Writing and distributing online Press Releases is one of the best ways to spread the word about your company or website all over the Internet. Over the years, press releases have become even more effective with sites like eReleases, which has the largest media distribution for their press releases of any company I’m aware of. I have used most of the top press release services including PRweb and Business Wire, but I find that eReleases blows them all away by far. I have always believed in online press releases as a proven way to gain exposure, gain additional search rankings, and even juice up your site’s Page Ranking, however I had not fully embraced using press releases in my overall marketing strategy until just this past year. Not only am I getting more business inquiries from sending them, I have seen noticeable search engine rankings boosts and additional traffic to my site from doing them. Press releases need to be written well content-wise and also contain the right popular phrases you are interested in gaining exposure for, both in your copy and your title. Your online press release should be about 500 words and completely original content. We even have an exclusive coupon code for you for eReleases.com for $75 off your new online press release. Save $75 with code: EXP-75 when you check out on their site. Let me know if you need any assistance with how your press release should be written. We can even provide press release writing services if you need one done for you. Let me know if you have any questions about how to effective use online press releases!

The Avalanche is coming, The Avalanche is coming, forget it, the Avalanche is here!

I fondly remember back to a conversation that I had with a Sr. VP of Sales at a leading newspaper roughly 5 years ago (who I was an Online Specialist for). It went something like this:

What do you think will happen moving forward with the newspaper, the magazine and the sites?

My response was “watch out because the Avalanche is coming”. What I was referring to was that with online audiences growing steadily and newspaper and magazine ad revenue (and readership) dropping like a stone, it was pretty clear that any irrelevant media source would be wiped out. It wouldn’t happen overnight but it would definitely happen, magazine by magazine, paper by paper, city by city.

“Readers” weren’t readers anymore, they’re now people. They didn’t like yesterday’s news or to be told what was happening. They no longer bought the media, they controlled it, they made the media, had voices and they reached out to places where they could be heard. They used to think we were nuts that we went to YouTube or Blogged, now it’s called things like User Generated Content, Tweets or Postings and these dark dungeons are now called Billion dollar companies. Imagine the pleasure I had back then in being a webhead. How much for a button thingy on the front page? how do I find Google on the web? I must have short man’s syndrome or something but it’s amazing now that people are living the dream – people read newspapers, people watch TV, people listen to the radio but people USE the Internet.

Now that we are USING the Internet we’ve taken media to an absolutely new level. That new level has been incredibly fun for my peeps, my fellow webheads. Before you put on your party hat and print your revolution t-shirt, stop and think for a second about something that this growth has created – Advertisers’ pain. They can’t find you anymore. They’re having difficulty learning how to speak WITH you instead of speaking AT you. Come on tidy demographics, can’t you just congregate at the local newspaper like you used to? It was so much easier when one phone call would buy media for millions of people in a specific demographic.

To make things worse, the economy has gone from “the challenge area” to the “Don’t lose my job at all costs” phase and now these Marketing Managers and agency folk are pressed to sell more products with each Marketing dollar spent. That’s right, selling products is important again. Pass the Rogaine, people are losing their hair out there. The avalanche is here and the snowboarders are winning! It’s ok, we’ll help them out right.

You never know, maybe they’re reading your blog right now, clicking on an ad and helping you make a few affiliate bucks.

Guest Post by: Mike Carney of MediaTrust

There are many ways to generate business for your company, but what are the best ways to do so in the current ecomonic climate? Traditional media like TV, Radio, and Print are really struggling right now and will likely continue to do poorly at gain advertising dollars. “Branding” is out, and measurable ROI is in. Putting your advertising budget into online advertising is the way to go for a variety of reasons. Of course you have to do it properly so you can gauge the effectiveness of your online campaigns. Here are some of the best ways you can leverage online marketing to increase business.

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to grow your traffic and revenue. The great part about affiliate marketing is that it’s on a strictly performance basis, which means you only pay a commission when a sale or lead occurs. Affiliate marketing is still a growing and thriving industry so the more resources you put into it the more you will get out of it. But simply launching an affiliate program is not going to get you there. Your affiliate program needs to be managed properly, with the right techniques and methods. Most companies make the mistake of not allocating enough resources to their affiliate management or in growing their affiliate program. Personally I prefer the Commission Junction Affiliate Network for launching and managing large-scale affiliate programs. They have the most affiliates and best platform for management.

Search is another source of traffic that should always be improving and growing for your company. Putting resources and dollars into improving your SEO is always money well spent if you do it properly. There are many SEO firms that will vie for your business, but doing your on-site SEO internally is always the way to go in my opinion. Having a well-optimized website, with good meta-tags and on-page content is a must for maximizing your search rankings. Adding additional pages of unique content to your site, like articles and blog posts, is a great way to expand your organic SEO reach. Building out your site with more pages of unique content is a great strategy and something that should be done on a daily basis ideally.

Another great way to maximize your online traffic is to put together partnerships with other ecommerce companies. By approaching other online merchants you can put together deals to promote each other’s website through mediums like: newsletter placements, solo emails, site placements, and other sponsorships. This can all be done on an affiliate basis, with each company earning revenue when actions occur. This takes a lot of business development, but well worth it when you get a good sized company promoting your offer to their customer database.

Perhaps the best feature of running online campaigns is the fact that you can track the effectiveness of each online campaign. Being able to see exactly how well or not well the traffic is converting from a particular source is invaluable at making decisions about how much to spend with that traffic source. This is where online marketing is better in this economic climate than traditional media. Also, most companies aren’t usually maximizing their SEO, PPC, or affiliate channels because of various reasons. But in this day and age more emphasis should be placed on maximizing all of your company’s online marketing channels.

All and all, I think companies should be putting the majority of their advertising budgets into online marketing. It has to be managed well and done properly to get the best results, and this may take some trial and error to get it right. Once you are maximizing your ad dollars on the Internet you can look for other online traffic sources to test out. You should always be looking for new campaigns to test on a very controlled basis. My advice: anyone trying to sell you a CPM campaign should be hung-up on immediately! Push hard for cost-per-sale or cost-per-lead campaigns and don’t relent. I look forward to your feedback on the issue of online marketing vs. traditional media.

I’m still dubious of the term “social media” (or marketer for that matter), but here’s an interesting piece with a variety of voices from Tamar Weinberg…

The Definition of Social Media Marketing: How to Find the Best Social Media Consultant » techipedia | tamar weinberg: “With many individuals finding great success with social media (and as an aside, a basic understanding of search engine optimization), they immediately consider themselves social media marketers and consultants (as well as seasoned SEOs) and offer to sell their promotional services. What skills, though, do successful social media marketers have that put these individuals above the average (or addicted) social media user, and better yet, above the traditional marketer? I asked several social media consultants, bloggers, marketers, search engine optimizers, and social media addicts about what they considered to be essential skills and characteristics of the most efficient and results-driven social media consultants. In the many paragraphs that follow, learn from many of the experts and hear what they consider success when using social media to engage with consumers about products and services.”