Small businesses need Public Relations, possibly more than large corporations, to put them on the map. If you consider that time is money, however, you may find that handling your own public relations is a daunting task and not necessarily worth the monetary savings. Here are some ideas of how to get the best bang for your PR buck by thoughtful outsourcing:

Use your business library. If you are savvy enough to identify the best media for your primary target audience, your local library or the nearest city library near your very small town has valuable informational tools to assist you at every turn. The librarian is a public resource that your tax dollars pay for anyway.

Having identified your target media, find a PR agency that charges by placement success instead of a standard six months or yearly contract. In that way, you can share the PR burden by supplying the media to be targeted, and pay only for premier hits. Besides, if the placement is impressive enough, you can put it on your website, and get incredible mileage from it.

Market your business service or product in the corporate fashion with mat features to print and online newspapers nationwide at half the price. A young service like Points of Persuasion Syndicate provides PR preformatted newspaper features free to editors nationwide. Their columns get printed exactly as written when the mentions are subtle and useful for the publication's reader. These trademarked, non-copyrighted features are picked up regularly by suburban daily and weekly papers, and remain on P-O-P-S' editorial website for six months to a year for instant downloads.

People talk of Public Relations as free compared to the expense of advertising. PR is never free but used strategically, it is more believed than its more costly brethren. Each time a placement is made your business is getting the endorsement of the editor of the publication, or host of the radio and TV show. The public depends on these consumer advocates to help them make the decisions important to them and their families.

Myrna Greenhut is currently president of P-O-P-S, a service designed to supply incremental PR impressions for companies, Associations and PR agencies. As a consumer product publicist, she has been with numerous independent and advertising affiliated PR agencies like The Rowland Company, Ogilvy & Mather, Cairns & Associates, D-A-Y as well as having done major freelance PR projects for Avon Products Incorporated.