, your expertise, your media objectives or your book/company? Fill out our expert form (and get a complimentary publicity CD) at http://www.anniejenningspr.com/experts.htm Would you like four more "Be The Media's Dream Guest Tips?" If so, please click to http://www.anniejenningspr.com/dreamguest.htm

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My Blog Guest – Hype or Monstrous Backlink Machine?

Oh no! Run for the hills. It’s another backlink service!

Not quite! My Blog Guest (MyBlogGuest.com) is not some pay and spray link building service. There are no macros or other gimmicks involved. Actually, it requires some work on your part, but you’ll end up saving a butt load of time by leveraging with this service. Read on to find out how I’ve started making tons of high quality backlinks each month with this awesome backlink monster. Think of all the possibilities! Imagine!

My Blog Guest – Friendly Backlink Monster

Guest blogging is a great way to get high quality backlinks, but it can take a lot of work to find somebody willing to publish your articles. Creating a list of potential websites and writing emails to their webmasters is a tedious and time consuming task indeed.

I wanted to do more guest blogs, but I didn’t have the time to invest in researching sites and contacting all the webmasters in hopes that they might be accepting guest blogs. I set out to do multiple guest blogs a month, but things were starting off really slowly and I was losing hope in my guest blogging strategy.

However, things made a complete turn when I learned about a service called My Blog Guest. It’s kickasscular, broham…But I’ll be honest, I was a bit skeptical at first like I am with most new products and services. However, after seeing it work for me over and over I can tell you that it’s a really awesome way to get lots of good backlinks. The brains and brawn behind My Blog Guest is Ann Smarty. Major high five, Ann!

What is My Blog Guest?

It’s like the best kept secret on the interwebs! Duh!

Basically, My Blog Guest is a web service that lets you submit your articles to a database, and publishers who are seeking out guest blogs can view your articles and make offers on them for publication on their websites. My Blog Guest is very intuitive and easy to get the hang of after you’ve submitted a few articles.

On the flip side, if you’re interested in finding guest blogs then you’ll also enjoy My Blog Guest. You can freely search through the database and put offers on the available articles. My Blog Guest is free from the publisher’s side, and it’s twenty dollars a month for the premium membership if you want to submit articles to the database. If you want lots of steady backlinks then this is a fair price to pay though.

My Guest Blogging Objective

In the past couple of months, my objective with My Blog Guest has been to publish about fifteen to twenty guest blogs a month on high PageRank, well trafficked websites. I can tell you that I have been very successful so far. I’ve been able to publish as many articles as I can possibly write, and I could get more published if I wanted to write more. Article turnaround has been really fast for me generally. I usually publish a few articles at a time, and I sometimes get anywhere from five to ten offers within a day or two on each one.

Well…What Can I Get Published Here?

If you want to get a lot of good offers on your articles there is just one main requirement. Your articles need to be at least decent, well written, and interesting to the publishers that view the My Blog Guest database. Create good quality content and you will get good quality backlinks in return.

I’ve experimented with some of my article submissions to see what gets the bidders biting out there either more or less. At first I was worried about including too many authority links in the body of my articles, but soon found that it didn’t make any noticeable difference. People were accepting my articles with about five body links and respecting the integrity of the system by posting them exactly as they were presented by me in My Blog Guest.

I’ve never included affiliate links or promotional links, and I’ve only included one link back to my site. I include my backlink and anchor text either in the body or the footer section. Publishers have always respected my links and never made them NoFollow. One tip I would say about putting links in the body is to write in the Notes section how many links you have included so publishers know. This is important since publishers can only see a preview portion of your whole article before getting their offer accepted.

My Blog Guest is especially effective for those people who are writing about anything technology or internet related. There are a ton of internet marketers and bloggers who peruse the article database looking for content. I’ve found that they’ll try to snatch up a tech related article within hours of submitting one.

A downside to My Blog Guest though is that for many other topics there are not as many users or as much interest. This can make it difficult to create a large number of backlinks with My Blog Guest for certain topics. I have only posted technology, internet, marketing, weight loss, and dating content so far. Compared to the technology topics, weight loss and dating had less demand. It’s going to be different for each topic, and I still recommend giving the service a try if you’re interested in guest blogging about something other than technology.

My Results So Far

I’ve been able to churn my tech-related articles through My Blog Guest at a pretty rapid pace. I get so many offers sometimes that I just let them sit in the article gallery for weeks to wait for the best possible offers.

Here is a chart showing a snapshot in April - May of my results since I started using My Blog Guest:

The average Google PageRank of the main page of these blogs came to 3.15.

From the chart below, you can see that PageRank 3 blogs were the most common. I thought about using other metrics like number of times retweeted or shared or commented on, which in some cases proved to be pretty sweet.

Link builders rejoice! This tool really works. From my results, we can see that there is a strong demand for content out there. Of course, not all content is created equally. I’ve been putting out good quality articles somewhere between 500 and 800 words. My articles are hardly literary works of art though. As long as you’re not a knobhead, and you can string your sentences and ideas together into a comprehensible and interesting article you’ll be fine here. It also helps to write creative and attractive titles. Also include valuable authority links in the body of your content and leave out any cheesy or self-promoting links. You can promote your sites in the footer section.

By following these simple rules of content creation, I’ve noticed that my articles are getting picked up even faster. Either that or people are just super hungry for content that they’ll take whatever they can get. However I doubt this is the case. Low quality content is usually flagged and taken out of the database

If you’re still on the fence about My Blog Guest, then let me refer you to three other reviews.

Review One – This review actually motivated me to give My Blog Guest a try in the first place. If I had not read this review I might have passed this service by the wayside.

Review Two – Learn more about the Premium membership plan and how you can benefit from it with your guest blogging.

Review Three – This person explains how he used My Blog Guest to spread the word about his new start-up company.

If you want to do more guest blogging and get lots of high quality backlinks then I highly recommend My Blog Guest. It’s easy to use, you can get really nice results, and the price is right. Guest blogging is a really good way to build high quality backlinks and to diversify your link portfolio. If you’ve got content to publish and you’re willing to pay for the monthly membership then I believe My Blog Guest is right for you. Give it a try and you might be surprised by your crazy high results.

Takeaways:

1. It does work for link building


2. Low cost service


3. Content demand from high PR blogs


4. No submission limits

Monkey see and monkey do! Come see what Alex and the Monkey are working on over at Monkeydo Marketing. If you like Internet marketing then you should check out their new online video marketing stuff.

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Guest Contribution: The Fiscal Stimulus in 2009-11

Trade Openness, Fiscal Space and Exchange Rate Adjustment

Today, we are fortunate to have as guest contributors Joshua Aizenman of UC Santa Cruz and Yothin Jinjarak of the School of Oriental and African Studies of London University.

This post draws upon Aizenman and Jinjarak (2011).

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The dire outlook of the global economy in the second half of 2008 necessitated unprecedented fiscal expansions in most OECD and emerging-market countries. The resultant fiscal stimuli focused attention on the degree to which countries possessed "fiscal space" and on ways to apply it in a counter-cyclical manner. But what does "fiscal space" mean? In attempting to clarify this fuzzy concept, Heller (2005) defined it "as room in a government’s budget that allows it to provide resources for a desired purpose without jeopardizing the sustainability of its financial position or the stability of the economy."

In our recent paper, we aim at defining a measurable "fiscal space" variable, and apply this concept in the context of the global crisis. A conventional metric, used by Maastricht criteria and frequently by scholars is the public debt/GDP. They question the degree to which normalizing public debt and fiscal deficit by the GDP is an efficient way of comparing fiscal space across countries and across time. A given ratio of public debt/GDP, say 60%, is consistent with ample fiscal space in countries where the average tax collection is about 45% of the GDP [Norway]. But, with a limited fiscal space, in countries where the average tax collection is about 10% [China, India].

A useful notion is the de facto tax base, measuring the realized tax collection as a fraction of the GDP, averaged across several years to smooth for business cycle fluctuations. The ratio of the outstanding public debt to the de facto tax base, or the tax-years needed to repay the public debt is measuring the de facto fiscal space. Figure 1 reports this measure of 123 countries, subject to data availability in 2006. It shows the wide variation in the tax-years needed to repay the public debt, from well below one year in Australia (indicating a high fiscal space), to about five years in Uruguay, and above 9 years in India and Argentina (indicating a very low fiscal space) (See Aizenman, Hutchison, Jinjarak, 2011). For most of the countries in our sample, the tax-years it would take to repay the public debt in 2006 were below three years. Figure 1 is consistent with the notion that, even without increasing the tax base, a fair share of countries had significant fiscal space in 2006.

Figure 1: De facto fiscal space measure based on public debt and tax revenue. Notes: This figure plots country’s fiscal space as measured by inverse of the tax-years needed to repay the public debt. De facto fiscal space measure based on public debt and tax revenue is defined by [2006 Debt/GDP] ÷ [2000-05 Average Tax Revenue/GDP.

They apply the de facto fiscal space in order to explain the cross-country variation in the fiscal stimulus during the aftermath of the global crisis. The pre-crisis tax revenue measures the de facto tax capacity in years of relative tranquility during the early 2000s -- the Great Moderation. The presumption is that a lower pre-crisis public debt and lower average fiscal deficits relative to the pre-crisis tax base imply greater fiscal capacity to fund stimuli using the existing tax capacity.

Figure 2 summarizes the averages of these measures for the low, lower-middle, upper middle, and high-income. The Figure suggests that in 2006, the middle income countries’ fiscal space was higher than the low income countries. While the debt overhangs [2006 public debt/GDP] of the low and lower middle income countries are slightly above the other groups, their ratio to the tax base is much higher than that of the upper middle income and the OECD countries. This in turn implies that the low- and lower-middle income countries may have more limited fiscal space than the upper-middle income and the OPEC countries. Consequently, the fiscal stimuli of the richer countries would have the side benefit of helping the poorer countries in invigorating the demands facing lower income countries.

Figure 2: De facto fiscal space by income classification.

The 2008-9 crisis led to a significant fiscal stimulus in the US, Japan, and Germany, the magnitude of which increased from 2009 to 2010, reflecting various lags associated with fiscal policy. In the US, Germany, and the UK, massive "bailout" transfers to the banking systems were put in place as an attempt to stabilize the financial panic. In Germany and the UK the size of these transfers to the financial systems exceeded the fiscal stimulus to the non-financial sector. Similar trends, though in varying intensity, were observed in emerging markets. China, South Korea, and Russia provided front-loaded fiscal stimulus at rates that were well above the one observed in the OECD countries. Notable is the greater agility of the emerging markets’ response relative to that of the OECD countries, reflecting possibly a faster policy response capacity of several emerging markets. This observation is remarkable considering the earlier evidence of the fiscal pro-cyclicality observed in emerging markets and developing countries during the 1980s-90s [see Kaminsky, Reinhart and Végh (2005)].

We perform a regression analysis, accounting for the cross-country variation in the fiscal stimulus during 2009-2011. We find that a greater de facto fiscal space, higher GDP per capita, higher financial exposure to the US, and lower trade openness were positively associated with fiscal stimulus/GDP during 2009-2011. The economic magnitude of these effects is large. Lowering the 2000-05 public debt/tax base from the average level of low-income countries (6) down to the average level of the Euro minus the periphery countries (2.3), was associated with a larger crisis stimulus in 2009-11 of 2.8 GDP percentage points. A decrease in the public debt/tax base revenue by one standard deviation (2.4) was associated with an increase of the fiscal stimulus during 2009-2011 of 2.2 percent of GDP.

Intriguingly, we found that higher trade openness had been associated with a lower fiscal stimulus, and higher exchange rate depreciations. A possible interpretation is that, as fiscal multipliers may be lower in more open economies, these countries opted for a smaller fiscal stimulus, putting greater weight on adjustment via exchange-rate depreciation ("exporting their way to prosperity"). The economic magnitude of these factors is sizable. An increase of trade openness ((Export+Import)/GDP) by 1 standard deviation (0.5) is associated with a higher cumulative depreciation during 2007-09 of 7 percentage points. The results validate the presence of gains associated with greater fiscal coordination among countries. A coordinated fiscal stimulus may generate positive spillover effects, mitigating the reliance on competitive depreciations. In a companion paper, we also study the usefulness of the de facto fiscal space measures by showing that they account better for sovereign spreads of countries than the more conventional public debt/GDP [Aizenman, Hutchison, and Jinjarak (2011)].

These results validate that the de facto fiscal space [tax revenue as a share of the GDP, averaged across the business cycle] provides a useful way of normalizing macro public finance data, and account well for the patterns of fiscal stimuli and sovereign risk during and after the global crisis of 2008-9.

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This post written by Joshua Aizenman and Yothin Jinjarak.

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