Press releases aren’t as hard to write as you’ve been led to believe.  They all follow a simple formula.  Press releases can drive traffic to your site and free advertising for your business.

Press releases are short so you don’t have to write a whole book.  Generally they are between 250 words and 500 (usually closer to 250).

They are written in the third person.  So you shouldn’t put, “I created this site to be the best.”  It would have to read, “The site was created to be the best.”

Here’s the way a press release is setup:

Headline.  An eye catching headline.

City, State Date -

Introduction paragraph.  Introduce your company, explain what your company does, the reason for the press release.

2nd paragraph.  Include a quote from yourself, an employee or a customer.

3rd paragraph.  You can finish the press release on the third paragraph or include more information about your company.

4th paragraph.  Write a brief summary of everything you’ve mentioned above and include a link back to your site or some contact information.

Every press release need some kind of angle or hook.  If your press release is boring or looks like a straight out advertisement it won’t be picked up by a lot of sites and the legitimate press.

The press release sites all have a place to add your contact information also.  Usually they ask for name, company, title, phone, and email.

Most of the press release sites are similar so you can submit the same press release to several sources.  Every few weeks create a new press release and submit those.  That increases your odds of getting a popular press release out there.

Press releases are easy to create and should take less than an hour to create and submit.

Article writing is an easy way to get targeted traffic to your site.  The only bad thing is you actually have to write the articles or pay someone to do it for you.  There are several article sites with high page rank that will let you submit your article and add your link in the resource box.  With articles you are building authority and looked at as an expert in your topic and you are doing off page optimization (it’s even more powerful if you add anchor text to your hyperlinks).  Another good thing is you can sell your articles if you’re a prolific writer for quick cash.

Article marketing will get your website ranked quickly for a lot of keywords, for the price of an article.  You don’t only have to stick to article directories you can also use social networking sites and build web pages (on sites like blogger, squidoo, wordpress, etc…) based off of your articles and include anchor text links back to your site.  These are authority sites and give you that needed boost to get your sites ranking.

You can use the same article over and over again, but the best way to rank for many keywords is keeping each article unique.  It will maximize the amount of keywords you’ll rank for.

You can also use article marketing if you’re an affiliate for products and link them right to your cloaked affiliate link.  People actually do buy from reading a good article and a related affiliate product with a decent sales page.

A fast way of creating articles for those out there that aren’t good at typing or talk better than they write is using a speech to text converting program.  With a program that does this your article can be written as fast as you talk.  Arguably the best program out there for this is Dragon Naturally Speaking.  You train it to recognize your voice and words and the results get more accurate the more you use it.   Usually a few edits and fixing punctuation and you’re done.

Article marketing is really a way of reiterating that content is king on the internet.  Good content will get you ranked for a lot of the terms you desire.

Local directories and map listings are a great place to have your business listed.  A lot of these sites feed other sites data so you can get traffic from literally hundreds of large sites for submitting to just a few.

I’ve compiled a list of sites that will let you add your business listing for free.  Most of these are major sites with big pull and tons of traffic.

citysquares.com
ibegin.com
infousa.com
insiderpages.com
judysbook.com
littleengine.com
local.com
local.google.com
local.yahoo.com
magicyellow.com
maps.live.com
mojopages.com
superpages.com
truelocal.com
tupalo.com
yellowbot.com
yellowpages.com
yelp.com

This list is good and active as of the time of this posting.

A lot of businesses don’t realize if they don’t grab their business someone else can and might.  Local listing hijacking is real.  You’ll notice if your business is listed in any of these directories you can claim your business if you didn’t previously.  What happens if someone else claims your listing?  That’s right they can change your business address, website address, phone number, etc…  Than they get all of your hard earned traffic.

Don’t hesitate grab your local listing at least from the top 3 search engines and if you have time gradually grab your listing from the other major companies (infousa, superpages, etc…).  Your business will be glad you did.

Spammers think they are getting a backlink from me.  They keep trying to post, but this blog is heavily moderated.  I will not let any bullshit comments be posted here.  If you want to post your Viagra advertisements search google for abandoned forums and blogs that aren’t moderated or at the very least post a decent comment and I’ll probably give you the link with anchor text.  If you’re going about it the lazy spammer way with 7000 links in your comments and nothing that adds value to any of the posts, they will never be seen here.

For everyone else,  abandoned forums and unmoderated blogs can be a great source of backlinks.  An easy way of finding them is following the Viagra advertisements.

Those strange porn and Viagra advertisements are a great way to find out where to get links form.  Although you probably don’t want your site associated with that type of content, they have a harder time of getting links to stick than a normal webmaster so if there link is up on a site that means it’s a free-for-all for everyone to post their links.  You’ll be surprised you can find some high PR pages by following the spammers.

WikiAnswers is a popular but not as popular as Yahoo, Answers type site.  It’s a PR7 and shows up in google for a ton of great search terms very highly.  I found a little loophole a few months ago that gets you a link back to your site with anchor text, without having to even post an answer.

Warning: This is considered black hat and can get you banned from WikiAnswers.

First create a new account.  You might want to create several accounts depending on how many sites you’re going to be promoting.  Then have a look around for any questions that might relate to your niche.  Once you find a question, on the left side of your screen (the sidebar) you will find an option that says Add Related Links.  Click on it and where it says title add your anchor text.  Where it says URL add your site’s URL or affiliate link (preferably cloaked).  Click Add Link and you’re done.

Now you have a link on a PR7 website that gets tons of search engine traffic.  Remember if you’re going to do this a lot have tons of accounts and use proxies to keep what you’re doing subtle.  You’ll find a lot of your links will last a very long time.