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Hearst, One Of The Largest Companies In The Country, Is A Privately Owned Company!

Because I am interested in what people are saying about the universe of privately held and family owned businesses I read several lists of the largest privately held companies in the United States when they are published each year.

The company, founded in 1887 by William Randolph Hearst, the Hearst Corporation has interests in magazine, newspaper, and business publishing, as well as newspaper comics, features syndication and Internet activities. Hearst also operates radio and television stations and produces television programs. The company is a partner in several cable ventures, including Lifetime, Arts & Entertainment, The History Channel, and ESPN. Forbes’ revenue estimate for Hearst excludes cable partnerships and the firm’s public subsidiary, Hearst-Argyle Television.

The point is these huge companies, that look like their Fortune 500 cousins, are in fact far more numerous than those listed publicly on all the stock exchanges.

If you’re like most people it probably didn’t occur to you that Hearst is owned by the family, like yours, and not the general public. It’s not the sort of company you would think of as a family business, but neither are Cargill, Publix Super Markets, or C&S Wholesale Grocers examples you would use to describe a family business. They and the millions of other family owned companies account for almost two thirds of our GNP.

There is a lot to be learned by studying companies like Hearst to find out what they are doing that keeps them ahead of their competitors. What they’re doing that you too can do.

From what I have seen, companies like Hearst are masters at self-promotion, perhaps we have not heard much about them but if you check out their web site you’ll see links to articles written about them and every other PR strategy possible.

But they have dozens if not hundreds of people helping them with their publicity, something you can not duplicate - or can you?

The simple answer is yes, you can. You can harness the power and reach of your profile, your web site, our web sites, and the search engines - by simply writing (or getting someone to write) your company story and we will publish it, completely free.

Every business owner, including me, is looking for free publicity.

Back in 1999, in order to demonstrate that we understand our audience of family business owners, we painstakingly interviewed almost one hundred clients and other business leaders and then published their success stories on our web site.

What happened next was a huge windfall for both the folks we’d interviewed and us. The search engines picked up the stories from our web site and from the links to the stories on the web sites of businesses we’d profiled.

The result was new business inquiries for the people we wrote about, free money for them from that day forward till today.

For us, we still get a lot of visitors each day, people reading those stories on our web site before clicking the link to find out more from the company’s web site itself.

My question to you is, how would you like to get free search engine traffic, more visitors, and new customers? If the answer is yes, we have created a simple template so you can post your story on our high traffic we site.

Take five minutes and read the simple instructions for telling your company’s story to millions of prospects, customers, and competitors!

http://www.familybusinessstrategies.com/index.php/submit-a-business-profile/

Wayne Messick publisher of www.FamilyBusinessStrategies.com has interviewed almost 100 successful owners of family businesses. He is an experienced family business consultant and business coach who specialized in helping business owners and farmers understand the power of effective communications.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 19th, 2007 at 7:34 am and is filed under Business Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.