Easy advertising for your website or business
Getting free publicity for your website or business is the Holy Grail of marketing. This is typically the domain of public relations (PR) experts who will feature stories in publications on your behalf and charge you up to several hundred dollars an hour to do so. This is actually something that you can easily do yourself using the power of the internet.
There are four reasons why you want to get publicity online:
- You can often get a ‘dofollow’ backlink to your website (although not always) and that will help with your website’s Google Page Rank as part of a search engine optimization (SEO) program.
- You build awareness of your brand
- You reach audiences you may not have been able to reach before without spending money on advertising.
- You want to present yourself and/or your company as an authority or expert on a subject
The steps are simple:
Identify something newsworthy your company is doing, such as:
- ambitious project finished or started
- He won an award
- appointment of key personnel
- new equipment
- new range of products
- exploring a new market
- new capability or service offered
- supporting a worthy cause
- support an athlete through sponsorship.
Then identify several areas of expertise that you can contribute an article to; you may have a specific skill that can help people understand.
Look for sites that report news in your genre; Avoid big sites like CNN.com as they only report serious news and it’s usually bad news. For smaller sites, journalists and/or site owners are always looking for easy stories, and many industry news-based websites rely on keeping their costs low to be as profitable as possible and will publish news for value only. unique content.
Contact them and ask if they accept press release submissions, and also see if they accept unbiased authoritative articles in exchange for link acknowledgment. You may be able to get a double whammy if you can submit an authority article and follow it up with a press release a week later to improve ‘mind sharing’ in your potential audience.
Once you’ve found a few, use Google to find a press release template and write one following its structure. If writing isn’t your forte, go to odesk.com and hire an article writer. Expect to pay around $5-7 per item. You’ll just need to provide the writer with a basic bulleted list of press release objectives and make sure they know how to format one.
If spelling isn’t your forte, hire a proofreading service once you’re happy with the article; expect to pay a couple of bucks for this service. So for less than $10 you have a press release. Repeat the process for one item.
When sending out your press release, always personalize the email for the journalist so it doesn’t look like you’re sending out a mass email. Just submit your article to a website; send your press release to as many (relevant) places as possible. Remember to keep a database of anyone you contact so you can easily send out another press release in the future.
As an example, if you are in the automotive industry, there are many blogs dedicated to automobiles and automobile news. A quick web search reveals two examples Car and SUV and Autoblog. Both report industry news, have dofollow links, and on the contact page specifically provide an email address or a form to submit suggestions and/or user submissions.
Try to think outside the square. For the auto industry you may not have a direct link beyond the fact that you sponsor a racing driver and he is doing well.
If you send out enough relevant press releases and the occasional article, you’ll find that these sites will start contacting you for your opinion, and that will greatly increase the perception and success of your business, as you’ll get not only ongoing free publicity, but the associated praise as well. . with being a recognized expert.