Promoting anything via Press Releases, direct to the consumer/user/reader

Almost anything can be promoted, for example a web site, product, event, you name it, via a press release today.

Press releases, pretty easy to write one pagers with a simple format, used to be for the press. You could buy advertising, or try to persuade journalists to write about you or your product etc. with a press release.

Today, with the explosion of the Internet and online press releases, we can talk about "direct to consumer" press releases. Who cares if a journalist writes about the stuff in your press release, if it shows up in search engines results and other places your target audience will find it? Hey, no surprise but more and more people are finding things online rather than offline.

Pretty much the bible here is David Meerman Scott's The New Rules of Marketing and PR, a book I've read more than once and I'll read again.

Here's my latest example:
I want to promote my ebook, Effective Internet Presence: Now required for business and life as well as the related Web site. I'm writing a book proposal based on its contents, and bigger numbers, downloads as well as traffic and email addresses for my ezine, are important to publishers, very very important.

Why not write a press release announcing my new ebook? Even if I've had maybe 20,000 downloads, it's still relatively new, and a press releases could easily boost those numbers.

So, here's my press release, Online Personal Branding: Internet Guru Releases Free Guide.

I not only put it on my Web site, but more importantly released it via PRWeb.com for $80 which will get it FAR wider distribution. I usually pay PRWeb $80 but they have a bunch of different "contribution levels" with different levels of exposure.

Now I want the mainstream media to pick it up, but that's not my primary target. The main target is people who might benefit from or like my ebook.

Notice the title -- "Personal Branding" is a much more commonly searched for term than anything in the title of the ebook hence I put it in the title of the press release to attract search engine traffic. Also, I'm not vain, but "Internet Guru" sounds cool and pretty enticing.

We'll see how well it works!