A press release is a written announcement that seeks to draw media attention to a specific event or product launch. When you are doing something big in your business sending out press releases can get you great coverage in the media sending you more visitors and potential customers to your ecommerce website.

Press releases are great for a quick burst of highly targetted traffic, but they can also have other more long-term benefits.

Here are two different ways to use the press release marketing method:

1. To get recognised and published in the online and offline media sending you a burst of traffic – to achieve this make sure your story is newsworthy, it has to be something big your business is doing E.G launching a new product which has benefits like no other product.
         You will have to write a great press release to get good press coverage, reporters get sent lots of press releases every day so you need to write a good one from the title all the way down to the last sentence.
2. To build up quality inbounds to your website helping your long-term SEO targets – sending out press releases online to lots of websites and press release services can gain you some valuable and highly targetted inbounds at very little cost.
         Some press release services offer paid services, for your money your press release can even be published by Google News gaining you a quality inbound and thousands of potential readers. This method can be done more often than Method 1 above so your story doesn’t have to be as ground breaking. It won’t send you as many visitors as Method 1 but long-term it will help your SEO efforts which in turn will send you lots of visitors every week.

When I completed the recent Dropship Help upgrades I sent out a press release to pressbox (read the release) it only took about 10 minutes to write and submit and I now have an extra inbound to the website. If you type ‘dropshiphelp.co.uk’ into Google the pressbox page comes up as the 8th out of 366 pages. This is an example of using a press release just to get an inbound link for your website.

If you don’t know how to write press releases or where to publish them then search around the web and fill yourself with the relevant knowledge so you can get in the media and build valuable inbound links to your ecommerce website!

For further reading check out this post about Press Release Optimisation.