Willie Crawford Teaches REAL Internet Marketing  

Insider Press Release Tactics - Part 1
Copyright - 2009 by Willie Crawford (All Rights Reserved )



Brought To You By Willie Crawford And
http://EasyPushButtonTraffic.com
This is Willie Crawford and I’d like to welcome you to
another episode of Willie Crawford Teaches Real Internet
Marketing.  Today’s show will focus on press releases or
media releases.  I’ll be showing you how I use them and
have used them in the past, and provide you with a template
or two.

For the templates, I’ll be posting the URLs into the chat
room where you can copy the URL and then download the PDF
or Microsoft Word documents to add to your swipe files.  If
you have questions or comments you can just type them into
the chat room or phone them in. 


I have some show notes I’ll go over and then I would hope
to engage many of you in conversation.  So we’ll fit in as
many callers as we can.  I do ask that before you leave the
site today that you mark the show as a favorite and to do
that you just login to

http://BlogTalkRadio.com/WillieCrawford and up near the top
there is my picture and just to the right of my picture
there is a heart-shaped icon, you just click on that to
mark this show as a favorite.  That helps in our ratings.

Also, feel free to tweet about today’s show, now or even
afterwards.  The mp3 recording from the show will be
available in the archives beginning roughly five minutes
after the episode is over.  Let me begin by saying that
press releases or media releases are fairly simple and that
you shouldn’t overcomplicate things.

When I start talking about press releases, a lot of people
seem to think of something mysterious or magical but it’s
just another tool that you are using to get in front of
your audiences, another way of getting in front of the
media, getting in front of your ideal customers and so
there is nothing really mysterious about press releases.

There are basically two broad purposes for press releases
that we’ll be talking about today.  We use them for,
actually, garnering media attention,  and we also use them
for search engine optimization.

First of all, we can use it to actually get the media’s
attention so the media personalities contact you for
interviews about your products, your services, your
projects, your causes, or whatever.  Getting written up in
a newspaper or a magazine can be huge.  Some magazines will
charge you tens of thousands of dollars for just a
quarter-page ad; I’ve looked at those and that’s
incredible.  But if you can swipe their attention, you can
get them to devote multiple pages, lots of photos, and all
kinds of space in their magazine, and the main part of the
magazine, to you.  So it’s extremely, extremely powerful.
So it’s definitely worth trying to get media attention via
press releases.

Being written up in a magazine or newspaper is often, I’d
estimate, 100 times more valuable and effective than just
running an ad in the same publication.  The reason I say
that is when they write you up they are providing an
indirect endorsement of you.  That media personality who
interviews you, and writes you up in a story or an article,
does a radio or television show on you, or a show
presentation on you, they are saying to their audience,
“Here is someone that is expert enough - that is
significant enough - that I think you should pay attention
to them.”  So they are endorsing you and that is huge.
That is very powerful.

Actually I have been taught, and I teach, that if you are
going to run an ad in a newspaper or a magazine or on a
radio station you want to do it about the same time or in
the same issue as when they do a feature on you.  So,
again, that is very powerful.

I actually do a lot of – I am speaking primarily today of
magazine and newspaper when I talk about press releases,
but I actually do a lot of radio too.  I have interviewed
on local radio stations in probably two dozen cities and I
am regularly on my local radio station.  I also do a lot of
Internet radio - some Internet radio shows can have a
pretty huge audience and these do actually generate a lot
of sales for me.  So this is very powerful; it’s worth
focusing on as another means of getting in front of your
audience.

Now in looking at press releases for actually gaining media
attention, I will explain my system, how I do this, to you
first.  There are actually two other documents that you
want to keep handy other than your press releases.  When
the media contacts you and asks if they can interview you,
they will need to have you provide them additional
information.  If you have these documents prepared and
ready, it just let’s you fire it over to them and lets you
show that you are an expert, you are a pro at what you are
doing and it also indicates to them that you will probably
make a very good interview.  These two documents are: your
bio.  This is generally a one-page document that tells who
you are and it should focus upon what makes you an expert
on the topic of the press release.  That means that you
probably want to have several bios.  I, for example, have
bios that emphasize my expertise in traffic generations,
others that emphasis my expertise in southern cooking,
since I have a cookbook and have sites on cooking, and
others that emphasize my expertise at search engine
optimization.  I have some that emphasize my expertise at
coaching and just teaching people Internet marketing or
ecommerce.

So you want to have a variety of bios handy and they should
all be roughly one-page long and just tell who you are and
why you are an expert and if you have credentials, if you
have special training; anything in your background that
makes you a verifiable expert.  If you’ve written articles,
you’ve been published, how long you’ve been in the
business, maybe some of your training and also what shows
you’ve been on.  Things like that.  Those are all things
you want to put in your bio and you do want to have that
handy for when the media contacts you.