Public Relations And Publicity

20.7 Public Relations And Publicity

Just about all of the methods that you use to bring people to your site will cost you money. You’ll have to pay for ads on other sites, you’ll have to give up valuable real estate on your site to lists of links and you’ll have to decide how much you want to pay for an AdWords campaign or to get yourself promoted through Overture.

Publicity can be free.

It doesn’t have to be of course. You can pay a PR expert to publicize your site for you and place articles in the press on your behalf... but it’s not necessary and they can be too expensive for most sites, especially at the beginning.

Or you can simply create a good quality press release yourself, fax it out to the media and wait for reporters to call.

Sound difficult?

It really isn’t. A press release is just one page and will take between twenty and forty minutes to write.

There are a number of rules you have to follow: you need a gripping headline; you have to include a quote; and you have to be available for the interview to name just three. Most importantly though you have to have a story the press wants to run.

Telling them that you’ve just launched a new site isn’t going to cut it. Telling them that your new site is going to set a new trend or change some people‘s lives just might.

Think about the effect that your piece of “news” will have on the public and you’ve got the beginnings of a great story.

And what do you get in return for doing that? Well, not only do you get the name of your business in the press, you also get the halo that comes with it. When you’re in the media, people assume that you’re an expert. You become the number one source for whatever your website offers.

And to underline that fact, you can even put a button on your home page that says something like: “As Seen On CNN!”

Sound good?

The real expert on marketing through free publicity is Paul Hartunian. This is the guy who bought a hunk of wood that had been cut from the Brooklyn Bridge during renovations, cut it into one-inch cubes and wrote a press release with the headline “New Jersey Man Sells Brooklyn Bridge For $19.95”.

He was on CNN for two days and the story was run as far away as Peru.

He now lives on a 30-acre estate and teaches people how to use publicity for their businesses. You can order his publicity kit at www.hartunian.com.