The past couple of weeks have brought in quite a few articles and blog posts about driving traffic as the new leverage of PR professionals. Pitch the story and have the traffic to back your pitch. But is this practice really new? Haven’t PR professionals already been driving traffic to online stories? I know I have and I doubt I’m the only one.

What stories do we drive traffic to? Well, almost anything showing up online.

Product/service reviews – all independent reviews, neutral and positive, are a gold mine for PR and Marketing pros. They are seen as objective points of view by customers and the bigger the publication, the more valuable the endorsement. Reviews are usually posted in a special website section, added to newsletters, used as literature to close new deals, twittered and blogged.

Interviews, press release coverage, other articles – these are also sent out to partners and customers. They are a great way to support the company’s image and the team’s values, and their being made public through media coverage gives them more credibility. If CEOs are interviewed and also have twitter streams or blogs, they will be advised to mention them and link to them. If not, the corporate blog will do. There are also media sections on most business sites linking to all these stories.

Blog reviews – these are sometimes promoted as much or even more than the magazine/newspaper reviews for a simple reason: they are personal. They are sometimes more vivid and describe a real life experience, sometimes with much detail, less focused on steps and stages than those written by journalists who have done dozens of reviews in the past month alone.

The reasons to drive traffic to all stories published online is simple: it helps build trust, it helps position products and services in a certain way, it boosts your partners’ efforts to promote your offers as they are definitely reliable and well received by the media (and they surely see a possibility for local media to cover their company’s stories if their valued partner is such a hyped up topic). Other than that, all interviews make the company representatives identifiable and thus make the business look human. It’s no longer a faceless entity; there are people all customers can approach, even if only in theory.

As I said before, this is definitely nothing new. Some of us have been doing this for a while. But I doubt we have properly used it when reaching out to journalists. Saying something like “publish my story and I’ll get hundreds of readers who are genuinely interested in the topic for it” sounds a bit like forcing their hand. Yet is it so? If the product is no good, if the story isn’t interesting, they won’t bother. But if they incline to publish it, the idea of incoming traffic might just suddenly make the story more important. The more words they publish, the more chances it would be an important enough coverage for the PR professional to promote it.

It sounds devious. But is it? Journalists and bloggers alike already publish stories based on what they can bring to their websites. Would the story interest readers, would it bring new ones? They have a clear picture of what there is for them to gain from each story they run. They are not in the business of making anyone favors. The bigger your brand, the bigger the coverage, even for lousy stories (and I can give you a few examples if you’d like), just because readers are interested in such brands, not to make said big corporations happy. So why not finally admit what a company can do for a certain medium, old or new, is important? Why not be open about it and state you, as a PR professional, can and will drive traffic to a published story?

What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

Our weekly roundup has been MIA for quite a while now. But we’re back with 5 great articles I stumbled across last week. I’ll make it short and sweet and as always invite you to add to the list!

A great way to learn is to find out what you should never ever do, no matter who does it and thinks it’s cool. Darren Rowse of Problogger came up with a top of the worlds’ 10 worst strategies to promote your blog.

When you send an invitation to a party, people expect to show up and join the fun. Not to first submit a form and then get a second approval to attend the party. Karen Swim perfectly explained how this situation applies to social media in general and Twitter in particular.

There are some words or phrases that we hear on a daily (or should I say hourly?) basis. We’re so used to them, that we sometime believe just hearing them is enough to know what they mean. Open source is one of those phrases. Before starting to use it and other related terms, read this list of definitions published by Seth Godin.

Readers’ attention is hard to get and even harder to mentain. We are in a rush, a little bored and sometimes lazy. So grab words, as explained by Alex Cristache of Blogsessive, are always a great way to make sure we read a piece you’ve wrote.

Bloggers are a growing force when it comes to PR and Marketing. That is why a lot of companies and agencies what them to cover their stories. But bad pitches are common, so here’s another article on how to pitch bloggers from the VallyPRBlog.

Hope you like this week’s articles! Till next week, feel free to share your own findings

Whenever dealing with potential or existing customers, try to apply this simple rule: make sure you never, ever offend them. Because insults are not the best tool there is to get new business your way. Now that we’ve already remembered this simple rule, someone should really tell Ryanair! They apparently weren’t awake when this was taught…

What brought this on? A friend pointed out this intriguing story on Wired about Ryanair offending a blogger through comments. So what did the blogger do? He thought he had discovered a security leak and wrote about it. And later admitted he was too quick to expose a threat that wasn’t really there. Ryanair’s spokesperson admitted it was them spreading out the bad words. Don’t dream of an apology though, actually, here’s what they said, according to the same Wired article:

“It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot bloggers, and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again. Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves, as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.”

Well, I’m a blogger! So probably an idiot as well in the view of Ryanair employees and decision makers. But I’m not an idiot. And there’s something else I’ll never be: a Ryanair customer! Moreover, I’m not alone in thinking they were wrong. I know such companies still think their low prices allow them to act like jerks. Actually, it allows them to charge me for food and for my luggage, to always be late and all that. But low cost does not automatically imply poor customer service. Simply because there are plenty low cost flights out there!

I am honored to announce that Lillie Ammann of A Writer’s Word, An Editor’s Eye has awarded a Premio Dardos to this PR and Marketing blog. Put in slightly different words, I won a Premio Dardos Award and I am extremely proud of it

What’s the Premio Dardos Award?

Premio Dardos means “prize darts” in Spanish. It is given for recognition of cultural, ethical, literary, and personal values transmitted in the form of creative and original writing.

What do you do once you’ve received one?

There are some rules to be followed:

• First, accept the award by posting it on your blog along with the name of the person that has granted the award and link to her blog.
• Second pass the award to another 15 blogs that are worthy of this acknowledgment, remembering to contact each of them to let them know they have been selected for this award.

Who am I passing it to?

After a lot of pondering, I’ve chosen 15 bloggers, listed below in alphabetical order. There are are few bloggers that also deserved this award, but I chose to only select blogs written in English, and theirs were in Romanian. There are more who I religiously read and deserve it, but Lillie was faster than me And finally, there’s a 15 bloggers limit, or I would have copy/pasted all the blogs I have in my Google reader.

1. Alex Cristache – Blogsessive
2. Andrew – Good Honest Dollar
3. Barbara Rozgonyi – WiredPRWorks
4. “CR” Cataunya Ransom – Mosnar Communications Blog
5. Daniel Secareanu – Daniel Secareanu, Strategic Marketing & Business Development
6. Deb S. – Media by Sistrunk
7. Ian Lurie – Conversation Marketing
8. Janelle Vadnais – Create Business Growth
9. Jonathan Fields – Awake@the Wheel
10. Phil Butler – Phil Butler Unplugged
11. Robyn McMaster – Brain Based Biz
12. Rodger D. Johnson – Your PR Guy
13. Steven Snell – Traffikd
14. Susan Gunelius – Women on Business
15. Tadeusz Szewczyk a.k.a Tad Chef – SEO 2.0

Later Edit: I apologize for the initial error – Premio Dardos is Spanish, not Italian.

It’s Sunday so it’s the perfect time to brag a little! WE magazine for women has published a list of 101 female bloggers they recommend to their readers for 2009. This happened in January, but I’ve only recently discovered the entry. Words of a Broken Mirror is on the list and I can’t tell you how proud and happy that makes me feel.

But enough about me! If you’re looking to expand you blog reading list, check out some of the great women selected by WE magazine. And you can help expand their list of women to watch by simply sending them a recommendation. I think you should really start doing this, as there are quite a lot of great bloggers out there who are also women. While you’re at it, if you’re a businesswoman running a business blog, you should contact Women on Business to get included in their businesswomen bloggers directory.

Have a lovely Sunday everyone!