Virtually every start-up business has a prominent place in their launch plan for PR- after all it’s a very cost-efficient way to promote your business, right? You send out a few releases, Techcrunch writes you up and the VCs start calling. Uh-huh.
It can work that way. I worked on a software product launch last year and yes, we did get Techcrunch and Digg front-paged. Unfortunately, it happened on a Sunday (not a big day for tech blog readership). Even so we had several thousand people sign up for the service. But once that very momentary exposure died down things went back to normal and we were struggling to get coverage. And this was with a PR agency on a $15k/month retainer. When you don’t have a $180,000 PR budget, how do you leverage this powerful marketing tactic? You have to go at it strategically and know the relatively untapped power of search optimizing your PR efforts. Here’s a road-map:
- Start the company blog. IMHO, this is more important than the company website (brochureware) and it may soon be that blogs supersede those old school ‘Welcome to our website’ sites. After all you can always include all that mission/vision statement stuff in a sidebar on the blog. The blog is the place you want your press contacts to land when they get your release (more on that in a moment).
- Build it and write it, everyday. Chronicle your pain and your ecstasy (no, not that kind), your trials and tribulations. Write about your area of expertise, the core knowledge or abilities you are building a business around. For example, we are hardcore Internet marketers so we’re writing about marketing on the web- d’oh! Don’t pitch your business with superlatives like ‘groundbreaking, innovative, market-leading’, etc. These days our bullsh*t detectors are fine-tuned for hype. Just talk about your business in depth, with passion and humor.
- Link like crazy to others in your field. Send them notes and ask that they link to your. Read Aaron’s SEObook for the best practices in link-building (and everything else SEO).
- Take your keyword research (if you don’t have keyword research, stop what you are doing and go learn how to do it- it will be critical to all of your marketing) and make sure the top ten or twenty phrases are used in your blog posts and site.
- Write a press release or pay a pro to write one (better in most cases). Now, optimize the release for keywords by adding them into the title and any subheads in a way that does not detract from the story you are trying to convey. Don’t write a bad headline just so you can cram as many keywords in as possible- bad writing will turn off most journalists, bloggers and readers.
- Embed links to relevant information online into the release doc. Don’t use text like like ‘Click Here for Free White Paper’, use relevant keyword-based anchor text (anchor text is the text in the doc that is the link- don’t use URLs. If you don’t know how to make anchored links ask any web programmer- it’s easy). So your anchor text might read: We’re now offering a free whitepaper titled Elastic Widgets As Revenue Machines: A Gartner Report. The title would be the link text. That way if someone is searching for that report or ‘Elastic Widgets’, your release will come up.
- Have someone, besides you, proof the release for both errors and readability. Make sure you test the links.
- Use a service such as PRNewsWire to distribute the release. You upload it, choose the markets you want to target, and pay them. They release it at the time you choose (preferably not weekends or Fridays). It will be sent to thousands of places including the search engines which is why you optimized it.
- Finally, and this is critical, sit by the phone number you put in the release and the email account you referenced. You must respond to any requests ASAP, in person. No calls or emails? Do not despair.
The goal here is to get another information source out there on the web that points users to your blog, site or service. It will be out there for a while. Make sure you put it in your News section or Press Room (more on Press Rooms in another post).
It may cost you a few hundred dollars to distribute the release. If you don’t have a great story, don’t expect coverage. However, absent a great story you might put out a release covering one aspect of your product or service that you know attracts a lot of organic search traffic based on keyword research. The release will help to capture some of that traffic.