g5Research recently commissioned a survey of small businesses and we discovered that almost none of the businesses we contacted had ever heard of on-line public relations. An equally small number has ever tried releasing press releases to traditional media. Both on-line and off-line publicity can be a very compelling and cost effective way to drive traffic to your web site and you should consider testing this under-utilized tool.
Traditional media outlets (newspapers, magazines, radio, & television) rely on the Internet as a primary and background research source. Reporters and writers regularly use the Internet to find experts to quote and features to profile. Your web site or blog must therefore include a regularly updated section where you discuss and comment about current developments in your industry. In addition, you must regularly remind reporters and writers that you exist.
Online press release distribution through the PRWeb distribution sevice offers an effective and inexpensive means to expose you to the media. News aggregators like Yahoo news, and Google news rely on feeds from PRWeb as do thousands of bloggers, local news outlets and newspapers. This means that your properly optimized press release may end up in an editor’s inbox before a press release from the White House, Microsoft or General Electric.
You can check out the distribution power of news releases by subscribing to a Google News Alert or a Yahoo News Alert. More and more people, especially media professionals, use these “alert services” to stay abreast of developments in various topic areas. Your release can be part of this powerful, growing trend.
You can also distribute your press release in a traditional manner – by faxing to your local news outlets. And finally, your press releases can serve as fresh content for your web site by appearing as newsworthy web pages.
If you would like to see for yourself how on-line press release distribution can generate traffic and publicity for your business, call g5Research today. We can work with you to prepare and distribute your press releases.
[tags] on-line press releases, PRWeb, Google News Alert, Yahoo News Alert, news aggregator, public relations, press release [/tags]
