11 publicity tips for retailers who sell tea—or anything else

Publicity Hound Ruth Furman, a PR specialist and a speaker at this weekend’s World Tea Expo in Las Vegas will be among panelists who will discuss ways tea retailers can generate publicity.

She asked if I could provide some tips for her handout, and I thought I’d share them here.

These tips are written specifically for those who sell tea. But there’s no reason you can’t tweak them for your own retail business, regardless of whether you’re selling dog beds or industrial widgets.

Retailers, remember that the days are long gone when we concentrated only on pitching story ideas to traditional media outlets. The Internet provides opportunities galore for spreading the word about any product or service.

1. If you’re not Twittering about tea, start right now! Remember that many people searching for tea information on Twitter will be using Twitter’s search engine. Use a hash tag (example: #herbaltea) when tweeting. Learn more about how to use Twitter hashtags for promotion and publicity. And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter.
2. The topic of gardening is hot right now because of the bad economy. How can tea-lovers create their own tea garden, filled with herbs and other tea ingredients?
3. What’s the Number One flavor of herbal tea? Survey tea lovers at your website and on the social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Write the results in a press release that you post online and distribute to the media.
4. What’s the correct way to make the perfect cup of tea? Create a short video of from two to three minutes, include a link to your website, and upload to the video-sharing sites.
5. Listen to the teleseminar I hosted recently with David Mathison, author of the book Be the Media. He offers tips galore on how to use social networking to promote and to build an email list.
6. Create your profile on Facebook. Then promote your retail tea business by creating Facebook Pages. Click the “Ads and Pages” icon in the lower left corner. You can create a Page for each product, and then invite your Facebook friends and others to become “Fans” of your pages. Remember that your Profile has Friends. Your Pages have Fans.
7. Create a tea-lover’s group on Facebook. Email them each week with a “tea lover’s tip of the week.”
8. Upload photos of tea and tea-related products, tools and ingredients to the photo-sharing sites like Flickr and PhotoBucket.
9. Create a profile on LinkedIn and start answering questions regularly on tea. It will help promote your expertise. (See “How to Use LinkedIn to Promote Anything–Ethically & Powerfully.”)
10. Subscribe to “The Publicity Hound’s Tips of the Week” and receive the ezine every Tuesday. It’s loaded with tips on how to generate free publicity.
11. Sign up for the free email tutorial “89 Ways to Write Powerful Press Releases” at  so you can learn how to write and distribute press releases.

If you’re a retailer and you have your own publicity tips, feel free to share it here.