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Press Release 101 – You Need News…

Press Release 101 – You Need News…

I believe that a large part of the problem that most people have with writing an effective Press Release is that they never actually get past (or even as far as) first base.

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You see, a Press Release has to be written about something that is newsworthy, and many small business owners do not consider there is anything newsworthy about what they do. Hence, they genuinely believe that there is no point of considering a PressRelease because what can they write about?

This is a very common attitude in many of the businesses that I’ve worked with over the years, and perhaps you’ve found yourself susceptible to it too?

If so, here’s something to consider.

Reporting ‘news’ as most people understand it is all about relating information about global or at least prominent local events.

However, a press release for a smaller business or organization isn’t meant to focus on global events for one very sound, logical reason.

Doing so is the job of the international, national and local press, and they are going to give such a situation all the coverage it needs. There is no way you can compete with them, so don’t waste your time trying.

Instead, focus on what is news for your business because – perhaps surprisingly – there are people out there who would be interested in what you do if you told them about it.

Most crucially, almost anything you do can be ‘repurposed’ or ‘repackaged’ as a news story good enough to merit a press release with just a little imagination and a willingness to think outside the square.

For example, if your business releases a new product or updates an existing one, it is worthy of a press release.

If you launch a new site, take on a new director or a senior member of staff retires, you can easily create a press release based on any of these events with a bit of practice.

In no particular order, here are a few more ‘event’ ideas to get the creative juices flowing:

•   Participation in a show, exhibition or product demonstration;

•   A new contract that you’ve won or a new job that has been given to your business;

•   Publishing the results of an online survey that you conducted (use the free services of Survey Monkey);

•   Run a competition with fashionable prizes like iPads, iPhones etc;

•   Issue a release about any public speaking event that you are part of;

•   Interview a celebrity or industry expert;

•   Highlight awards that your business or individual staff members have won;

•   Customer success stories and/or customer testimonials;

•   Issue a release about a big office move or expansion;

•   Product price changes, special offers or discount campaigns;

•   Any new community or charity related activities. For example, if you sponsor the fund raising efforts of a local school, it’s a story that merits telling to the world in general.

•   Even if it is a group of staff supporting the community in their spare time, they are only together as a group because of your business. Once again therefore, you should issue a press release about it.

Please understand that this is not intended to be an exhaustive list but rather a way of making you view what you do every day in a different light. The bottom line is that almost anything that you, your staff or someone related to your business does that is in any way out of the ordinary can be ‘spun’ into news worthy of a press release.

So please don’t allow the idea that you haven’t got any news worth announcing prevent you from harnessing the power of online press releases. As I hope you can see, it’s simply not true.

Where’s your Press Release ‘hook’?

When creating a press release, you must focus on what the main ‘hook’ of your story is:

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What is it about what you want to say that makes it newsworthy, or what makes it worthwhile for the reader to keep on reading?

What you must do here is identify the key benefit of whatever it is you are promoting in your press release, the one thing that makes your product or service a ‘must have’ offer for the reader.

In this respect, there are several alternative ways of identifying what the main appeal of whatever it is your release is about, is.

To begin with, think about timing. Is your offer one that perfectly matches the time of the year or the season?

If for example you were promoting chocolate Santas and it happens to be Christmas, then you have an offer that matches the season perfectly and your ‘hook’ is fairly obvious. If it’s topical, the chances of your release getting picked up are that much higher.

Next, look at what is happening in the news on TV or on the net because if your release happens to coincide with a hot topic, you could be very much in luck.

The earlier example of your new personal anti-radiation device being released on the day that a major nuclear power plant goes up in smoke is a very clear example of this.

Do you think that your device would sell well in these circumstances?

I imagine so…in fact, I imagine that you’d have a very serious run on your production capacity, simply because you happen to be in the right place at the right time.

In many cases, issuing a successful press release is about getting the timing right and this is just one of the more obvious ways in which this applies.

Next, can you produce evidence or factual information to back up what you intend to announce in your press release? Testimonials can be very powerful as can quotes from someone who is closely involved with the project.

The more evidence you have that the benefits that are promised in your press release are genuinely realistic, the more persuasive your release will be in the eyes of the reader (and incidentally, benefits are a subject that I will keep reverting to throughout this report).

Similarly with a case study if you have one. Again, such a report provides evidence that the benefits you claim for your product or service are realistically achievable, adding additional veracity to the main thrust of the information contained in your release.

Think about the geographical reach of your message as well.

On the one hand, the fact that you’ve sponsored the local school or the scouts is not national news by any means but in local terms, letting people know about it could be very influential.

Just as long as local influence is what you need or want, making a big impact in your own community should be more than good enough.

On the flip side of the coin, you may have something that genuinely has global appeal.

For instance, if you were to invent a revolutionary type of football boot (as this guy did a few years ago), a press release about your invention is targeting a global audience of followers of the most popular sport on the planet. The Titanic going down was a pretty newsworthy event too, apparently:

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As a consequence, you would focus the content on the ‘extra’ benefits of the product for everyone, in comparison to the ‘standard’ product that most people would be used to at the moment.

Finally but crucially, never forget to include a clear, concise and very obvious call to action in your press release.

Do not make the mistake of assuming that the reader knows what to do because whilst what they are supposed to do next might be abundantly clear to you, it may be far less so to them.

I guess that it’s perhaps politically incorrect to suggest it, but you cannot assume that people are always intelligent. They are not, so you should never take it for granted that they know what to do after reading you release.

It is however true that most people need to be told what to do. Many of those that fall into this category will do whatever they are told to do. For all these reasons, it’s imperative that you include a strong call to action in every press release, a clear instruction about what you want the reader to do next.

And note that you should tell them, not ask. A powerful call to action is always an instruction and never a request!

Press releases – why you MUST use them…

Press releases and why you use them…

If you haven’t previously included Press Release issuance in your content marketing efforts, you might be wondering why you should start doing so now. This would I imagine be particularly true if your previous marketing has already met with a degree of success.

The point however about marketing with Press Releases is that doing so allows you to tap into marketing channels that are otherwise closed to you:

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For instance, a well written Press Release about something of significant public interest could easily be picked up by high volume publicity outlets like radio stations, newspapers and perhaps even a TV station or two.

There are also a multitude of online press release distribution resources. Thus, your story can end up being syndicated all over the net.

For instance, if your press release gets picked up by some of the real big players – think about how powerful Google News and Yahoo! News would be for example – it can spread like wildfire. Many smaller but nevertheless highly respected resources will also pick it up, publishing your content and linking back to your site as the source.

This might generate lots of incoming site links from a multitude of very highly rated sites and directories, and all you did to generate this tidal wave of link ‘juice’ was publish one press release.

Note that I say ‘might’. This is because Matt Cutts of Google recently suggested that links from Press Releases may be ignored by the ‘Big G’ either now or sometime in the future.

As there is no hard and fast guidance on this at the moment – whether it has happened, is going to happen or never will do – I’d suggest that you continue with Release issuance in exactly the same way as you did before!

This is especially true when you think of how much more work would be necessary if you attempted to generate a similarly large wave of such high quality links using a strategy like article marketing and you should begin to recognize why press releases are so powerful.

In fact, they are even more powerful because unlike articles published on directory sites (for example), you can embed hyperlinks in the actual body of a press release in many cases. these ‘in-text’ links are way more powerful than any contained in a clearly-delineated ‘resource box’, so again, keep going with issuing releases until we know for a fact that they no longer work.

Most search engine expert agree that ‘in text’ links are far more powerful than those that are planted in an ‘author bio’ box at the end of an article, so that’s another ‘strike’ in favor of press releases!

The links inserted into the content are keyword focused anchor text links too, the most powerful and valuable type of link. If for example your keyword were to be ‘rapid weight loss’, this is the term that would be hyperlinked from within the body of your release, usually pointing at the home page of your site.

We’ll look at the mechanics of effective linking in more detail towards the end of this report but for now, the important thing to appreciate is how powerful these links can be.

All the search engines consider keyword targeted anchor text links in the main body text to be first class links from high quality, authority sites. As a consequence, it is highly likely that they will give your search rankings a very significant boost.

What is more, if your press release happens to hit a real ‘sweet spot’ by being in the right place at the right time, Google may even include it in the news results that generally appear right at the top of their search results pages:

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Your story just needs to be topical and of widespread interest, and you could find your release in the same spot, 2nd of more than 74 million results!

As an example of how this might happen, imagine that you issue a release about a new personal anti-nuclear protection device that your company has just launched the day after a nuclear power station went into meltdown.

Your information would be 100% topical and so vital, it would be exactly what people are clamoring to read, the stuff they must know about, right?

There are no guarantees of course, but the chances of featuring near the top of the Google search page in this scenario would be very good. If you’re at the top of the most appropriate page just as you’ve launched your new device, think of how many visitors your site would enjoy, and how your sales would be. It’s a very tempting prospect and all because of one super-topical press release.

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In short, there are many very good reasons why learning how to create and publish press releases to promote your business or that of your clients makes so much sense.

In truth, if you are serious about marketing as effectively as possible, you really cannot afford to ignore the power of press releases.

So, now you have a clear understanding of why you need to write press releases (aim to produce at least one a month if you possibly can), I’ll consider the specifics of how you do so in a subsequent post.

Comments or questions, please add them below. Massive cash donations, send them straight over…

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Signing bonus ideas…

This is a short report that I wrote to explain why affiliate marketers need to create and give away a signing bonus to help grow their business. As it applies to many online marketing businesses however, I though I’d add it here too…

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Why adding a signing bonus is necessary…

Affiliate marketers sell products or services that are created by others. In other words, what they sell is not unique to them. One thing most quickly learn about the business of selling products created by others in exchange for a commission payment is that, contrary to what far too many so-called experts would have you believe, it is not as easy as it might first appear.

Whilst the actual business of promoting other people’s products is not so complicated – you promote, make sales and get paid – actually making the sales is not as a straightforward as it might at first appear.

For example, it’s an extremely competitive business with Clickbank having over 100,000 active affiliates. All are competing for the same business as you are, and Clickbank is just one of several digital information affiliate network sites (although it is by far the biggest network of the type).

Of course, the problem is that every affiliate who is promoting a particular Clickbank product is pushing exactly the same thing. Unlike the situation where you create your own product and can therefore control your market, you will be competing on a head-to-head basis with thousands of other affiliates, every one of whom has exactly the same product to offer.

There are therefore two very important factors to understand when considering this scenario.

Firstly, you cannot do anything with the original product to make your ‘version’ of it stand out. If therefore you want to present your potential customers with a unique proposition, you have to think of another way of doing so, such as by adding a signing bonus to the deal.

Secondly, as online customers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and aware of how affiliate marketing works, a significant percentage of people who are interested in buying a product from a site like Clickbank will search around to see whether there are any ‘deals’ available, places through which they can buy that offer something extra.

Consequently, if you want to give yourself an advantage in the affiliate marketing game (which you must do if possible), you have to offer the kind of deal that potential customers are looking for, which basically means offering bonuses to encourage these customers to buy through your link.

There is another significant advantage of offering bonuses as well as they prevent other people replacing your affiliate account name in the Clickbank hoplink with their own or removing your link altogether.

Both of these things happen with surprising frequency and offering attractive bonuses is a way of making sure that this doesn’t happen.

How to create your own unique signing bonus…

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Enhance the main product

There are many things that you can do to create signing bonus materials that you can add to an affiliate offer to encouraeg people to buy through your link on your own web page.

However, with all of these bonus creation strategies, the main thing to bear in mind is that the bonuses you offer must enhance the main product in some way. For example, you might do something that makes the main product easier to use or supply a signing bonus that improves the results that the customer is likely to see when they use the main product, and so on.

This is therefore the first aspect of your bonus product offer to consider. How can you enhance the value of the main product that you’re promoting?

For instance, there are lots of extremely popular Forex trading ‘robot’ products featured by Clickbank at the moment, with more seemingly arriving on the site almost daily. It is clear that anyone who buys one of these products is interested in making money by trading foreign currency exchange markets (which is what Forex is), so the key question would be, how can you help this happen?

One answer might be to grab your own copy of the product to create a series of videos showing anyone who buys through your link how you have maximized profits using this particular robot program. If the trading strategy used is replicable (which it will almost certainly be), these videos would be an invaluable bonus to offer to anyone buying this product.

Another option would be to create an e-book all about Forex trading because most people who invest in one of these programs is probably going to be interested in learning more about the market so that they can maximize their profits as well.

Perhaps surprisingly, in both of these scenarios, creating your bonus product is not going to be particularly difficult, nor does it have to be particularly labor-intensive or time consuming either.

If the product that you are going to promote is something that lends itself to a live video demonstration, all you need is a cheap digital camera (or web cam) together with free video editing software like Windows Movie Maker (which is already installed on almost all Windows machines) or ZS4.

If on the other hand what you are demonstrating can be shown in a screen capture video (as it would be if you were demonstrating a Forex trading robot for example), you can capture the action using CamStudio or the free version of Jing before editing it using the same software as before.

When it comes to creating suitable e-books or special reports that you can give away as bonuses, the process is no more complex then that involved in creating a video bonus series.

The first option is to find a suitable PLR materials, e-books or special reports that you can either find free or buy that you can then modify as you see fit.

Using PLR materials in this way allows you to create completely unique e-books or reports with relatively little effort as the original materials give you all of the information that you need. All you therefore need to do is modify these original materials as necessary so that the bonus book or report that you end up giving away is completely unique to you.

A couple of sites where you will find free PLR materials are PLR Wholesaler and Resell Rights Weekly, and if you run a Google search using your main keyword plus PLR, you should be able to find plenty of sites offering materials of this nature.

For example, a search for ‘Forex PLR’ brings up 172,000 results:

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A final option that is an easy free way of creating a unique e-book product that you give away as a signing bonus is to create your own, but to do so in a very easy and simple way.

Firstly, visit an article directory site like Article City, Buzzle or Search Warp to find between 10 and 20 articles that are related to your market.

Incidentally, these are not the biggest article directory sites, but this is a deliberate policy because if you use one of the major directories like EzineArticles, it is far more likely that your site visitor will have read the articles you select. This significantly diminishes the value of the bonus that you’re going to give away. By sticking to smaller directory sites, you reduce the chances of this happening.

However, all of these article directories allow you to download and republish article materials as long as you include the original author’s information when you do so. You must therefore make sure that this happens in every case, including any hyperlink if necessary.

What you need to do is copy each article before pasting them all into a single Word document. Paste each article on to a new page within the document, so that each is formatted as attractively as possible. If there is any logical progression from one article to the next, try to arrange the articles in the most appropriate manner.

Next, you need to write a page or two of introduction that explains the content of the book represents some of the best articles you have read about your particular topic and that because you know that these articles will provide anyone who is interested in this topic with great information, you have collected them together for your readers benefit.

Make sure that you include contact information and the URL of your website in this introduction before adding your photograph to personalize it still further.

If you can find a suitable image for the front cover of your book somewhere on the net, so much the better as this will make the whole thing look far more professional. Finally, run a last-minute check that the formatting of the whole document is as it should be.

Finally, you use a free PDF creation service like Primo PDF or PDF995 to turn the Word document into a secure PDF version your book and you have your unique bonus e-book that is highly targeted to give away.

Think ‘value’

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Having seen three ways of creating a bonus product that you can give away to encourage people to buy through your affiliate link, the final thing to bear in mind is that the ultimate perceived value of your bonus is likely to dictate how successful your offer is.

For example, if you give away one free e-book as a bonus, then you are likely to lose business to other affiliates who are giving away two or three. Consequently, the more bonuses you can ‘stack up’, the more effective this strategy is likely to be.

On the other hand, there are only so many hours in the day and you cannot afford to spend all of your time creating or sourcing bonus materials.

There must therefore be a degree of balance between giving away a fantastic bonus package to encourage the maximum number of people to sign up through your link against the amount of time it takes to do so.

But the more value you give, the more money you will make. Adding a signing bonus is one great way of doing so and don’t lose sight of this fact.

Free Photoshop CS2, Courtesy of Adobe…

It’s not every week that one of the major software players release one of their best sellers for free, but that is exactly what Adobe have done! Granted, the CS2 version of Photoshop that they’ve made available is not the newest – I read somewhere that it’s a 2005 vintage – but it is perfectly functional and works very well, despite the lack of the latest bells, bows and whistles.

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If you’re a Photoshop kind of lad or lass, you’ll no doubt have the brand-spanking new latest Photoshop ‘model’ installed and fully functional, so this is not likely to be of any interest to you whatsoever.

If however you’re a very occasional Photoshop ‘dabbler’ like me (i.e. someone who could never justify buying the full-price software), then this is perfect!

I’ve no doubt that this offer can be found all over the web, but I came across it at SnapFiles. Click the link to download the program, an ignore the comments below the offer post about it not working – it does.

The Adobe supplied serial number is 1045-1412-5685-1654-6343-1431

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