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Leveraging Media Publicity for Your Website
pay-per-click search engines, email marketing, search engine
optimization, etc.
But they often miss out the most powerful marketing channel for
driving hundreds of thousands of visitors. What is it? Media
publicity!
Almost every person on this planet is exposed to some form of
mass media daily - be it newspapers, radio or television. Such
wide media reach drives huge traffic.
How do you get media coverage for your website?
One highly effective way of getting media publicity for your
website is through press releases.
All businesses, large and small, use press releases to
disseminate information to the public. Editors and journalists
use them to get fresh information about the latest happenings in
their fields of coverage.
Should you write your own press release?
That depends on how much a writer you are. If you don't enjoy
writing, you should outsource to a professional PR firm.
The major advantage to using a PR firm is that they can write
your press release objectively in a style which adheres to media
editorial requirements.
Press releases are often written like sales letters. That's the
number one reason why many press releases get trashed. Editors
are interested in stories, not sales pitches.
Next, you need to distribute your press release to relevant
editors and journalists. You can submit your press release
through email, fax or postal mail.
Start with newspapers and magazines which you read. Check their
masthead and make a note of who and where to send your press
release to. See http://www.prbuilder.com/distribution.htm for a
list of major media outlets in America.
There are tens of thousands of media outlets in America. Unless
you have the time and energy to manually compile your own media
list, we recommend outsourcing.
An established PR firm would already have the major media
contacts stored in their database. Their media contacts are
accurate and fresh.
If you think it is cheaper to do the distribution yourself,
here's the shocking truth!
Consider this illustration: If your hourly wage is $20 and it
takes 10 minutes to locate contact information for each media
outlet; plus another 5 minutes to contact them. Time spent per
media outlet = 15 minutes.
Labor cost to reach each outlet = 15/60 * $20 = $5.00
A reasonable size of distribution for most press releases in
America is 4,000 media outlets. Multiply your labor cost of $5.00
per outlet by 4,000 outlets.
Total labor cost for your PR campaign is an astronomical $20,000!
That excludes actual distribution costs.
How much do PR firms charge for writing a press release AND
distributing it to the same number of media outlets? Most charge
between $350 to $600. It definitely makes good economic sense to
outsource your PR campaign.
Media publicity plays an important role in successful website
marketing. Get yours rolling today!
About the Author
Michael Low is a professional PR Strategist. He provides top-
notch PR services at highly affordable rates. Check out his full
range of PR packages at http://www.prbuilder.com/pr.cgi?a013