indie promotions

indie promotions would like to welcome Ghost Knitters to its family of clients. Ghost Knitters is a service for designers, yarn stores, stylists and others in need of handknitting help. The company employs a cooperative of professional women knitters in Ecuador who reside in a remote area of the Andes. The poverty rate is high, job opportunities are scarce and a lack of child care makes it difficult for mothers to work outside the home. The cooperative provides a way for these women to make a living by knitting, all while developing additional work skills.

We’ve helped Ghost Knitters develop a web presence and overall PR strategy to further their marketing efforts and increase their visibility in the knit design-related world. What can indie promotions do for you today?

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Longtime indie promotions client Profile Solutions recently asked us to redesign their website, adding additional functionality, training their staff to use it appropriately, and strategizing new ways to increase their profile (if you’ll pardon the pun) online using both traditional and new media techniques.

Is your website doing the job you need it to do? Does it help you get your message out or does it turn people off? Are you reaching all the customers you could be? Ask us for an online media PR review!

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indie promotions welcomes its newest client, artist Pat Hardy. We are building a brand new website for her with not only the expected contact and background pages, but also user-friendly sales tools and website maintenance.

An American painter, lithographer and etcher, Pat has been exhibiting in various mediums for 35+ years. Her art is included in such collections as the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Museum of Art and Archaeology, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, University of Missouri-Columbia, the Michael C. Carlos Museum, Atlanta, and the Georgia Museum of Art.

indie promotions looks forward to helping Pat bring her art to an entirely new audience online!

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Welcome to our newest web design client, Anne Kinchen, a registered acupuncturist who specializes in fertility issues. We are currently redesigning her website to meet more modern content management and search optimization specs, and transitioning its user interface to something that will be much easier to maintain over time.

As someone who’s generally got two clients on the table at any one time most hours of her working week, Anne needed a new online strategy. Her former “user friendly” update system wasn’t, and she needed her website to do more for her — specifically, provide better information to her clients while acting as a passive marketing tool for potential clients who may be searching for an area acupuncturist or fertility assistance.

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indie promotions would like to welcome our newest client, artist Arabella Proffer.

Arabella hired us to manage her media strategy. We’ll also promote her upcoming exhibitions in partnership with the host galleries, including this fall’s Private Empire: The National Portrait Gallery of Kessa.

She is not just a painter and illustrator, but also the co-founder of Elephant Stone Records. Her loose narrative themes and interests revolve around a fascination with punk fashion, aristocrats, Renaissance portraiture, Ian Schrager hotels, vapid socialites, Eastern European cultures and rock n’ roll lifestyles.

Arabella attended Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA before receiving a BFA from California Institute of the Arts where she studied art, animation and film. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Ana, Laguna Beach, Boston, Austin, Cleveland, Cincinnati, London and Moscow.

Welcome, Arabella!

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indie promotions is now offering its clients green web hosting services through Dreamhost. What does this mean? Through the purchase of offsets, our web host has become carbon neutral, making up for their energy usage by purchasing certified Renewable Energy Credits and carbon credits. As they say: “We are not currently able to actually power our servers with the wind or the sun, but this is the next best thing!”

indie promotions clients who host their sites through us will also be able to benefit from Dreamhost’s green services — perfect for environmentally-aware organizations, artists and musicians! Help the environment and your online PR strategy at the same time by hosting your website with a carbon-neutral web host.

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Stitch Cleveland, “northeast Ohio’s creativity central, a space where fiber and fabric come to play” is a new workshop/class space and the home of three designers’ studios. We’ll be working on promotions and marketing for their classes, patterns and special events. Our summer intern will be developing an integrated marketing database for the shop using various indie promotions resources, as well as working on online community-building and promotions.

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See this button on the right sidebar? It links to a new service we’re offering to clients and the general public alike. E-junkie not only automates online downloads and payments (perfect for musicians, designers, e-book authors, etc), but it can also be used for physical product. It’s integrated into PayPal, Google Checkout and a number of other payment gateways, it has all the bells and whistles you might expect, but best of all — it offers an affiliate program.

What does that mean for you, the artist / business? You can offer song downloads, e-books or whatever you sell on both your own site and on your fans’ sites / MySpace profiles / LiveJournals / etc.

We know that musicians in particular have made use of social networking sites such as MySpace to reach new audiences. What if you could provide your fans with a program that not only encourages them to post about you and your songs, but also gives them a cut of whatever downloads they sell as a result? Would you rather pay another online service such as iTunes that percentage or give it back directly to the fans? This could also be extended to band t-shirts, signed posters…you name it. E-junkie handles all the accounting and downloads for you.

If you are an indie promotions client (or want to be!), contact us about setting up your E-junkie affiliate programs and suggested affiliate marketing materials. Or just click through on the button and check it out!

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Sometimes it’s not about a splashy all-new website or ad campaign. Sometimes you just need some good old-fashioned writing or editing. indie promotions specializes in this, because it comes up more often than you’d think. Among our recent clients: 10 Speed and H.I.C.K. Tech.

We’ve been working on copy for 10 Speed’s website relaunch — the old saw is “a picture says a thousand words,” and 10 Speed’s design work certainly speaks for itself, but you still need a little context, or even just an “about us” that fascinates potential clients! We helped Conference Chair Emma Hogbin punch up her media releases for H.I.C.K. Tech, because sponsorship is key to the festival. A good release not only sells an event to attendees and the media, but to sponsors, too.

The title of this post, “Which of those 1000 words are you missing?” is key. If you can’t rely on photos and flashy graphics to relay your message (most newsrooms still receive and view their wire press releases on truly ancient machines, and not everyone has a high speed connection), you need to make sure each word counts.

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PR Newswire is the world’s largest news release distribution network, reaching tens of thousands of print, broadcast and online news organizations (as well as consumers via search engines and portals). Now, for the first time, they’re auctioning (on eBay) the chance to send an off-peak press release via their wire.

Winner of this auction may distribute one news release of 400 words or less via PR Newswire’s US1 Newsline. Distribution timing will be at PR Newswire’s discretion, Friday through Sunday.

As many as 1,100 news releases are posted on PR Newswire on busy weekdays, but the network is utilized far less frequently on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. This is a vestige of the pre-Internet era, when U.S. TV news cycles were geared to the 6 and 11 o’clock broadcasts, newspapers deadlines were geared around morning and afternoon editions, and trade magazines printed only weekly or monthly.

Releases distributed on Fridays and weekends remain live on websites and search engines for weeks — or even longer! Weekends and evenings are also optimum times to reach consumer rather than editorial audiences.

It’s good to see PR Newswire taking advantage of their dominant position in the news distribution business to reach out to businesses (and audiences) they may not have previously touched. Their US1 newsline is priced beyond the reach of many smaller businesses… businesses who might someday be the next eBay themselves!

Putting their own underutilized weekend cycles to work makes sense for PRNewswire in the long run — they’re building loyal customers for the future. What have you done today to reach out to new markets creatively?

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