With these tips I am not setting out a marketing course. Just little tips I have learned over the years that work. Some of these tips a lot of you will already know but they may still worth posting for those that don’t.

So the first tip is very simple. Always embed at least one url in your press release, complete with the http:// bit so that it is a clickable link. You can put the url of the microsite for the product in the press release in the body text and the main site in the boilerplate which gives you two links. With creativity you can get even more in.

Now for an anecdote. At Codemasters, quite a few years ago, we wanted the website to become a central marketing plank. The problem is that we had zero marketing budget for the website itself. We followed a policy of issuing 2 press releases a week and we embedded urls in every one of those press releases which were released simultaneously, globally, in the local language. The website grew in popularity till it became one of the busiest gaming websites in Europe. Obviously we then did good things with the content to make people come back, but that is a different story.

The mechanism is very simple. A properly organised global press release goes out to many thousands of journalists, blog writers, fansites etc. Now the paid, full time, professional journalists will use the press release as the basis of a story (if you are lucky) but the vast majority will just copy and paste it, complete with your urls. When they do this on the web you then get nice live links to your site. As the web is a voracious consumer of content your release will be copied and published in places you never dreamed of, always with your urls.

You can see where this is going. If one press release can generate many thousands of links to your website then a consistent press release strategy will very quickly create millions of links. It is inevitable that a good percentage of these links will be clicked and, voila, you have a very busy website. Then Google and the other search engines send their bots out and see this huge number of links and you shoot up the search engine ratings. Then you start getting lots of organic traffic. All for zero budget.

So it won’t suprise you that I embedded the urls for this site in the press release announcing it. As I did this myself, at home, it didn’t have massive distribution. And it was only a little story. But I still got the links. Not as many as an established company would get, but enough to bring this site a bit of traffic.

Now please don’t let these tips become a one way process! Use the comment link below to add your knowledge and experience.