Resources and Links

Helping Professionals Tell Their Story 
Should you decide you'd rather hire a professional to help you with your PR campaign, there's no shortage of firms who are happy to help and qualified to do so. Most will do a good job, but the reality is that the amount of work a traditional PR firm needs to do in order to get to know your firm and services and to conduct the campaign, will place the fee for the project well beyond the financial reach of small firms. So what can you do? Easy. Contact Alan McLaren at PR Mentor, the first web-based do-it-yourself PR service in Canada.

Alan and his partner, Leanne Bucaro, launched PR Mentor as a response to the number of small companies who sought to hire their firm Infinity Communications, but who weren't able to afford the fees involved in crafting a traditional PR campaign. Recognizing an underserved market and a business opportunity, they created affordable service packages tailored specifically to the needs of these smaller companies - firms under 10 employees with $500,000 in yearly revenues.

No sooner had they launched this service that they became aware of an even smaller sub-set of potential clients for whom Infinity's pre-packaged programs were still unaffordable: sole practitioners or companies of 1 to 5 employees with yearly revenues of $250,000 to $300,000. Searching for a way to service this market, it occurred to them that they themselves fit the profile; after all, Infinity was also a startup with only two employees. This was the breakthrough they needed: "we turned the table around, and began to look at our services as if we were buyers".

The result is a unique service that provides users with all the information they need to design a PR strategy, target the right media, prepare their communications materials and conduct a campaign. Ongoing support is available through the PR Mentor website, which has forums where members can ask questions and receive feedback from Alan, the webmaster. All questions and answers remain on the website creating an ever-growing resource. Best of all, PR Mentor costs $500 dollars to join, making it the most affordable PR service on the market today.

For more information, you can contact Alan Mclaren at: info@pr-mentor.com or at: 905-257-5555.

Expert News Releases

There's an art to writing news releases that are newsworthy, factual and objective but that still manage to to be eloquent and memorable. It's a practice best left to pros like Evan Thompson, who has been helping professionals with their PR materials for over 20 years. He is great to work with and very flexible; he will take your draft and polish it. Or, he will create your news release and media kit materials from scratch. His approach is always collaborative - he'll ask questions and suggest alternatives while remaining aware that it is your practice, budget or career. You'll always receive his full attention as he views each assignment as if it were his first. Evan can be contacted at www.evanwords.com.