Have you heard of Justin Herald? Here’s a young man who started a business as a practical joke for $50 and turned it into millions “almost over night”.
His claim is that his clothing label, “Attitude”, has never paid for advertising.
Justin’s was an inspirational story of a kid with a bad attitude who became a success. When the press heard his story, they competed for who would interview him.
Getting an endorsement on the news gave him a competitive edge and plenty of free exposure. So much, that “Attitude” has become a household brand name simply through the news.
The question is, how do you get your Home business to make the news?
“Am I a News Story?”
Are you a news story? Maybe not. But we can turn you into a story.
We need something with mass appeal. Something that people who would normally never be your customers would talk about – Just because it’s exciting news.
Is your business made up of mainly women? Or do you have a huge downline of young 18-25 year-olds? Are you a well known person in your area and people would be interested to know you’re running a home business now?
Watch the news and read it. Find those stories about others in the community. Why did their story make the news?
Pick an angle that you like and construct a story for yourself around it. And make sure your story is factual.
How to Attract Journalists and News Stations to You
Trying to sell your product to the press is a stupid idea.
A “press release”, is a mini article telling your possible news story in a journalistic style to the journalist. Is your story worthy of news? That’s all the journalist needs to know.
If you have an unconventional method of getting more advertising power for the same price, for example, you could create a story from that. Is it newsworthy to Home Business owners? Are you kidding, more customers for the same price, what advertiser would say no?
Anyone who advertises will want to read about that!
Drama, controversy, and “the unusual”, are basic elements of story-telling. People want to hear about these things.
At the end of your story you need a natural lead-up to promote your website. I do that simply by referring in the body of the article to my company by name. After the name, put the website address in brackets. Hopefully your story is so interesting that your prospects will go to your site.
“Yo, Google, Lend Us a Hand!”
Before writing the press release and issuing it to journalists, we need to do some keyword research.
Why?
Because when we post our story to the internet, we want journalists and potential customers to find it easily in search engines.
Journalists will come across your story through RSS feeds, searches on the internet, or searches in social news networks.
Often bloggers also create content in the same way as journalists do. They’re valuable to you too.
It’s no time to get lazy. Out with the keyword research tools!
You can use wordtracker’s free keyword tool. Type into it the broad term you want people to find you under and submit to learn of related keywords they’re searching for.
From these, you’ll pick the keywords with the highest number of searches and then find out from Google how many pages are competing for them. Ideally you’ll keep the ones with least competition.
You should have a small list of say 5 keywords now. Write one variant of your press release for each keyword.
Making the News
People usually browse a list of news headlines and only read the summary for the ones which interest them.
Head over to prweb.com or 24-7pressrelease.com and find the category or categories you intend to post your story to. Most of the people posting here are amateurs. How can you stand out from the crowd?
Your headline also needs one of your keyword phrases.
There are 5 keywords, so create five news headlines using those exact words. Afterwards, you’ll be able to submit the same press release to different websites and only change the headline. (Note: Submit only one press release per website or you’ll be rejected).
Here are some other press release submission sites: http://www.express-press-release.com, http://www.free-press-release.com, http://www.openpr.com, http://www.i-newswire.com
Shouting it to the Word with Web 2.0
Most people stop at writing the press release. Most people don’t even bother to research their keywords. And most are so self-serving that they use the press release like an ad.
Not us. We’ve made a deliberate effort to make the news for the sake of the news. But nothing adds fuel to a raging traffic fire like social networks.
If our story is really newsworthy, people will discuss it socially in social networks. Let’s share our news with them too!
Submit your press release’s URL to Digg and tell the story. Both the Digg submission and the press release should have the same title.
Remember to also blog about the press release on all your blogs. Be sure to always link back to the press release.
If you’ve built a MySpace list of home business owners, post a bulletin about your story. Use your MySpace blog to open the story for discussion too.
Don’t have a MySpace list? Get one!
With several back-links from your press release, you help your story rank well in search engines. At the same time, you’re catching traffic from the social networks while spreading the news.
Who knows, if your story is really powerful, maybe Today Tonight will cover it on prime time TV too.
