The following is excerpted from: How To Steal To The Top Of Google: Use the News by Danny Wall on SEO Chat. It describes how to write and send a news release that gets attention.
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Let me give you a good example. Lets say you sell a product that teaches people how to swing a bat properly and is aimed at baseball and softball players (and their parents). What you do is you hang back and you proceed to watch some baseball games, waiting for one of the big name batters to make some significant batting mistake. When they do (and they will because no one is perfect) you send a press release that says:
“Holy Crap! Did you See The Mistake Barry Sosa Made At Bat?”
You then talk about the error, that was made, say what the correction is, and give a link to a page on your website that talks about common batting errors and how to fix them, and gives contact information for reaching you by voice. And you had better answer the phone, and if you miss the call you had better call back promptly.
Let me reiterate what I just said. The phone number you give goes to you. Not your secretary. Not your marketing VP. You.
That press release gets sent out to every single sports reporter in the country (or at least to those that you know about), by fax (not email, not B.S. internet media press release, by fax) well before the game is over. You just became a sports reporter's best friend. You’ll probably get written about by a very significant percentage of the sports writers. But you may find yourself getting called for interviews by both TV and radio personalities.
You’ll find that article popping above the number one search term for things like “baseball” and “hitting” or “batting.”
You see, the technique I just mentioned allows you to solve a reporter's problem. How to find news that is actually news. Any idiot can report the scores and the newspapers know that. But the reporters that pick up your “story” will be heroes to the newspapers because it’ll be something interesting. It’ll be about something that happened to a “celebrity” and explains how to “fix it.” All it takes is imagination and the willingness to keep your eyes open and “exploit” current events to your favor.
Did you just hear about some bad business decision by some major celebrity? That’s good news if you do almost anything related to the financial sector.
Is the price of gas going up? That’s good news if you do almost anything that helps to extend a car’s fuel economy.
But you have to be willing to be bold, to use your imagination. Notice that the headline above may actually “offend” some people. Believe it or not, that’s a good thing. Now, you don’t want to go out of your way to be offensive, but at the same time, some people are always offended by anything that is bold and out of the ordinary.
If you want your company, your web site, to be picked up by the news you have to stand out. You have to be bold. You have to be willing to stand out from the crowd. Some people are going to be offended by that.
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To read the entire article, which provides great advice on getting to the top of Google, go to SEOChat.com.
