Way back at the start of this adventure I wrote very briefly about Duncan and my professional backgounds, and the different skills we bring to our startup.

Duncan with his 12 years of experience as a Developer is obviously the techie side of our business, and he is working long hours building our site from scratch.

So with Duncan busy with the development side of things, my role is to do or manage everything else! You name it - legals, financials, research etc and eventually PR. Of course most of this is completely new to me and I’m learning on the job.

Before Thursday, PR was like a foreign language to me - I knew it would be good to learn it, but I thought it would be time consuming and really difficult. So, on Thursday I took myself off to the Sydney Writer’s Centre for a one day course on PR and Media Releases That Get Results with the fabulous Catriona Pollard, Director of CP Communications.

This was my third course at the Sydney Writer’s Centre, and as with the other two courses I’ve done (Features writing and Perfecting your Pitch), I can not recommend it highly enough.

My interest in the PR course was peaked by the line in the course description “Do you want to get free publicity for your business?” With our PR budget, (what PR budget!) that’s exactly what we need!

After the course I now feel like I have a much better idea about how to go about promoting our site. As one fellow participant in the course said, “I always thought PR was about who you know. I now realise I was wrong!”

Catriona provided invaluable insights into the PR world. The whole course was very practical, and the focus was on us developing our own PR strategy by the end of the day. There were lots of recent real life examples, and our small class size meant that Catriona was able to tailor her answers (and the day in general) to the group’s specific needs.

Ok, off to finesse my PR strategy now!

Here’s some great (and free!) PR and Marketing resources that I have come across recently:

• CP Communitcation’s Public Relation’s Sydney blog posts twice weekly PR tips and tricks. They also have a monthly newsletter that you can subscribe to. You can also check out their PR tips on YouTube
• Marketing Angels also has a blog, newsletter and offers a daily marketing tip on their facebook page. You can also download their free e-book called how much should I spend on marketing. It’s targeted at start-ups and small businesses who aren’t sure where they should be spending scarce marketing dollars.
• Small Business Internet Marketing Secrets.