Get Featured
Getting your site and/or company featured is a great way to boost your traffic. The benefits are temporary, but sometimes they are enough to generate the kind of momentum you can build on. There are many ways to get featured, including:
- Getting a site to do cross-promotion with you
For example, you can be featured on Feedburner's Publisher Buzz if you are using their technology for your own site.
- Pitching your human-interest story to newspapers, magazines, radio and television outlets
News and media love a good human interest story. Have you overcome struggles to bring your business to fruition? Is your product or service helping the masses live better lives? Are you doing something new and interesting in the world? Pitch your ideas to magazines and columns that do human-interest stories, or see what local tv shows might be interested in your story.
Just remember: When it's time for the article or show to come out, don't forget to mention your company name and URL! You can also boost your onsite marketing by including a bit on your site about where you were featured or mentioned.
Press Releases
Are you doing something new and noteworthy? Have you recently expanded your product line or invented a new device? Then a press release might be the thing for you. Press releases come in three flavors: direct to meida, business to business, and direct to consumer. The style you choose will depend on your goals for the press release and your topic.
Writing a press release is more than just putting words to paper—you'll want to identify your audience and create a well-written piece that will spark your readers' interest and inspire them to learn more about your company and announcement.
A press release offers three main benefits:
- The chance to be picked up by a media outlet and get featured in a news story or article.
- A boost from search engine traffic due to the high pagerank of many press release databases.
- A boost in direct traffic if your site goes through the ewire and appears in place like Yahoo! news and Google news.
A press release should appear like an upside-down triangle in terms of importance: your big headline is on top, your first paragraph summarizes your announcement, and all the supporting details follow. Your goal is to capture enough attention with your headline for your reader to want to read the opening paragraph. Once you get them reading, entice them with the details to learn more about your company at the end and follow the URL to your web site!
For more information on how to write a press release, check out these links:
Once you have your press release, where do you post it? The first place to post your release is in the press section of your own website. You should also include a link to a press kit in that same section for media personnel that are interested in further information. After you've released it internally, you can use this handy chart to get you started on finding the release service that is right for you:
Looking for more tools to help you market yourself with press releases? Try these: