I sometimes use the method of online press release for my e-commerce sites and also as a part of affiliate marketing. This is something not many people discuss in the field of internet marketing but if you want whatever the products/services you are promoting to be exposed pretty fast, this is definitely one of the techniques you should look into.
This technique is rather an old fashion way of doing online marketing and it’s pretty much similar to article marketing (aka. bum marketing). The only difference is that in the article marketing you can write about your niche/products as an article author but for press release, you are supposed to have someone else (like a reporter/journalist) write about your business so it should sound more objective, which tends to produce better results simply because it would sound more "believable"…
But the reality is, unless you find someone who genuinely wants to write about your business, you’ve got to write for yourself, pretending you are a reporter… So the key is to be "objective" here.
Here is the simple steps I go through:
1. Do proper keyword research and come up with a few keyword phrases with decent search volume.
I mainly use Market Samurai for my keyword research. It’s a brilliant tool. You can try for 12 days for free with full function now so check it out if you don’t have a good niche keyword tool (btw, this is not an affiliate link so i don’t get anything from it:)).
2. Write a press release - Be as objective as you can be - No hype. Just pretend to be a good reporter who genuinely wants to write about your business.
The head-line is the most crucial part of it as that how people decide to click on your link in SEs. Here is a good article about writing a press release headline >> How to write a press release head-line
3. Submit your press release article(s) to press release websites. You can submit to as many sites as you want but in that case try to write a few unique articles for each of the main keyword phrases from your research so that you will get more traffic.
I normally use only two press release sites, one free one paid…
www.prweb.com
This a paid service. The standard visibility is $80 but normally I get money back in 24-48hrs if the product I’m promoting is decent one so the rest is a pure profit.
www.prlog.org
This is a free service. It may not be as powerful as prweb.com but you can still get a fair bit of exposure with it.
In the past I have experienced making a few hundred bucks within a week of affiliate promotion (using direct linking) purely through those PR sites so I know this method works.
I hope it will work for you too!
