Part of my book launch strategy involves submitting press releases – lots of them.

Now many people don’t bother with press releases. I’ve been one of them. But recent research has proven that even Internet only businesses can benefit immensely from frequently submitting press releases.

One example of such research was conducted by Marketing Experiments.

They ran a 6 month trial where they submitted seven press releases, relating to specific items on either their own or third party own web sites.

The content of the press releases were mostly announcements about things like changes in pricing structure, mention of third party press coverage, and even basic announcements like new team members.

Through careful tracking they measured an extra 3,000 new visitors as a direct results of those free press releases. Not bad.

Would you like to attract up to 3,000 or more extra, and highly targeted visitors to your site, for free? By responding to press releases prospects are pre-qualifying themselves — anyone who visits your site from one is more likely to respond than someone who clicks on a single link or small Google Adwords advert for example. That’s also been proven.

Other benefits they reported include an extra 12,500 incoming links to their site. (Explained in the section of my book about link building.)

Given that the major search engines count the number of links to any web site as an indication of it’s authority — which has a direct impact on search engine rankings, having an ongoing press release strategy as part of your business systems could be highly beneficial.

But all this leaves us with one, ahem, ‘minor’ issue. Writing them!

What on Earth do you write about?

Obviously for the kind of results reported above you need to write press releases that sizzle.

Terry Dean has just written what I think is one of the best free courses about press releases anyone has written on the Internet.

It’s in three parts. Start here:
http://www.terrydean.org/21-ideas-for-hot-press-releases-part-1/

At the bottom of that post there are links to the other two sections of his article.

It’s a fantastic resource, as is Terry’s blog. Highly recommended.

-Ed.