Tag: press release

How to write press releases for the web

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Online press release distribution is a successful way to create expert status. If your company has reached a milestone, celebrated an anniversary, hired a new president, achieved significant growth, or received an award, tell the world. Or, write a release that offers readers tips or advice in your field of expertise.

If you are running a new promotion, tell readers where they can go to learn more. Provide links in your press releases directly to the pages on your website, not to the home page, where readers can learn the specifics about your news and then act upon it. Give readers a reason to click through to the page, or they won’t.

Source: PRWeb, Writing Great Online News Releases

7 Secrets For Successful Freelance Copywriting

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1 – Create value in what you provide. Give 10 times or more the value of what you charge for your services.

2 – Get paid at least 50% before you begin any work on any project for a new client.

3 – Turn a small project into a larger one by learning more about marketing and upselling; e.g. if a client needs an e-newsletter, can the lead story also be used in a press release.

4 – Set up a package plan for your business that offers clients a better rate in exchange for guaranteed work over extended periods of time.

5 – Have your client sign an agreement that outlines your terms of service, what you will do, fee agreement, timetable, and any caveats.

6 – Be sure to include a cancellation clause in your agreement that lets you keep your deposit should a client cancel the contract after you’ve already started work.

7 – Never charge by hours worked. Charge by project based on the value and return on investment (ROI) you’ll provide.

Source: The Writer’s Life, 8/3/12.

7 ways to get free PR

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“The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald.

But how can you use this principle in your PR to get media attention? My colleague, marketing expert Marcia Yudkin, says you can do it by:

1. Taking issue with a survey result.

2. Disagreeing with a common belief or counteract a stereotype.

3. Championing an underdog.

4. Revealing common misconceptions.

5. Making surprising predictions.

6. Exposing flaws in something assumed to be beneficial.

7. Describing the underside of something popular.

Example: Bob Baker and 3 colleagues in the music business collaborated on a press release titled “What’s Wrong with American Idol?”

Their press release criticized the popular U.S. talent show for misleading aspiring musicians and the public about what it takes to succeed in music. Baker’s reward for stirring up controversy: 5 radio interviews that highlighted his status as an expert on careers in music.

Real case study of a one-man show with 300,000 domain names.

Nelson Tan Leave a comment

Apart from the ongoing Web 2.0 wave, there are very few and ‘new’ marketing methods which are mind-blowing enough to cause a paradigm shift and completely change the way you do business online.

Affiliate marketing? Checked.
Article marketing? Checked.
PPC? Checked.
Viral marketing? Checked.
Link exchange? Checked.
…
…
…

Of course, bridging the gap between what you know and what you do is another separate matter…

But perhaps you may not understand or even heard of making money out of domain names and its inner workings. Why? Because it is entirely different from marketing. In fact, it may hardly have anything to do with marketing at all. We are so used to selling and creating value to make money.

On the other hand, domain name trading/investing is an established industry whereby you create portfolios of expired domain names and “squat in the jungle” for the right time to let them off for a premium price. I have long suspected that people who deal in property investment and stock market would be very adapt at domain name trading because the mindset is already well honed for crucial timing…well, some similarities are there, like getting hold of names the moment they expire on that very day. Very ‘commodity’ stuff.

This industry won’t be easy to play for 1 key reason: Squatters may hold on to domain names that depreciate in value some years down the road only to finally realize they are absolutely useless. They just don’t know how to evaluate the present and projected monetary value of those names and quickly find a targeted buying audience via an established channel to let them go for a timely profit.

If you also think most simple and easy-to-remember domain names are already taken up, I beg to differ; I really think we are still in a “Wild West” era when it comes to domain name trading. Most netrepreneurs would have given up if they think they have to publish some amount of content for every domain name before they can sell them off.

But the money is based on the value of the DOMAIN NAME itself, not the content or anywhere else.

Consider this: when we all have 24 hours, what makes an expert ‘domainer’ different from everyone else?

Answer: 300,000 domains

Don’t understand what I’m driving at? Read this press release.

Kevin Ham owns around 300,000 domains, and receives around $70 million per annum in revenue from them. His empire is reputed to be worth close to $300 million. All this from owning domain names!

If you work your calculations backwards, all these big numbers will look manageable:

$70 million is about $5.8 million per month. Divide that by 300,000 domains and it turns out each domain is generating around $19/month in revenue.

Or just $0.63c/day. So $0.63c/day (per domain) is all it takes to get there.

Do you think you can generate $0.63c/day? I certainly think it is achievable.

Domain name investing is a great model if you’re very serious about passive income, and at this moment I still believe there is a huge opportunity there for people getting in at ground level.

Why Google spiders love blogs and snippets too.

Nelson Tan 3 Comments

Back in the last SEO workshop, I consulted Shi Heng Cheong over a problem with our article directory: less than 20% of the pages were ever indexed (there were lots of supplementary results, but consider them ‘bastard’ pages).

I showed him this page, where if you scroll down and look to your bottom right, you see some links to 5 articles. That’s how we reckoned the spiders will dig deep via a “front door” page and index more pages. Anyway, the page is never meant to be a direct-response page and it will be deleted at an appropriate time. Learn what NOT to do from us gooroos!

Whether it was a coincidence or not, Shi mentioned something that relates to how article directories work. To solve the problem as best as we can, we must bring up the article links as a top-fold section AND include a writeout of the first paragraph as a snippet so that spiders can easily ‘look’ at the content for its indexing decisions.

To increase the ‘originality’ degree of the article, rewording the first and last paragraphs is just fine. That reminds me of an urban myth about teachers. During the busy exam season, teachers don’t read from start to end of every student’s essay. They scan through the first few paragraphs and give a mark according to that.

But can’t spiders look at every single link of a page? Aren’t they machines? What Shi said next completely knocked me of my chair and I have yet to find evidence of his explanation. Google is actually modeling spiders as closely to human eyeball movement as possible (surely that has to do with heat maps). Now…not one of us have any idea how googlebot can not only determine your page layout but also how visitors read through it just by ‘looking’ at your HTML code, but at least that gives us an insight into why Google loves blogs.

And the truth is layout and culture are the blog’s 2 best assets.

For one thing, the blog has an elaborate archiving system that takes away non-techies’ fear and hassle of uploading web pages via FTP and linking to them from the “front door”, so they can happily post away as frequently as they wish. The more frequent a blog (or site) is updated, the more often spiders come to look for food. The blogging culture precisely promotes originality because blogging motivates original opinions, thoughts and comments too. Chances are, when there is original content, would not readers scroll all the way down to read what they have missed out before? Would not spiders emulate readers’ behavior by ‘looking’ all the way down? And index new posts along the way? 1 post per page. We know spiders are more than happy to index 3 posts a day instead of penalizing you if you are that hardworking. As a saying goes, “The more pages you get up in the search results, the bigger your online presence.”

It’s true, as reflected by our own tracking of blog pages. We hope blogging may be an activity you would resolve to do more consistently to build up credibility, relationships and SEO too as you go along. We will type something concerning the Long Tail of SEO. This is amazing stuff, and it works. You will know how to get ranked on the first page for every possible key phrase combination. The “how to get noticed on myspace” in the previous post is one example.

Last but not least, the 4th run of the SEO workshop, to be conducted by Shi, commences on March 2nd and 3rd. There will be a lot more covered in the areas of on and off-page optimization, including press release optimization and social media marketing plus continual support and opportunities for idea exchange within the community. Register on this page. Having this SEO skillset will make things easy for you in the future.

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