Press Release Neglect: I Don’t Mind, That’s More SEO and Traffic for Me!

Press releases are quite possibly the most under-utilized form of marketing out there on the internet. Now, I don’t mean to suggest that people don’t use them or read them. Quite the contrary. But if you go to PR sites versus forums or article sites, you’ll quickly realize the power behind PRs. Article sites are flooded with article after article after article, and forums look similar. PR sites can be, but not generally to the same degree.

So who’s reading press releases?

All kinds of people! That’s the beauty. There are so many people reading press releases it’s disgusting. But see, your advantage comes from the amount of competition out there (much less than in the article or forum outlets). That leads to a much greater chance of having your PR read by thousands, which translates to the exact same kind of traffic as articles or forum posts: long-term (years), targeted, and trusting. Not only that, you also get the same search engine optimization from it that you do from articles, blogs, and forums. To give you an example, I wrote a press release about a website I built selling Bakugan Battle Brawlers and submitted it to PRLog, a free PR site that provides you with an RSS feed for your PRs. I submitted my feed (which I’ll address next time), and within three days, I had over a hundred hits to the PR and 12 to my site (about a 10% click-thru). As of today, I’ve gotten about 1200 hits to that particular PR. And that’s for Bakugan stuff. I mean, WTF, right? Imagine what a long-term (not fad) profitable niche product PR can do for you. And that’s only one release.

Okay, so what is a press release, and how do you write one? Well, that’s a pretty good question, so here goes.

First of all, a press release is a "news story" that you publish under a company name in the third person to sound like something worthwhile has happened. For example, it could be about a great new book that just came out or a new website that just went live. That’s really all there is to it. I’ll touch on the elements needed in a sec, but basically what makes it different from an article is that an article generally has to provide plain content, and it has a resource box at the end where you can sort of "sell" yourself to get people to go to your website and sign up for your list. A press release can be purely promotional with links in the body of it since there is no resource box at the end. Pretty fantastic, huh?

Now, there are some elements necessary to have in your PR that will attract more traffic than if it’s missing. For that matter, if it’s not done properly, your press release won’t even be approved, and what’s the point in that? First of all, you have to make up a news angle. It’s not that hard, either. Go to PRLog and read a few. You’ll get the idea in short order, I promise. Second, you have to include some sort of quote relating why this product or service was created. List benefits and features, with an emphasis on the benefits. Maybe throw in a second, shorter quote, wrap it up, and send it off. That’s it. It takes about 10 minutes to write a press release, and the links you can get from it make it more than worth your while.

So how do you get it out there? Easy. You can go to free PR sites like PRLog, which you want to do. Grab RSS feeds from your accounts and submit those to the aggregators. Bam! Of course, the more sites you use, the more links and love you get from the search engines. Alright, so how do we cut down on the submission time? Easy! There’s all kinds of software out there to do this, and the best one I’ve found is called Press Equalizer

This baby does it all, too. You can schedule when they go out and all kinds of stuff that I don’t have the time to get into at the moment since this isn’t a product review. Just jump over to the site and see it for yourself. It’s amazing!

So that’s it. Next time, I’ll get into RSS feeds and how to use them to maximize exposure to your blog, articles, PRs, and even your websites. Yes, you can build a website with a live blog-like aspect to it that will provide a feed you can use, and I’ll go over that, as well, probably a little later on.

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