PR for Startups

June 1st, 2009 by Dave

Launching a website? Not sure where can you can post a press release for less than $100?” Well, if PRWeb and Marketwire stretch your budget too thin, here are some tips for you bootstapping entrepreneurs to consider before crawling too far out on the PR limb.

1) Nobody Reads Press Releases!

You’ll likely get more in the way of visits, customer acquisition, and inbound links by posting the news to your own blog. Or, better yet, have somebody with high Google PageRank in your vertical post the news on their blog. For TeachStreet, this might mean sending a friendly e-mail to either Jon or Koichi, our friends over at EduFire, which is an SFO based company who specializes in online video learning.

2) Arrington Will Not Issue Your IPO

As great as TechCrunch is, unless your target audience is comprised of SQL scripting, RegEx writing developers, don’t expert customer acquisition.

We’re raving fans of TechCrunch and we’re grateful for both the first and second articles they wrote about TeachStreet, I would caution startuppers to put all their eggs in the TechCrunch basket, especially if they do so to the exclusion of other great sites. One site that has driven visits and singups for us is Springwise.

3) Don’t Forget SEO

Though links from PR sites have SEO value that’s closer to that of a comment link than that of an editorial piece in Business Week, make sure the links in your press release have good anchor text. And for those who are new to SEO and aren’t purveyors of PageRank yet, get your feet wet learning from those who are.

5 great SEO blogs worth adding to your feed reader:

  • SEOmoz — http://www.seomoz.org/blog
  • Shoemoney — http://www.shoemoney.com/
  • SEOBook — http://www.seobook.com/blog
  • NineByBlue — http://www.ninebyblue.com/
  • Michael Gray’s Blog — http://www.wolf-howl.com/

4) Use Free PR Sites

To be open kimono, we’ve received little in the way of traffic volume from the free press sites, but I’ve heard several folks in the wiki space talk about how they’ve seen great traffic pops by submitting to these sites.  Depending on your time and resources the freebies might be worth a try.

10 free PR sites worth checking out:

5. Link to Journalists

Everyone and their baby momma gets Google alerts for their brand name. So why not give link to someone you’d like a link from yourself. Or, better yet, a journalist whose attention you’d like to get. Drop the name of a favorite journalist, be it TechFlash’s Eric Engleman or the BigBlog’s Monica Guzman… who knows, one of them might be looking for a story about how yoga instructors and piano teachers are using TeachStreet to grow their business in a down economy.

And don’t be affraid to give the people you mention a link. And as SEO Rand Fishkin mentioned in a recent blog post, there’s no reason not to link to other people. Perhaps refrain from giving optimized anchor text to a competitor, but if you’re in the education space and the site your linking to builds one of the best link intelligence tools, why not?

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