To successfully replace all their other marketing efforts with image building and PR marketing, a self publisher needs to understand two very important truths about PR.

a) Good PR is Referral Marketing And Word Of Mouth

The whole objective of good PR is to get people talking and the word of mouth advertising happening. Unlike advertising that seeks to pass the message directly to the target audience PR world best as a tool that triggers off word of mouth. Human nature is such that people gossip about interesting things and controversial stuff. It is therefore absolutely important that a self publishers message falls into either or both these two categories.

b) Understanding Positioning Is Important

Positioning is really the space in the mind that the name of your business or blog occupies. The mind rather than store everything tends to edit out unimportant information. The result is that the mind will tend to remember the top three or two names in most categories. For example if you mention Colas or soft drinks, the first two names that come to mind are Coke and Pepsi. So what happens if you want to launch a new soft drink to compete with Coke and Pepsi. You will need to cleverly position it and one of the ways of doing this is by creating a new sub-category, say one for Uncolas or non-cola soft drinks like 7-Up.

Done successfully, this will mean that you will be at the top of the mind when people think of that sub category which is much easier than getting their minds to include you in their existing category lists as a number 3 or 4.

Positioning is very important in successful PR and image building more so for a self publisher who is bound to have products like email newsletters and books which will all need to be carefully positioned in the mind of the prospect to be successful.