I’ve been working hard lately promoting my upcoming class, “Polymer Clay Beads with Pearl Ex Pigments”. It’s the first in a series, so I’m figuring out some new processes and making several new promotion pieces. The next one should take a lot less time to promote, but only if I remember what I did and can find all the parts – there are quite a lot as you will see!

First I’ll make an action list of all the tasks to perform in a logical order.

1. Write up event description and create promotional image – a photo, a logo or whatever image shows what the event is about.
2. Create event registration form on web site.
3. Create any short URLs, campaign codes or QR Codes you might need.
4. Write up event announcement with link to registration page and post on web site(s). If you have a separate mobile-optimized site post it there also.
5. Write and send out press release to media outlets. If you’re new to this find some on this promotion resources page.
6. List event on all the suitable free online events calendars you can find.
7. Promote to all appropriate social media outlets.
   • Blog
   • Facebook
   • Twitter
   • Tumblr
   • Google +
   • Pinterest
   • LinkedIn
   • YouTube (if you have video or slide show)
   • More!
8. Create banner ads and place where appropriate.
9. Create flyers and distribute.
10. Create postcards and send to your snail mail list.
11. Create announcement email and send to your email list. For my email I used ExactTarget software and made use of the Social Forward feature. I had more than one event to announce in my email and Social Forward allows me to break up the content into segments and enables recipients to share the parts of the email that are of interest to them with their own social networks.
12. Send reminder emails to your list of those who have registered as event date gets closer.

I recommend you use my list above as a starting point and use it to make your own promotion checklist, adding and subtracting action items as needed. Then make some kind of master document that includes notes, links or whatever information you will need to carry out the tasks and remember what you did so you don’t have to figure everything out again the next time you have an event to promote. It’s useful to make this document in some kind of format that supports tables such as a private web page, Word document or Excel spreadsheet. Then you can put appropriate links and info in the row next to each action item to make everything easy to find and remember. If you are part of an organization share this document with others involved in the project so you can all benefit from the knowledge you’ll gain during the promotion.