One big mistake that many marketing-minded financial planners make when contacting the media is to drop what's called an "information dump."

Sending a reporter statistics on the growth of your business (no matter how impressive) or on the success rate of your stock picks (no matter how propitious) will simply overwhelm them and will not garner publicity.

What reporters want is a story ? a smaller piece of information that is likely to hold their attention and help their readers, viewers or listeners.

Help the media slice and dice your professional knowledge into bits they can use. Pre-slice and dice it for them. Because when you do, you increase our odds of getting publicity.

Why attempt such alchemy ourselves? Aren't those reporter-types the experts on doing that? Why not just "put it all out there" and let the media take it from there?

No! Because it's you, not they, who know your own stuff the best. And it's far easier for you to understand how they work than it is for them to pick out the right nuggets of pertinent information from your entire, lifelong accumulation of subject-matter expertise. (After all, today they're reporting on the tax law, tomorrow it's on to new trends in the insurance industry.)

So, your first job: create your very own story.

Ned Steele works with people in professional services who want to build their practice and accelerate their growth. The president of Ned Steele's MediaImpact, he is the author of 102 Publicity Tips To Grow a Business or Practice. To learn more visit http://www.MediaImpact.biz or call 212-243-8383.