It may not result in an immediate surge in customers, but it undoubtedly has enormous benefits – it builds awareness of your brand, helps you stand out from competitors and gets your name embedded in the mind of future customers or supporters.

Not only that, appearing in the media can give you an extra layer of credibility and enhance your professional reputation.

Spotting a story which will interest the media can be tricky and a good public relations expert will be able to help.

Of course there are the obvious stories – perhaps your company has come up with an award-winning new invention or created scores of new jobs.

But there’s plenty of other ways to entice the press into giving over some column inches to you. Here are just a few ideas to get you thinking:

Do something good: There’s nothing like getting involved in the community to spark a bit of interest with the local press. Think creatively – don’t expect a hoard of photographers to turn up just because you’re presenting a cheque to the local school. Hold an event to raise money for a good cause, give staff time off to volunteer at a local charity for the day or offer your skills to train local people – for example, an IT company could generate great publicity by lending staff to teach local pensioners how to use the internet.

Do it for the kids: Remember how your mum brought 10 copies of the local paper because your name was printed as coming 16th in the egg and spoon race? That’s why local newspapers love stories involving children. The more kids you can involve in your story the better – where there are proud parents, there are big newspaper sales. Just make sure you get written permission from parents if children are to be photographed (although most photographers will usually do this themselves).

PR Stunts: I’m all for PR stunts, but for it to work you need to be prepared to put some work into it. If it’s local press coverage you’re after, you need to come up with something quirky, photogenic and which genuinely involves the community. The more people you can get to come along the better, as these are events which make great photos for newspapers. Think carefully about how your skills could benefit the community and use them. For example, if you’re a landscape gardener and want to raise your profile why not organise a guerilla gardening session at a local landmark? If you want to raise awareness of a cause or raise debate, flashmobs always get newsdesks excited and can generate great publicity, provided they are lawful and well organised – social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are vital for this kind of stunt.

Get opinionated:  Offer your skills for free to your local press and you may even land yourself a weekly column. It’s a sad fact that newspapers today are woefully short-staffed so your local rag may well bite your hand off if you offer to write 200 words each week on your area of expertise – for example, a financial advisor could give a regular commentary on the local economy, a vet could take time to answer questions from local pet owners or a garden centre manager could give horticultural updates. If you get offered this opportunity count yourself lucky and be professional – meet the deadlines set and don’t be offended when your lovingly-crafted text gets re-written.

Keep an open mind: Don’t presume you’re boring! Just because it’s a routine to you doesn’t mean somebody doesn’t want to read about it. A newspaper may well be interested in a village hairdresser who is being overwhelmed with demand from local women for the latest Victoria Beckham hairdo or how a farmer keeps animals cool in hot weather with home-made ice-lollies. Newspapers aren’t all doom and gloom and need light-hearted, quirky tit-bits to break up the harder news stories.

Once you’ve got some ideas for stories, it’s time to contact the press and the next blog will give you plenty of tips on what media to approach and how to deal with journalists.

Getting press coverage of your business, product, service or charity can seem like a daunting prospect, and the temptation may be to pay out for an advert instead.

While there is undoubtedly a place for advertising, it’s often wrongly viewed as the easy alternative to having an article about you in the editorial pages.

It may seem attractive: a chirpy advertising rep guarantees you a great spot in a newspaper or magazine for a terrific price and they’ll even design a snazzy advert for you. All you need to do is pay up and wait for the customers to start beating down the door.

No press releases to write, no struggling to persuade stressed-out, grumpy journalists to cover your story and absolute control on what is published and when. It does sound appealing.

But apart from the obvious downside – advertising can be costly – there are plenty of good reasons why getting a mention in the editorial pages is far more desirable.

In this post, I’m largely referring to advertising and editorial in local newspapers and magazines and what is best for small businesses and organisations.

What’s the difference between editorial content and advertising?

Put simply and crudely: You pay for advertising, but editorial space is free.

Editorial content includes news and features and is written by journalists who are either employed by a publication or work freelance.

News stories should be unbiased, written in the third person and may include quotes and photos. Features are more in-depth and may include the opinions of the writer (for example, restaurant or product reviews).

Advertisements are paid-for content and can be taken out by anyone from big businesses to individuals. They can be designed in-house by a publication or provided by the advertiser.

Prices depend on how big the advert is, where it is placed and whether it is colour or black-and-white – so a full-page colour ad on page 5 will be significantly more expensive than a quarter page black-and-white ad on page 54.

When is editorial content better than advertising?

It would be naive to say advertising is a waste of money. Great adverts sell products, increase brand awareness, get people talking about you and engage your customers.

Big businesses hire the world’s finest advertising agencies to create marketing masterpieces – think Saatchi & Saatchi’s T-Mobile flashmobs, Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s iconic Levi’s ads and the memorable Guinness commercials.

This is all well and good but most of us don’t have a spare few million quid to splash out on hiring the world’s top marketeers to design our ads and here is the problem.

If you’ve got an advertising budget of £500 and a local advertising rep offers you a spot for £300 it may sound like good value, but think carefully first. Will a rushed, poorly-designed and ill-thought out ad really do the trick?

Advertising sounds appealing because it guarantees you a place in a newspaper or magazine, but if all you can afford is a lowly ad on page 54 you really need to ask yourself if it’s worth it.

It’s not all about money, of course, and here is the key word: trust.

It is generally considered that editorial content is THREE TIMES more trusted than advertising – put simply, readers believe what journalists write more than what advertisers say.

News stories add much more authority, urgency and colour to anything an advertiser could come up with.

For example, if you’re a charity trying to raise money for a stray dogs home, you could blow your entire marketing budget on one advert. But hand on heart, would anyone even notice your ad? How would you make it stand out? Would it work?

Now imagine instead a news story about your charity. Think of the headline: “Canine crisis as dogs home runs out of cash,” accompanied by several photos. Imagine how it may look in the newspaper – spread out across the page rather than squeezed into a corner. What do you think would grab the reader’s attention more, the story or the ad?

Add to this the potential for free future publicity! Journalists need good stories, and if you’ve provided them with material in the past they’re likely to call on a quiet news week in search of a follow-up story. Imagine – they do all the work, and you reap the benefits.

Which brings me onto a whole new area – what makes a story and how do you get the media interested in what you want to promote?

I believe there is a good story lurking behind every business, charity or product – it’s just a matter of hunting it out. Forget what you’ve heard about the media not publishing stories which promote companies: if it’s a good story, they’ll run it.

Next blog: How to get the media interested in your business, charity, product or service, where you’ll find loads of tips on how to spot a great news story.