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Piggybacking publicity onto popular or obscure days, weeks and months of the year is one of the easiest ways to find your way into the media.

Here’s one of the more obscure days of the year.  It’s Pi Day, and was last month on the 14th of March.  It celebrates pi, which is 3.141592653589793, the mathematical constant that goes on without any repeating patterns, right into infinity.

Columnist Jim Stingl of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote a column  about two local businesses celebrated.

* Discovery World Museum is giving prizes to math wizards and Einsteins who can recite from memory the most digits of pi.

* Each year, Whole Foods Market in Milwaukee gives away free slices of apple, cherry or blueberry pie, starting at 3:14 p.m. It also sells pies for $3.14.

Your business doesn’t have to be tied to food, or math, in order for you to generate a little publicity from Pi Day.  What can you sell for $3.14?  Or what challenge can you issue to your customers that ties into the numbers 3, 1 and 4? 

Note: You don’t have to create your own holiday, or your own day, week or month of the year in order to generate publicity from it. You can piggyback onto anyone else’s special day. Publicity Hounds do that all the time, with great results.

You don’t have to be a recruiter to find a treasure trove of Twitter tips in the free White Paper “Twitter for Recruiters: How to Minimize Your Time & Maximize Your ROI,” from Arbita.

Twitter newbies will learn the basics like how to optimize their profiles, what to tweet and not tweet, how to quickly build a large network of relevant followers, and the guideline that for every nine tweets that offer helpful advice and tips, you can write one tip that promotes.  (See “How to Use Twitter to Amass an Army of Followers, Customers & Valuable Contacts—and Promote.”)

You’ll learn about tools like Tweetake.com, which helps you back up your followers, tweets and direct messages, and Twubs.com, where you can see if a community has emerged around a specific hashtag.

From author Glenn Gutmacher’s viewpoint, Twitter is a giant database of job candidates, and the White Paper’s real strength is its step-by-step directions that show recruiters (or anyone else) the many ways to search Twitter to find exactly what they’re looking for.:

Tweepz.com lets you search the biographical data on more than eight million profiles.  You can combine a keyword (CPA) and locaton (Atlanta) to search like this: bio:CPA loc: Atlanta.  Tweepz even lets you refine the results by following/followers count, date joined and other criteria.

The White Paper is based on Gutmacher’s webinar that attracted more than 1,000 recruiters.

If it’s time to write a press release, and you don’t know where to start, it’s sometimes easier if you have a few good sample press releases to eyeball before you start typing.

You can see different angles that writers have taken. You can see how they format their press releases.

And you can learn fairly quickly that we no longer have to have “legitimate news” in order to write a press release. Now that we’re writing them and posting them online, and not writing them only for journalists who want only “legitimate news,” we can write press releases about almost anything.

You’ll find 35 industry-specific releases and 40 occasion-specific releases in the ebook The Big Press Release Book.  Mickie Kennedy of eReleases.com, a press release writing and distribution service, is giving it away if you sign up for his free Insider’s Club.

As a member of the club, you’ll receive an “insider’s only” offer each week for an eReleases.com service at an “insider’s only” price.

Mickie’s senior editor selected each press release in the book.

If you’ve just started networking on LinkedIn, the site can be a little intimidating.

And you might be stumped about how to create an effective strategy on a site that’s so big.

The best place to start is with LinkedIn’s three-step New User Starter Guide.  It gives a quick summary, with links, to the three most important things to do at that site:

–Create a Profile that truly represents you. Don’t forget those all-important keywords so that people who are searching for specific types of employees or expertise can find you!

–Leverage the power of your LinkedIn network by asking questions. We wish that LinkedIn would also have suggested that users get into the habit of answering questions that tie into their expertise.  This is a great way to really flaunt your knowledge.  And at times, I’ve found it can be more valuable than a paid ad.  Once you’ve got those down pat, you can concentrate on connecting with the right people by either asking your connections to introduce them to their connections, or by joining groups.

–Perhaps you want to build your credibility.  One of the best ways to do that is by asking for recommendations.

We advise that you pay attention to people who compliment you. Instead of just saying “thanks,” say, “Thanks so much.  I’d be honored if you’d say that by writing a recommendation on my LinkedIn profile.” And the give them the link where they can find you. 

Thanks to book marketing guru John Kremer’s excellent ezine, “Book Marketing Tips of the Week.”

He provides a list of where to find journalists who Twitter, and it’s important because many journalists use these sites to find experts to interview.  “Follow those journalists that you want to begin creating relationships with,” John says.

JournalistTweets.com allows you to track what journalists are writing about you, your book, or your subject.  Includes email alerts.  Also allows you to locate journalists on Twitter by subject interest.

JustTweetIt.com features 156 reporters and editors.

MediaonTwitter.com features more than a thousand journalists by name, Twitter ID, title/beat, media outlet and country.

If you aren’t blogging yet, or you’re looking for shortcuts to save time and blog more frequently, here are three ideas to get you started:

1. Can’t write?  Then talk!

Too many people don’t blog because they can’t write, or it takes them too long to write well.  The solution?  A small tape-recorder.
When an idea strikes, simply dictate your blog post into the recorder.  Then transcribe it yourself or hire an inexpensive assistant to transcribe it for you and post it to your blog.

2. Recruit guest bloggers.

Most of your blog content should be your own.
But you can recruit guest bloggers occasionally to fill in when you’ll be on vacation, taking time off, suffering from writer’s block, or when you simply want to expose your readers to another viewpoint.  Blogger LinkUp.com  links bloggers who want to write guest posts with bloggers who need them.

3. Recruit others on your team to blog with you.

Don’t carry the entire load on your shoulders. If you work for a company or nonprofit, ask fellow employees in your own department or other departments to contribute to your blog occasionally by writing their own posts.  Be sure to include their photos.

If you’re a sole proprietor, ask your virtual assistant, or a vendor, or business associates to write on a topic that would interest your target audience.  They’ll probably be thrilled to receive the exposure.

At a small networking breakfast I attended recently, I met five people who were either job-hunting or were there to talk about their businesses.

They brought their resumes, engaging personalities, impressive marketing materials and succinct elevator pitches and shared them with our table of 10.

But all five were missing a critical marketing tool that could have landed them a job or set them apart from their competitors.

Not one of them had a blog.  For more than an hour, the conversation centered on how each of them can reach their target audiences.

By the end of the breakfast, I lost it.

“Everyone at this table should be blogging!” I yelled.  With nine pairs of eyes riveted on me, I explained:

–A blog establishes your credibility and expertise.

–It’s like a giant magnet that pulls in traffic.

–It can impress visitors and turn them into buyers.

–Many of your competitors are blogging.

–Unlike Twitter, you can use your blog to discuss topics in-depth.

–You can engage visitors and carry on a conversation with them in the comments section.

–A blog can give you a huge online presence, even if you can’t afford a website.