Leveraging Media Publicity for Your Website

By Michael Low
Posted Monday, October 25, 2004

Most site owners use online marketing channels like banner ads, 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)