Having your website mentioned by a newspaper or news outlet is a great way to get traffic because you’re leveraging the traffic that the news source gets.
Imagine that your name and website was referenced in article as a source on the front page of the New York Times. How much traffic would that send to your website? Could you even handle that much traffic?
And here’s the best part: It didn’t cost you anything! And if you do it correctly it doesn’t have to take very much time on your part to get a lot of traffic.
You’re doing it wrong
Unfortunately 99% of people do it completely wrong!
There are 2 major mistakes that people make:
1. They submit a sales letter that is cleverly poorly disguised as a press release
No one likes to feel like they’re being “sold to” but they do like new and interesting stories.
So write about some cool aspect or feature of your product that will make the reader sit up and say, “Holy cow! That’s neato!”
And you get extra credit if the reader tells a friend about it.
2. They send their press release to some unknown press release distribution company and hope for traffic
While I have heard that people have success submitting their press releases to major distribution services you may have better luck cultivating a relationship with an actual reporter.
Learn more
If you want to learn about this in greater detail than check out this PDF: How to Get Press. It was written by Jeremy Schoemaker and I must warn you that it has some profanity and run-on sentences.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
It's a good idea if you have really good and specific content.
I have a new blog I will be starting soon, and it's a pretty narrow demographic, so I will be contacting our local paper and doing print advertising in the way of flyers and business cards.
I think people forget when advertising their blogs that this can be accomplished off line..lol
Patricia recently posted..Getting more readers to comment on your post
Very true. There is a whole lot you can do off-line to promote your website.
@Patricia,
when you already think about spending some money to promote your new site and plan to do this locally, why not identify your best customers first and send a direct mailing to them?
You could get some data from sources like zapdata.com (don’t know their pricing, but heard it works) and perfecly target your niche instead of using a shotgun approach with local papers.
Anyway, good luck with the new blog