In either case, here are four mistakes that you’ll never want to make when working in PR.

1. Showing Up Late

Never be late. Let me repeat that: never be late. Whether it’s an appointment with a contact, a lunch date, a conference call, or an industry cocktail party, make sure you’re on time.

This isn’t a college party – showing up “casually late” doesn’t work. Every minute you’re late for your meeting will seem like ten to whoever is waiting for you.

If you are running late, make sure you call, text, email, Facebook, Twitter DM, or send a pigeon on your behalf to inform the waiting persons. Show them the courtesy you’d expect yourself.

Don’t be afraid to show up early, but don’t show up 45 minutes ahead of schedule. This will make things awkward for the people you’re waiting to see, and may make it seem like you have nothing better to do (or this is the only company that has given you the time of day).

2. Being a Textbook Talker

Scenario – you’re a waiter serving a bunch of tables at a middle-class restaurant and you have two tables. Table one is a group of four elderly women eating salads. Table two is a group of college guys ordering wings and beer.

Would you talk to these people with the same tone, mannerisms, and choice of words? Probably not.

The same applies when talking to other people and businesses. If you’re talking in person, it’s a bit easier to judge someone’s personality. If you don’t already know the person, it’s best to be professional. If you find out they’re a casual, humorous kind of person, be the same. If they’re something else, respond appropriately.

You can often pre-judge how someone will interact with you based on the company they work for – think of a Facebook employee vs. an employee of a law firm. But be very, very careful. Nobody has a one-dimensional personality. Someone can be a joker one moment and deadly serious another, depending on the circumstances.

Given today’s world of social networking, you can dig a bit (Twitter, Facebook if it’s public, LinkedIN, Flickr, etc.) to learn more about the person you’re going to contact. Have a common interest (i.e. cars), great! Bring it up in your first point of communication:

“Hey! Thought I’d reach out and contact you as a fellow sports car enthusiast, AND someone in the iPhone development community.”

This increases the chance of hearing back enormously. Even if they won’t be talking about your product or services, at least you can develop a relationship that may benefit you somewhere down the road.

3. Overtly Asking to Be Featured

Instead of saying:

“Hey, I was just wondering if you could review our product on your website”

Try something like:

“Have you heard about our product before? I’d be happy to send you some free stuff so that you can check it out.”

It’s generally best to avoid directly asking for coverage when reaching out to a media contact. First develop a relationship, find out if they’ve heard of or used your product/service, and then, and only then, see if they’re interested in writing a review.

It’s a bit of a touchy subject, but asking for a review can be made to seem less selfish (for lack of a better word) by doing things like:

• mentioning the benefit for them to review it (i.e. it’s something you and your audience would benefit from using)
• offer to include a giveaway (this helps the reviewer – contests generally increase web traffic and reader comments)
• point out similar media outlets that have already covered your product/service
• mention awards you’ve won or testimonials from other credible sources so that it seems like they’d be missing out if they didn’t cover you (i.e. if you’ve been on FOX then CNN would be missing out if they don’t talk about you)

4. Write Like a Kindergarten

When children start writing, their garbled spelling and mixed up sentences can be cute. It’s not cute, however, when you send a PR contact an email or letter full of typos and poor grammar.

The BIGGEST mistake you can make is to misspell the name of the person you’re contacting. Terrible. A close second is spelling the name of the company they work for incorrectly. With Google and Wikipedia at your fingertips, there are NO excuses.

Make sure to NEVER spell your own company name and product names, or services incorrectly, and never spell something two different ways in the same email. I’ve seen two and even three different spellings for things in the SAME email far more times than you’d imagine.

But What If I Screw up?

We’re all human, and we all make mistakes. The way you deal with your mistakes is what will leave a lasting impression with your contact.

A short apology and a bit of (humorous) self-bashing will usually do the trick.

Remember, when you’re doing PR, you’re not just representing your company – you’re representing yourself. You never know when you’ll run into old contacts in your future.

You can see a video of my 5 minutes on YouTube or embedded just below:

There are a lot of other great videos to watch, you can see lots on the main Ignite Show website. My personal favourite is Eugene Lin, speaking about his path to building a killer iPhone App in iPhoning My Way to Retirement $.70 at a Time:

The Ant Fable

Having trouble viewing the presentation? You can also see it on SlideShare.net.

Once you decide what you want to share with your customers, you need to choose a tool that makes email campaigns a pleasurable experience. Luckily, there are no shortage of good options in this area. Here are some tools that have enjoyed success this century.

AWeber

Quickly create and run your campaigns with powerful, easy-to-use email marketing tools.

Whether you’re looking to get your first email campaign off the ground, or you’re a seasoned veteran who wants to dig into advanced tools like detailed email web analytics, activity based segmentation, geo-targeting and broadcast split-testing, we’ve got just what you need to make email marketing work for you.

MailChimp

MailChimp will help you manage and grow your mailing list, design beautiful emails, get into the inbox, and track your campaigns.

Free + Easy = People Power.

Emma

Create, send and track your email campaigns in style.

Meet Emma, the email marketing and communications service that’s taken a unique approach to web-based software. We think it should be easy to use (goodbye, cluttered interface). It should be made for you (farewell, generic templates). And it should even be fun (see ya around, support phone queue).

It’s all about email marketing in style, and it’s why 20,000 small and midsize businesses, non-profits and agencies have chosen Emma to power their email newsletters and campaigns. And we’d love to help you.

sendloop

Sendloop is a professional yet easy-to-use email marketing and mail list management service for any kind of online/offline businesses.

Newsberry

Send and track email newsletters: join the thousands of companies who trust Newsberry for the email marketing success.

iContact

The Email Marketing Service That Allows You to Easily Track Sends, Opens, Clicks, and More!

StreamSend

StreamSend is the most comprehensive and cost-effective permission based e-mail marketing suite available, and it is our honour to provide this powerful email marketing suite to marketers, entrepreneurs and online retailers around the world.

CampaignMonitor

Email marketing software for designers and their clients.

Send beautiful email campaigns, track the results and manage your subscribers. Earn a tidy profit by letting your clients send at prices you set.

Campaign Monitor is one of the more popular services out there, but it’s aimed more at professional web designers. And they are so confident in their product that they allow their customers to rebrand the Campaign Monitor package and offer it to customers of their own. Great support and a flexible API make this possible.

And many of their clients have taken advantage and offer their own email marketing packages built on the Campaign Monitor engine. Some email marketing tools can be a bit intimidating to start using, so these companies have attempted to make it a little easier for the end user: some focused completely at ease-of-use or doing the design, some are focused at a niche market.

Check out these other services that may suit your needs.

AshWebMail

AshWebMail is built to give you the tools to succeed in email marketing. This means that every feature we build and decision we make is focused on one thing – helping you rock at email marketing. Happy rockin’!

Breeze

Breeze lets you create and send amazing email campaigns. And it’s really, really easy.

Broadcast

The cost-effective way to reach your target audience.

It’s simple – we do the design, you add the content, manage subscribers and track the success of your campaigns using Broadcast’s built in reporting facilities. No installation, no setup, no fuss.

MagicMail 2.0

Create stunning email campaigns as easy as 1-2-3.

mail&go

Create and deliver fantastic email campaigns. It’s so easy you can just mail&go.

ScoutMailer

The easiest way to manage your camps, councils, troops or crews e-mail mailing list.

ScoutMailer is a super simple web application designed to make it easy to send e-mails to your camp, council, troop or crew. Send messages, manage your list and monitor the results. It doesn’t get any easier than this!

Selectmailer

Selectmailer – quite simply the best, easiest and most measurable e-marketing tool! Selectmailer is being used to send tens of thousands of attractive HTML email newsletters every day.

Are you connecting with your customers as well as you can? Your users and customers should feel like the know you personally. Any of these great tools can help you to show the human side of your company or product and make your users feel more at home.

So when should we go full steam ahead with our idea even after hearing all the negativity—and when should we pause and evaluate the idea?  The answer depends on who the naysayers are.

1. Student Proving a Professor Wrong

Fred Smith was a student at Yale University in the 1960s. For his Economics class, he wrote a paper describing an idea he had about using the hub-and-spoke model to make the delivery of mail and goods more efficient.

His professor—Challis A. Hall Jr—read the paper and barely gave it a C.

But Fred didn’t let that discourage him. He went on to create Federal Express (now FedEx) and revolutionized the postal industry.

Why didn’t Challis A. Hall Jr see the potential in Fred’s idea? Because he was a college professor who didn’t run a business—FedEx’s core market. Hall didn’t see the benefits of getting important mail delivered a day early.

2. LolCatz? Are You Kidding Me?

A few years back, if you told me that you were going to start a blog with funny pictures of cats with captions in broken English, I would have called you crazy. But yet, today LolCatz is one of the most popular blogs in the world. Today, the LolCatz and other funny blogs in the entire ICanHasCheezeBurger.com network receive more than 218 million page views a month!

So why didn’t I see the value in it?

You see—I’m not its target audience. I’ve never held a 9-to-5 office job where people pass on silly stuff just to get rid of their boredom. I couldn’t predict how well it would do. You’ve got to ask that question to people who will find it useful—those who will form your core audience.

Action Summary:

• Don’t heed advice from folks who don’t form your target audience. Who you wouldn’t expect to take out their wallets and do business with you.
• Don’t listen to naysayers – especially if they are a part of your family or friend circle. They don’t have the right perspective.
• Call up 5-7 of your target audience and test your idea with them – and them only.

A Few Questions To Ask Your Target Audience

• What do you do now to solve [the problem you solve]?
• What is the exact process you follow to achieve [the end result]?
• What was hard about it?
• What was easy about it?
• What is the one attribute of it you wouldn’t change?
• Would [your idea] help you do it in a better way?
• What type of a person do you think would benefit most from [your idea]?
• Would you tell your friends about [your idea]?
• Where do people like you hang out – online as well as offline? (Helps you find where you can start promoting your idea…)

Public relations is an important part of every business, and it’s usually a good idea to involve experts when dealing with such an essential aspect. Let’s look at what’s involved with outsourcing this important part of your business.

To start, let’s look at some pros and cons:

Pros

• Less work: If you’re constantly busy and don’t have time to write emails and make phone calls, outsourcing PR may be a good idea. You may also feel your time is better spent doing what you do best, i.e. design, engineering.
• Particular skills: A PR company that has skills you or your team don’t have means they can do things you aren’t capable of (i.e. Google Adwords, although you can find specialized companies to do this).
• Relationships: If the PR company you’re thinking of hiring has a solid relationships with the media in your industry niche, they’ll be able to reach out to people you may have a hard time getting through to: For example, if they have an in at CNN, they may be able to get you featured in the Business section: If you’re a new, unknown company to CNN and you try to make the contact yourself, you probably won’t hear back from them.

Cons

• Cost: PR companies aren’t cheap – and if they are, they probably wouldn’t do much for you anyway. The money you spend on a PR company could be spent on advertising, networking events (trade shows, dinners, etc.) or additional employees, among other things.
• Tracking: If you don’t have the time, the means, or the knowledge to properly track the effectiveness of your PR company’s efforts, you may be pouring money down the drain. Google Analytics and Mint are good tools for monitoring web statistics. The iPhone application Ego can be used help you keep track of Google Analytics, Mint, and Twitter (as well as a few other popular services) when you’re mobile. You can also setup Twitter Searches to track word of mouth, and monitor Twitter from your favourite iPhone app (mine being Tweetie).
• Image: Because your PR company will be trying to persuade media folk to review and promote your product or service, you need to ensure the PR people are in line with your company image. If you’re a cool, young, hip company, all you need is your PR company to contact a blogger by beginning their email with “Dear Sir or Madam”. It may sound trivial, but aside from the fact that it can deter potential responses, it can change how a media contact will shape its review. If your contact with the media is super professional, their reviews are likely to be too. Just make sure your PR company is on the same page and that you know how it’s talking to the media.
• Strangers: Would you rather talk to a stranger or somebody you know? If you think a media contact has at least heard of your company before, he or she would probably rather hear from you than PR Company XYZ. Media folk usually would rather speak to someone on the inside as opposed to someone on the outside.

Of course there are plenty of other things – for example, if you can’t write very well, you don’t want to be emailing important media contacts yourself. People don’t respond well to improper grammar and typos (nobody’s perfect but if an email reads as though a kindergarten kid wrote it with chalk on your driveway, it’s not going to get a response).

Already have one?

So you already have a PR company – what to do? Monitor, monitor, monitor. Going purely on trust in this industry is not a good idea. Even if a PR company has a proven track record, it doesn’t mean they can do the same for you.

Google Analytics is free and fairly easy to understand. If you don’t already have it on your website, it’s probably the first thing you should install. From there you can explore other tracking tools (as mentioned above), but if you aren’t seeing the numbers you’re looking for, you need to speak up. If your web traffic doesn’t growing month over month, year over year, there’s a problem.

Make a list of things you want your PR company to achieve for you (or carefully examine the list they provide) and make sure it’s delivering on its promises each and every month.

No money for a PR company?

That’s OK! I recently wrote an article about making first contact with the media – that’s is a good place to start.

If you make a quality product or provide a service that is of great value, it shouldn’t be too hard to get noticed. If you can make the best product in your industry, you can sit back and watch the traffic flow.

PR isn’t everything but it needs to be done right.

As I sit and type this, it’s nearly three in the morning. Working late, once again.

Or am I? What IS working late? Is working late just working past 5:00 pm – or is it working for a certain amount of consecutive hours in a row? Or is “working late” just a term we often use when we think we should be elsewhere, i.e. with the family?

In today’s day, business happens 24/7. If you’re a startup company – or any company for that matter, you probably can’t get away with 9-to-5 hours.

Of course, you may have “office hours” of 9 to 5, but there is always work to be done outside these hours.

There are many reasons for working outside the “typical” (or as I like to say, “old-fashioned”) office hours.

Some of these include:

• Email: Email happens 24 hours a day. Unless your company reaches only your local community, you’ll probably have customers and business contacts in different time zones. I often e-mail or send instant messages to contacts outside of “office hours”, because these are the times most convenient for the people I’m trying to reach. It’s not efficient to email someone and wait an entire day, only to need to ask them another question. Time is money.

• Phone calls: If your business relies on phone communication, you’ll have to decide if it’s worth “taking the call”. Try sticking to particular hours – once your customers realize you’ll answer the phone at 3 am, it will become the norm.

• Sales: If you operate an e-commerce website, or sell anything 24/7, it pays to have someone available as close to 24 hours a day as possible. If you have a large enough volume, you may require a sales team during all hours. You may want to watch your traffic and sales quite closely.

• Customer service: If you’re selling to customers around the world, you have to be proactive and reactive to situations outside of work hours. Your “office hours” will not do anything to prevent an outraged customer from tweeting about your product or service at 4:00 am. If you’re small, try to do this as much as possible (monitor from your phone, etc.) regardless of the hour.

• Competition: More likely than not, you have a competitor that is either operating 24-hours a day. Stay ahead of the game by providing flexible hours, or at least being aware of your competition.

It’s not viable for every small company to operate 24 hours a day. Not only is it expensive, but it’s hard to find good employees willing to work night shifts (outsourcing to another time zone may work well here).

Do what you can for now – just make sure it’s top of mind as you grow.

So, how exactly do I NOT become a workaholic?

While it may be true that you have to operate during hours outside of the old 9 to 5, it doesn’t mean you need to work more hours each day.

Try spreading things out and taking breaks. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t respond to every email within five minutes. If you have the option to, do some of this work from home. Delegate work to others.

Did I mention take breaks? Not just half hour breaks, but days/week(s) off. If you over-work yourself, you’ll be miserable. And if you over-work yourself to the point of sickness, who fills in to maintain responsiveness and productivity?

If you’re a creative person, you may find yourself constantly thinking of ideas outside of “work hours”. It’s hard just to sit yourself at a desk and say, “I’m going to think of the next great idea”.

Many of my creative ideas come while I’m in the shower. It’s important for me to think about work outside of the office – it allows me to think from a different perspective.

Some people just disconnect when they leave the office. Sometimes I’m jealous of this – however, having business on the mind at different times in different places often sparks creativity.

The bulk of the successful people I know do not work for an 8-hour period and then call it quits – they’re always thinking and working.

Just don’t overdo it.

Embrace the new “office hours” – I think they’re here to stay.

The idea of ‘filler’ content is nothing new in publishing. Magazines, newspapers, even TV has filler, it’s the stuff that bulks up and fills out your editorial calendar. But online, filler content has the potential for a whole lot more than just plugging gaps, and it all rests on search traffic.

For most online publishers, search traffic makes up a reasonably large bread and butter base of visitors. On our Envato blogs, for example, search traffic generally makes up about 20-30% of visits. That’s a pretty substantial amount of traffic for us, but for some publishing sites those are some really low numbers.

You see there is a way to grow search traffic that has nothing to do with tinkering with the keywords on your articles, or even building link-backs. Instead it’s about publishing masses and masses of content, and that’s where filler content is taken to a whole new level.

Authority Domains, Page Titles and Quantity

Ever notice that when you Google pretty much any topic in the world, Wikipedia will appear somewhere in the top ten search results? That happens because Wikipedia.org is an authority domain. Search ranking algorithms take a slight shortcut in ranking pages and give very heavy weighting to domain names with a lot of link backs, even if the individual page itself is not that important. As it happens Wikipedia is a pretty good source of information on most topics, so this method of ranking works quite well in this example.

Now let’s say you Google “Where is Timbuktu in Africa?” and there is a page out there with those exact words in the title, Google again will give this a pretty high ranking for your query – after all it appears to be a perfect match.

Marry these two ideas together and you will see that if you could get an authority domain with tons of content with a variety of organic titles, you’d be open to receiving a lot, and I mean a lot of traffic. Of course there is also a good chance that you are creating what some pundits are calling information pollution.

Feeding the World’s Demand for Answers

In a recent Wired article ‘The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model‘, author Daniel Roth writes about how companies are using the mixture of Authority Domains and Quantity of Content to make some very big businesses.

Sites ploughing out enormous fields of content have been around for a while, from grand-daddy names like About.com to more modern Stackoverflow.com type sites. Sometimes they are driven by a fairly traditional publishing model, sometimes entirely by user generated content. But they all share the same general ethos: pump out a lot of pages with a lot of subjects on a big domain.

DemandMedia, the focus of Roth’s article, takes these ideas and applies them to publishing at a whole new level. It does this in two ways. The first is in the sheer scale of the operation. At their current size Demand publishes over 100,000 articles and video clips every month. By next year the company plans to step this up by a massive ten times to around 1 million pieces of content per month. To give this some context, Wikipedia has around 3 million English articles at present, in total.

The second part of Demand’s operation is to make the process of choosing what content they produce a whole lot more scientific and systematic. Using an algorithm that processes search trends and ad rates, then combines them with what rankings are attainable based on competition for terms, the company is producing not just a lot of content, but a lot of content that people are actually looking for and that advertisers will pay to place ads on.

Even with over $300m in funding and a reported annual revenue of over $200m, that amount of quantity is going to be difficult to produce with particularly high quality or compensation levels. Unsurprisingly video clips are shot on budgets of $20 and articles get $15. Copy editors come in at $2.50 and fact checkers at just $1 per article.

It’s hard to imagine that these kind of rates attract a lot in terms of quality. But of course, that’s not the name of the game for DemandMedia.

MediaGlow, Aol and a Friendlier Version of Quantity

While I’m impressed by Demand’s ideas and success, they aren’t the most inspiring vision of where web publishing might go. A slightly friendlier alternative is offered by the aging internet giant Aol.

While their dialup business has been slowly rattling through its death coughs, the company has had the good sense to make a plan for the future. Beginning with their insightful acquisition of Weblogs Inc in 2005, along with its very successful stable of names like Engadget and TUAW, Aol has been slowly building their roster of niche publishing sites into an empire, all sitting under the MediaGlow sub-brand.

Where Demand is building mass niche content on the cheap, Aol is taking an economic but only moderately so route. Hiring from the increasingly large pool of talented but redundant print media workers, Aol has been building a very large roster of writers and editors.

The results speak for themselves, nearly 70 million monthly visitors over 80 niche publishing brands and the elevation of this model to underpin the entire Aol strategy as it spins off from parent company Time Warner.

Where DemandMedia is the poster child for quantity, Aol and MediaGlow lean slightly more towards quality, but certainly don’t exemplify it. On the one hand, Saul Hansell—formerly of the NY Times and now AOL’s programming director—was quoted as saying “Aol is just as much as journalistic organization as the New York Times,” (source) but on the other Aol is reportedly trying to buy DemandMedia competitor AssociatedContent. In his post The End of Handcrafted Content, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington laments both approaches and implores publishers to search out new ways of profiting from a quality focus in online publishing.

Quality vs. Quantity – Psdtuts+ vs Tutorial Aggregators

Though I have no experience of publishing at the size of either Aol or Demand, I find the quality vs quantity issue interesting because when we launched our flagship tutorial site Psdtuts+ two and a half years ago, this was exactly the dilemma it faced.

Though Psdtuts+ is far and away the largest Photoshop tutorial blog today with around 2 million visitors a month, it certainly isn’t alone. In fact there are tons and tons of tutorial sites around, so many so that there is a class of meta-content sites called Tutorial Aggregators that exist to funnel all these tutorials to the reader.

The best known aggregator is a site called Good-Tutorials.com and at the time when we launched Psdtuts+ it was already pretty large. I remember wondering if it was such a good idea to be in the rather expensive business of producing long, quality tutorials, when it was possible to get huge amounts of traffic with a mostly automated aggregation system where other people had to do the heavy lifting.

Equally pertinent was the question of whether there was even a market for good quality tutorials where masses of hobbyist material was already abundantly available.

Within a few months of launching however it was very clear that there is a market for quality and it can be profitable. Given that there is only so much information a person can take in, I believe they will generally prefer smaller amounts of higher quality content than buckets of average quality.

A couple of years on and Psdtuts+ has outgrown the aggregators—though they still send substantial traffic—and thanks to advertising and subscriptions it’s even profitable. It’s also one of a growing number of great tutorial sites posting hand crafted, long, detailed and laborious tutorials.

I don’t know if the Psdtuts+ lesson holds true in every type of publishing. But it certainly makes me optimistic that there is room on the web for both quality and quantity operations. It is a pretty big web after all.

Of course a quality AND quantity site… now that would be a thing of beauty!

They may not be aliens, but they aren’t your next-door neighbor either.

So how do you go about contacting a new media contact for the first time? Do you follow them on Twitter and send them a DM? Do you email them? Make a cold call? Or do you simply just show up in person, and knock on their door?

Depending on the industry you’re in, the first medium of contact can differ. If you’re contacting someone in the web or tech industry, chances are an electronic form of contact will work best. Sometimes though, an old-fashioned handshake can work best.

Do your best to determine the most appropriate method of contact – after all, do you really think it makes sense to send a tweet to the 60-year-old contractor down the road? No.

Who can I contact?

Before you start contacting people, you need to figure out the appropriate people and companies to target.

For example, if you’re a small iPhone developer that has just released its first application – do you think it makes sense to contact CNN? How about Macworld, or TUAW?

I wouldn’t go as far as to say you should never contact any of these companies – you’ll need to use your judgment again. If your application has been picked up all over the place (i.e. featured in the App store or in an iPhone commercial, or already covered on some equally popular websites), you may have the leverage you need to contact some of the bigger names.

One way to leverage something like this would be to put it right in the subject of an email, i.e. The Netsetter App: Featured in Apple’s Latest iPhone Commercial. This will greatly improve your chance that the person on the other end of the line will even give you the time of day to open the email, let alone read it.

So what do you do if your application wasn’t in Apple’s latest TV ad?

You start small. Contact bloggers who run personal (often not-for-profit) blogs. Try to find one in your user niche of users, rather than one reviewing other iPhone applications (in this example).

For instance, if you were releasing an application similar to Photoshop Mobile, you’d want to go after designers, photographers, and other creative people – as opposed after a more general website like TUAW.

Individuals running smaller (but popular) blogs are often looking for new content to write about, and are always looking to meet new people. The same can’t always be said about the larger “company” websites – they may see your contacting them as purely a selfish request for traffic (even if it’s not the case).

So I’ve found a cool, independent blogger – now what do I do?

There are usually three ways to get hold of a blogger: a contact form on their website, Twitter, or by sending them a direct email. Some may list their contact phone number. Don’t use it.

I’ve personally networked with approximately two hundred bloggers/media folk in a period of 3 or 4 months – without picking up the phone once. Again, this isn’t the case for every industry, but in general, people don’t want interruptive phone calls.

Personally, I find it’s best to avoid using Twitter as your initial form of contact. It doesn’t hurt to follow the contact, but avoid sending them a “Hey, my name is _____ and I wanted to share _____” tweet, or DM.

Contact form or direct email?

Generally, I’ll opt. to send a direct email instead of submitting a contact form, because it offers more flexibility and the ability to store a record of the outgoing communication.

Below are a few important things to consider, when contacting by either method.

Drop-down options

Not all contact forms allow you to enter your own subject line. Oftentimes you’ll have to choose from a drop-down menu of some sort. If you’re choosing an option from a drop down menu, make sure you choose the most appropriate option – not the option that they’re likely to be most interested in (i.e. don’t choose the “Hire me” option just so they look at it first). If you do this, you’ll lose all credibility.

Communication history

Sending your target an email means you’ll have a copy of your outgoing message. You won’t always receive a copy of your original email if you get a response, so if possible, it’s best to send them an email.

As you start hearing back from people, you can keep track of what works – and when you don’t hear back, you’ll know what’s not working.

Subject line

As mentioned earlier, try to use something catchy here. By catchy, I don’t mean using exclamation marks, caps lock, or including X amount of lottery winnings in the subject line. You’ll want to mention something familiar or appealing to the recipient – this may require some research before sending your message (more on that later). Keep your subject line as short as possible, and capitalize the beginning of most words (except and, the, etc.).

I’ve applied some of what I’ve learned from Adwords optimization to subject lines, and it works. You’ll notice noticeably higher conversion rates when using initial caps for every word in your Adwords text ads. Since this is not advertising, and you’re emailing a writer, don’t get too crazy with this.

The Golden Rule

We all receive junk mail and shady business propositions everyday – if you don’t, consider yourself lucky!

If you receive junk mail daily, you can use it as a learning tool. I can’t count how many 800-word emails I’ve received that I delete before reading; emails starting with “Dear Sir or Madam”, or messages containing wallpaper-sized graphics go to my trash almost immediately. Whatever bothers you probably bothers other people – don’t send people the type of mail you yourself mark as “junk”!

Signatures

If you’re sending a direct email, make sure you’ve thought about your signature.

For a long time, I had a signature explaining the company I worked for and the products we sell. This transitioned into a hybrid of the aforementioned along with my email address, Twitter name, and AIM account. Then it dawned on me – why would I need to include my email address when I’m sending them an email FROM THE SAME ADDRESS? This isn’t 1995. In addition, if the person wants to find you on Twitter, I’m sure he or she will have no problem doing so (if your name is John Smith, maybe it doesn’t hurt to include your unique Twitter ID). And AIM? If they haven’t ever spoken to you, why would they want to chat with you on an instantaneous level?

I now have a simple signature that includes my name, and a happy face. I don’t always include the face, but sometimes I find it helps to make the email seem more personable. You definitely don’t want to include a .JPG or .PNG of an actual happy face, or your face for that matter – I once received a no-less-than-1024×768 headshot in the signature of a woman who had contacted me. If there is some sort of super urgency involved in your line of work, you could consider adding a phone number, otherwise I’d stay away from it – they’ll ask for one if they need to call you.

Do your homework

It’s extremely important to do your research before contacting someone. If you’re emailing a blogger in hopes of a review or giveaway, make sure they’ve written posts like that in the past. Read at least two or three pages of their blog, and scope out their Twitter account before sending them anything. Even better, watch/follow them for a little while before making contact – the better you know somebody, the easier it will be for them to relate to you in your first contact with them.

PR is all about forming meaningful relationships. Go beyond the product or service you’re trying to get them to talk about. Social networking makes this easier than ever – poke around their Twitter account, browse their Flickr photos, and read their “about” page.

Find something in common and don’t take without giving.

You probably wouldn’t invite an alien into your home right away – but with a little background information and a shared hobby or two, you may consider it.

Dealing with fast growth can be tricky, just ask Bruce Banner. One moment he’s a regular comic book uber scientist, then someone has the bad judgment to make him angry and next thing you know he’s a 10 foot green monster who uses guns for toothpicks and likes smashing things. That sort of growth always comes with consequences. In Bruce’s case, it’s his clothes that suffer. Inevitably we see the Hulk burst out of his shirt as he transforms, all the while counting ourselves lucky that his pants managed to hold on for dear life.

Startup growth is not altogether unlike the Hulk’s growth – it can happen really quickly, and it can be hard to predict ahead of time. Sometimes I think about companies like Facebook and how fast they grow and it boggles my mind. In just a few short years Facebook has grown from a few guys in a dorm room with not an ounce of business experience between them, to a company with over a thousand staff! Can you imagine what that sort of growth must be like? I can’t. How do you make sure you don’t go off the rails? How do you keep delivering product excellence? How do you keep the right culture in the company? How do you hire the right people and so many of them?

Happily, Facebook makes my own startup Envato look like an insignificant pea in comparison, so we have not had to deal with anything so epic in scale. Nonetheless we’ve had our own growth these last few years and it’s been interesting, particularly this year watching, shaping and managing how it’s taken place. In the last two years we’ve grown about fifteen times larger in people, audience, revenue, and traffic. It’s not Facebook sized growth, but it’s a lot, and like any growth it brings some challenges.

The Demands of Growth

As our young company has grown, we’ve had to adapt to the change in circumstances. In some cases it’s been clear what was needed, in others we’ve had to use trial and error, advice from our more experienced team members, and intuition and instinct. Here are some of the demand of growth that we’ve experienced:

Hiring and Training the Right People

Unless you have Craigslist’s knack for running an enormous site with a skeleton crew, you are probably going to be hiring lots of people. There are enormous challenges in making sure you find the right people and then give them enough training and resources. I once read an article interviewing ten successful Australian entrepreneurs who’d run fast growing companies. About half of them cited hiring people too quickly with not enough thought and background checks as one of their greatest mistakes.

Aside from the possibility of hiring someone who isn’t right for a particular job, you also have the distinct possibility of hiring a person who isn’t the right fit for your company. Keeping the right culture in a business is critical because it determines how your company behaves, how it is perceived and who wants to work there.

Organizational Structure

If you’ve ever worked in a disorganized group or committee where it wasn’t clear who was in charge of what and whom, then you will know first hand the perils of bad organizational structure. Throwing lots of new hires into the mix without assigning clear roles, responsibilities and reporting structures is a recipe for trouble. It makes people less efficient, effective and ultimately less happy.

My father once told me there is no perfect organizational structure, there is only what works for a particular team. So what works in one company may be completely wrong for another. The important thing then is to figure out what structure suits a particular work style, ethic and attitude.

Accounting and Cash Flow

Growing fast means you need to have excellent accounts so you can quickly react to changes in the business. Cash flow is one of the biggest killers of new businesses and it’s particularly dangerous when your business is changing so fast you have trouble predicting what is going to happen next. Having solid accounts means knowing where your money is going, what’s in the bank, what your costs are and what a change in growth speed or revenue would mean in terms of your costs.

The greatest danger of inaccurate accounting is overshooting what is sustainable and finding yourself hanging off the edge with expenses and liabilities that outstrip both your current income and growth rate. If you don’t have up to date and accurate accounts, you may never know this is happening.

Not Getting Bloated

During a recent hiring process I had a chance to speak to a number of candidates who’d recently worked at large corporates. Every one of them recounted stories of red tape and unwieldy organizations that despite their success were slow and cumbersome. When you grow fast it’s easy to get bloated. Easy, but not pretty.

These are just some of the demands that fast growth makes on a company. Each has its own complications and is worthy of an article all on its own. What has become clear to me during the last two years however is that it’s important to manage the growth overall. The question is, how do you do that while maintaining momentum?

Growth and Consolidation

Unless you’re the Incredible Hulk, building muscle is usually a slightly different process to the anger induced mutation that Bruce Banner undergoes. In fact it’s a process that offers insight into how a company might manage growth.

Building muscle generally involves two phases. In the first you exert your muscles, pushing them as hard as possible, to the point where the muscle fibers begin to burst. Then you recover, letting your muscles adjust to this new level of required strength. In business you can manage growth by taking a similar two phase approach.

In the first phase you focus entirely on growth. Whether it’s increasing staff size, pushing heavily on marketing, or using money to buy you time in infrastructure; this period is the time for increasing the size of your company as fast as possible. It’s characterized by spending to solve problems, taking the view that some solution is better than none, and that you want to push out product and development as quickly as possible. In essence this phase is geared towards looking outwards.

In the second phase you switch modes to consolidate the growth. Here you focus on tidying up organizational structure. You make your infrastructure more efficient. You build up cash by pulling back on marketing. You take time to focus on the direction and strategy and to look at where your business is going. This phase is characterized by finding optimal solutions and looking to ensure they are going to stand up to the next phase of growth focus. It’s a time for prioritizing and organizing. In essence this phase is geared towards looking inwards.

Exertion and recovery. Growth and consolidation. This two phased approach allows you to focus on each phase without ignoring the equally important other half of fast growth.

Concurrency

During each phase you take an active approach to one aspect of fast growth and a passive approach to the other. So you continue growing during the consolidation phase, but it’s for the most part passive on the growth front. A few months later, you switch to growth mode and though you are still consolidating in the background, your main focus is growth.

So it’s not that you ever completely stop growing or consolidating. I think completely ignoring one part of growth wouldn’t be a great idea. Rather the focus switches. And having focus means you can get better results in that area.

I suspect that the larger you get the more concurrency is needed and possible. So a larger organization might have different focuses in different parts of the organization. For us here at Envato, we’re still pretty small — my head particularly so, so it’s nice to be able to have only one major focus going at a time!

‘Hulk, Smash!’

The great thing about fast growth of course is that it’s very exciting. Watching things change and move as fast as you can keep up is exhilarating! And you often suddenly realize that you are capable of doing a lot more than you used to be able to, a little bit like ol’ Bruce and his sudden ability to throw trucks and leap out of helicopters!