Questions to Consider Before You Write a Press Release

Posted on July 28, 2010 by admin

Writing press releases is a great way to get you site noticed by search engines and visitors alike. However there are a few questions you should consider before writing your press release, here we look at some of the most common ones.

Should my press release inform readers about the benefits of my product?

Unlike a promotional article or sales letter, a press release should provide only the necessary details to members of the media with the basic information they need to develop a newsworthy story.

Can I Submit Some Articles I have had Written to Press Release Sites?

It is definitely not recommended, a press release should be written to a unique format that is quite different to a general article.

So Should I write the Press Release as a Story?

No that is the job of the reporters. Just make sure the first three paragraphs are interesting enough to hold attention, the rest of the press release should be basic facts and contact information.

Remember, even if your press release is not interesting enough to be picked up by media professionals, it is still a very worthwhile method of promotion, as submitting to just 10 News Release directories can result in thousands of valuable high authority backlinks – the content on PR sites is often syndicated by other sites and blogs.

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Email Marketing – Types of Newsletters

Posted on July 13, 2010 by admin

Building a subscriber base you can email offers to is one of the most profitable things you are likely to do online.

However, building trust and credibility first is vital if you want people to respond to your offers. There are two types of newsletters you can send to your list, a promotional mail, or a trust-building mail.

Experts recommend sending at least two trust building mails for each promo mailings you send.

The Trust Building Mail

The emails you use to build a relationship with your list are very important, you can think of them as a pre-sell to your promotional emails. If your subscribers feel a connection with you and trust you, they are much more likely to later buy from you.

In these emails you should tell a bit about yourself, and allow your own personality to come through somewhat. You can tell a personal story or something funny or interesting that is relative to your niche.

In these emails you should give them valuable information for free, a free report, a useful audio or direct them to an interesting blog post you came across.

Promotional Mails

When sending a product affiliate link to your list, do not try to sell them in the email. This is the job of the product’s sales page.

A very simple “Hello Steven, How are you doing? I came across this muscle building guide and I thought I would share the link with you…” should suffice.

The only job of the email has to do is get the prospect to click on the link.

Most importantly, when looking for paid offers to send your subscribers, don’t just look for a product that has a nice fat commission. Take time to sort the mediocre stuff from the good, if you are sending your list bad offers, they will certainly not be happy with you, and will very likely unsubscribe.

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3 Beginning Steps to Write an Ebook

Posted on July 6, 2010 by admin

Writing your own ebook, when executed correctly is one of the most profitable things you can do online. Once you have decided to write your own book, there are several steps of action to take.

1. Define your market. I am not referring to simply choosing a niche, but you must know who your target reader will be. Are they predominantly male or female? Are they over 40, or young college students? Defining your market will help you with the style of your writing. You will find you need to write differently to keep the interest of a younger male audience than for women over 50, for example.

2. Decide what the main concerns of your target market is, and list them. Giving vague fluff to fill pages will result in refund requests. For your book to be successful, you must find out the main problems affecting your market and provide them with real solutions.

3. Write! Make a rough draft of the direction the book will take and begin to write it – don’t worry about the flow of your words, or grammatical mistakes to begin with. The important thing is to get what is in your head out, the book will need probably need several parts rewritten before you are happy with it, so just make a start.

Your reasons for wanting to write an ebook are likely to have an impact on your success. While obviously you want some financial reward, keep upmost in your mind you should also have an interest in helping your readers, and giving them an excellent return on their investment.

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10 Blog Writing Tips Every Blogger Should Know

Posted on July 1, 2010 by admin

Bloggers are always on the look out for new tips – whether you’re just setting up or an experienced blogger, hopefully you will find the following tips valuable.

1. Don’t set yourself up for failure by blogging to often when first starting out. Many bloggers begin too enthusiastically, often posting several times a day but find when the blog begins to gain popularity it is impossible to keep up with this schedule. Devise a reasonable posting schedule you won’t find too much of a strain six months down the line and stick to it.

2. Blogs are not overnight money machines. It is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to start building an online presence, and the excellent content management systems such as WordPress mean even the most inexperienced people can start a blog. But it takes time to build a readership to a level where you can sell advertising and promote products. It is unlikely a blog will make anything significant until it has been online for around 6 – 12 months.

3. It might be great to provide your visitors with a quick means to share your content, but don’t overdo it. Some blogs are so full of ‘share it’ buttons, the content is lost!

4. Reply to comments, but don’t overdo it. You don’t have to reply every time someone thanks you for the post. These comments can be replied to generically every 4 or 5 comments.

5. If someone leaves an interesting comment, rather than just replying repurpose it into a new post! This gives you fast content and you know your readers are interested in the topic.

6. Finish your posts with a question. This invites responses and greater interaction on your blog.

7. Consider buying a premium theme. You want your blog to appear unique, and jump of the screen at the visitor when he lands, not to look identical to millions of others out there.

8. Visit problogger’s sites. See how they interact with visitors and build relationships with other bloggers. Also note how they monetize their blogs.

9. Write about what you know. If you can’t stand golf, pretending to be interested in the big tournament is a no-no – people will see through you!

10. Keep clutter to a minimum, not only do too many ads cause ad blindness, but unnecessary content is also uncalled for. Remember web users have notoriously short attention spans, and all content should be valuable and relevant.

Do you have any useful blogging tips? Please feel free to enter them below.

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SEO Tips – Optimizing Every Part of the Page

Posted on July 1, 2010 by admin

Most webmasters know they should have a keyword focused title on every page of a site, and that the main keyword should figure in the content of posts or pages, but many ignore the rest of the page, and therefore are losing rank and visitors.

Implement the following five tips to all your web pages and watch them rise in the rankings.

1. The most obvious but often overlooked method of getting your site to the top of the rankings and keeping it there is write very ‘linkable’ content that people want to share. Generic content that is thrown together or rewritten from an ezinearticle isn’t going to cut it.

2. Using a title attribute will give your readers (and the search engines) a better idea of where they will land when they click on it. It also makes the page accessible for those who are visually impaired – blind people can navigate to your site by using a custom browser that will read title and alt attributes.

3. Similarly, you should save your images file names. For example, if your keyword phrase is “English Bulldogs” you’ll want to save the images used on that page as English-bulldog-01.jpg or english_bulldog_2.jpg (either will work).

4. All images should have alternative, or ALT, text assigned to them. This is the text that a surfer sees when passing the mouse over an image. It is also the text that can be read by search engines.

5. Link to relevant posts on other sites. The internet is known as the World Wide Web for a reason. Many site owners don’t like to link to other sites in the fear they will lose visitors, but the opposite is true. If you provide relevant links for your readers, they will love you for it, and it will increase you SE rankings.

For more tips on how to improve your website SEO take a look at this SEO Starter Guide from Google.

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