John Cow dot Com » blog traffic

How To Construct A Press Release That Gets Attention

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 11:52:52 +0000

Press releases have always been a great way to get not only visitors to your web properties but also backlinks. The problem is, most people have no idea how to write one. It’s not that difficult at all and I will give you an outline and some of the things you should do and shouldn’t do.

Firstly, ask yourself whether your news is actually newsworthy? If you think it’s not don’t worry, it doesn’t take much to make it look newsworthy. Here is the biggest no-no of a press release. Don’t use it simply to make a sale or sell something.

A press release needs to be toned down. It needs to answer the who, what, where, when and why of whatever it is you’re promoting.

Here are a list of DO NOTs:

Don’t make your press release sound like an advertisement. If it does then go back and tone it down and remember the four “Ws.”
Never write a press release just to mention an opening or a launch. They are a dime a dozen and these type of press releases will usually get turfed.
Always avoid hype and don’t fill it with fluff. It needs to be direct and straight to the point.
Avoid exaggerations and over the top claims. The Journalism profession is one of skepticism. I know because I’ve spent my career working in news rooms around the world.
Avoid too many exclamation marks. This is definitely a no-no…!!!!! I would not include them at all.

Here are a list of the DOs:

Get straight to the point. People should know what your press release is about simply by reading the headline and the first paragraph.
Lead with your main point. It’s the hook to attract enough attention to get the media to want to use your press release.
Your press release should only focus on the features but in a toned down manner. Never try to sell. Ask yourself “why anyone else would want to read my press release?” Put yourself in the Journalists or reader’s shoes and decide if your release is interesting enough to share with the world.
Always try and use real life points that will illustrate how you or your service solved a problem. You could identify a problem and then explain why your product or site can solve it. Never exaggerate.
Try and relate your story to something going on in the world right now. For example, it could relate to the current state of the economy. If you have a home business opportunity relate, it to the frail economy. Mention the problem and then why you have the solution. Mention benefits.
Your language should be plain. Avoid using unnatural language. There is certain language which may be appropriate in a particular niche but remember, you want your press release to touch the general population. That’s what a Journalist will be looking for. They want to appeal to a wider audience and not just a specific niche.
The press release should end with a short spiel about your company, site, product, history etc. This is like a resource box but keep it short.

Just remember not to write a salesletter. It’s a news oriented item and needs to grab a reader’s attention very early on. Avoid too much fluff and keep it a reasonable length…250-400 words. Here’s a resource I posted in The forum recently on constructing a press release. It’s basically a template and will be a good guideline to writing your press release:

http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/IPR.htm

WIN $500 (For Real this Time) with JOHNCOWtv Episode 3

Jason Katzenback — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:51:49 +0000

WIN $500 (For Real This Time)
By Helping Us Catch the COWnappers!

This Weeks Episode of JOHNCOWtv is sponsored by…

MotiveInteractive
The Premium Online Advertising Solution

If you tuned into last weeks episode 2, you would have witnessed the broadcast interuption from three scandalous villians (two of which have fantastic moustaches if I say so myself), as you can see in the below image captured from their broadcast…

There were also some serious demands made and we have been given 2 options…

1. Pay 1 million dollars (ya like that is going to happen… uhmm… i mean, yes we will try COW)
2. Solve the clues left by the COWnappers.

Each week we will be given a video clue and a sentence to help identify the clue. At the end of the four weeks (week 5) we will recieve a secret encoded message and if we have each weeks clues correct and can figure out who the COWnapper is, he will return COW to us.

There is no way I can do this on my own… I need my super intelligent and extremely good looking readers to help with this and…

I Will Pay For It!

I am willing to give $500 cash to anyone that figures out who the head COWnapper is… the man behind the smiley face. You do not need to subscribe to this blog, give me a backlink or anything (of course it is always appreciated when you do)… but there is absolutely nothing that you have to do except each week watch for the clue left by those villians and then at the end of the 4 weeks when the bad guys give us the supposed secret encoded message, there will then be a 24 hour period in which to give the correct answer. We will put the name of all those that submitted the right answer into a hat and pick out the winner and award them instantly with $500 via PayPal.

IMPORTANT –> You must have an active PayPal account in which to recieve the funds in order to participate.

DONATE TO THE CAUSE –> If any of you want to donate a reward to the cause, I will accept anything to add to the pot (ebooks, software, advertising, or even cash) and I will feature you in an episode plus give you a strong mention in a JOHNCOWtv post. Simply email me by using the “Contact” page.

Below is this weeks episode of JOHNCOWtv and contains first of all a tip on how to take advantage of Stumbleupon but more important of all is it contains the first clue to solving this riddle.

A word of warning, the video contains some very graphic images and should not be watched by vegetarians!

Week 1 Clue : The COW is being forced to BBQ a _ _ _ _ _

DO NOT POST THE ANSWER BELOW (Keep it secret… keep it safe)

Remember watch for the hoof print to identify the clue!

Click Here to Add JOHNCOWtv to Your YouTube

Click Here if You Want Your Website or Business Spotlighted in the Next Episode of JOHNCOWtv?

Link Boosting and WIN $10 000! – JOHNCOWtv Episode 2

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 19:12:02 +0000

Well it has been a full week since our beloved COW was stolen from us (as witnessed in JOHNCOWtv Episode 1) and sadly we have not heard a single word from the authorities or the COWnappers. We are still hopeful that COW is safe and unharmed but we also a little concerned. We are moving forward still and in fact we want to celebrate with all of our readers what it is COW represents and stands for (too many things to write about in this post, that is for sure) and as a result we are giving away…

>> $10 000 CASH! <<

That’s right… we are not going to let these COWnappers ruin us and destroy this for our readers.

The rules are simple… watch the video and we announce the winner in the video. We selected a name from the list of email subscribers and picked one random winner. The only exception is we are not publishing the name, we are not emailing the person and they have to contact us within 24 hours of this post…

NO EXCEPTIONS!

If you do not hear your name or do not contact us within 24 hours… we are keeping all of it… and believe me Audrey can always find ways to spend that money!

So don’t email us or comment below that it is unfair if you do not hear your name or contact us in time.. remember NO EXCEPTIONS!

I also share a powerful strategy in this episode called “LinkBoosting”… which I know you will find useful!

So watch the video and see if you are a lucky winner!

Click Here to Add JOHNCOWtv to Your YouTube

Want Your Website or Business Spotlighted in the Next Episode of JOHNCOWtv?

If you would like to be spotlighted on JOHNCOWtv it is easy… simply send us something with your business name or logo on it (ball caps, winter caps, t-shirts, coffee cups)… OR… something cool (we like gadgets and PS3 video games ) and tell us what you want to have mentioned. We will also add the sponsor message in the text of the post.

Mailing Address: 645 Queen Street East 2nd Floor, SSM, Ontario Canada, P6A2A6

Planning Contest Criteria – Part 5 of AnAudLife dot Com

Jason Katzenback — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:02:34 +0000

In the previous post “Planning a Contest to Get the Buzz Going” we talked about deciding on what the best prizes would be for your market and today we are going to talk about planning the criteria that participants are required to perfrom to be entered to win.

One of the challenges of holding a contest is how do you make it viral so it gets loads of attention. People that enter the contest usually do not want to talk about it with others since it will decrease their chances of winning. With http://www.anaudlife.com, my goal of the contest is to get exposure for the blog and in order to do that I want the contest to encourage participants to talk about the contest in other places and personally I am a fan of the “Ticket” system for allowing participants the opportunity to earn more chances to win by spreading the word.

There are many people who are not big fans of the multi ‘Ticket’ system but the problem is if you have a new blog and you do not already have a significant reader base, having a contest or giveaway that is just a simple “subscribe”, is not going to get you any extra exposure.

Now do not get me wrong, contests with simple one step registrations can be very successful but you need to already have lots of traffic coming to your site to take advantage of it.

For our case study blog we are going to use the multi ‘Ticket’ system and now we need to plan out the criteria.

This can prove to be somewhat of a challenge for people, especially in non “IM” (internet marketing) related niches. One of the great things about the IM niche is you can be pretty sure that most people in the market own a website or blog, have accounts at social networks, know what digg, twitter and squidoo are and the list goes on and on.

You need to be able to take advantage of systems that the sites market will be familiar with and it can not be done in such a way that would appear to be spamming someone. One thing you will want to consider is providing small little video instructions of each criteria that your readers may not be familiar with, this way you can help those that want to participate but do not know how.

Criteria 1: Subscribe to RSS feed via email: This is the top thing that I want people to do. Getting someone opted in to the sites list means repeat traffic. It is important that you also mention that they must remain opted into the list in order to win.

Possible optional criteria:

The optional criteria are the extra things the participant can do to get more chances to win. You will want to award points based on effort and so something that is very easy to do would earn a few points but something that is more difficult would earn more points. Before you worry about the points however, you need to figure out what optional steps to use. Some ideas for our case study blog is…

Vote for Video on YouTube: We would need to create a video about the site but most people know what Youtube is and it would be easy to make a quick video about how to vote the video up and comment on it.

Facebook and or Myspace: You can be pretty sure that a lot of people are familiar with these sites and have accounts at one or both of them. You can create a group or page and have them join and write on their wall about the contest.

Content Creation: Some people love to write and you could have them create content for you that you can use. Ask them to write a 400 word article about your contest and blog, you can then submit this article to a site like ezinearticles.com to get some exposure. You can even offer to link to their site with the article as well, this way you both get a good quality backlink.

Link to Your Blog: I can guarantee you that the majority of your readers will not own a blog but a lot of them will have some way of adding a link to your blog. It never hurts to ask.

Stumble the Page: This is one of those things that a lot of people will not have accounts with but you can provide instructions and hope for the best.

Comment on Other Blog: This one you need to be careful with and provide detailed instructions but is an easy way to get some links via comments. Explain that the comments must be worthwhile and relate directly to the post they are commenting on and are not to enter a link in the comment but simply enter your sites name and url in the asked for comment fields. Make sure that the blog they comment on is at least remotely related to your market.

Cow Brained Idea –> Hmmm…. thinking outside the box here but maybe you could get a little script made that you prefill with blogs you would like them to comment on and the post randomly shows one for them to comment on. Damn I think I am going to get that made… it is freakin genius bwa hahahaha.

Once you have decided on the criteria you are going to use, you will then need to figure out the point values.

Your Help is Wanted –> What other ideas do you have… please comment below and share other possible ideas you have for a non IM “arthritis” blog.

In the next post of this series, I am going to about protecting yourself with your contest.

Part 1 – Planning Your Promotion Strategy
Part 2 – Understanting the How and Where of Your Promotion Strategy
Part 3 – Planning the Subscriber Traffic Strategy
Part 4 – Planning a Contest to Get the Buzz Going
Part 5 – Planning the Contest Criteria
Part 6 – Protect Yourself Before You Start a Contest
Part 7 – Rule of the Contest Prize Delivery

My Secret Weapon is Open for a Limited Time Only

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:55:05 +0000

I am sorry, I meant to announce this yesterday but for those of you that have followed along the eBook, you will know about my secret weapon that i use to get my sites loads of traffic is TrafficKahuna. Well we have opened the doors to TrafficKahuna today for a limited time (about 24 hours).

If you are not sure what TrafficKahuna is, it is a system that provides extremely powerful tools for promoting your business online. If you want more targeted traffic, back links and to dominate the search engines — without maxing out your Visa card buying traffic or spending 10 hours a week doing everything by yourself — you will want to check this out.

We have a desk drawer stuffed full of success stories from TrafficKahuna customers (you can read them here http://www.traffickahuna.com/

When you consider that buying one link from an established site or blog can easily cost you $200 per
month, you will quickly realize that Traffic Kahuna is an absolute steal of a deal!

Give Traffic Kahuna a try for the next 30 days. I know you will be impressed with the results you get!

Click Here Now!

PS: Over the past few months, you have seen the quality of material I have been providing you here, I promise to not let you down with whats inside TrafficKahuna.

Planning Your Promotion Strategy – Part One of An Aud Life dot Com

Jason Katzenback — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 14:34:02 +0000

When I originally did the COWpetition section a few months ago on promoting the GamerzReviewz blog, I saw a few people try to replicate what I did without understanding the need to step back, look at the big picture and then properly plan. You see, each niche is a completely different animal and what works in one niche is not guaranteed to work in another niche.

For example, I have found twitter to be very good for markets that are full of people that are online addicts, these include marketers, bloggers, programmers and gamers. The real power of Twitter comes from getting people that actually use it to follow you. Getting someone to create a twitter account and follow you is almost useless if they never actually visit the account.

So the first step is to plan out our strategy and this includes creating a goal and then planning out how we are going to achieve that.

Step 1: Set Our Goal

When doing a promotion campaign, you should set your goal as “Traffic” not google rankings, links or subscribers. The reason for this is traffic is where the money is and rankings, links and subscribers are stepping stones to achieving that goal. We also want to create three goals… 6 months, 3 months and 1 month. You can plan out further then that if you want but I do not like to because the blog might not catch on.

This is not by business goal, it is my specific traffic goal for this specific blog. The fact is that not all sites and blogs are going to catch on and after 6 months you will know if you should continue to focus a lot of effort into this project or move on.

Remember you blog is a part of the bigger picture and is a stepping stone to achieving your financial goals. You do not want to digg your heels in and focus your energy on something that is not returning an investment and so after 6 months, re-evaluate the situation and either make plans to grow it more or move on to focus efforts elsewhere. At the minimum I will let a site run for 3 months and within that time will have a good idea about how well it will do but I have also had sites that sucked at first and suddenly 9 months later Google started ranking and sending traffic to it.

Our Traffic Goals:

6 Month: 600 Uniques a day
3 Month: 300 Uniques a day
1 Month: 100 Uniques a day

My Reasoning: I have found that on average doing standard promotion strategies that these numbers are about what we should expect from a niche specific site in the health industry. Whether you agree with me or not, I do not really care and when you set your goals remember they are your goals not someone elses. You do not want to go too high because your first initial few months are in need of momentum and a great way to give you momentum is by achieving realistic goals. You also do not want to under estimate too much because if you make it too easy on yourself you will get lazy.

Now here is the challenge and I know a few of you will say… “I told you so”

http://www.anaudlife.com is already averaging 100+ a day because of this case study and being mentioned on this blog. The challenge is I want to show exactly what we are doing and there is no way to hide the site from you but what we can do (using google analytics) is calculate the traffic from all other sources and get an estimate. The traffic being sent from JohnCow is also not niche targetted and so for the most part will disappear once the case study is over, so we want to dismiss this traffic up front.

IMPORTANT –> Do not be distracted by the fact that the results will not be exact due to the mentioning of the blog, look at the strategies and follow along and implement them yourself. Here is a twist on a popular saying for you that is something I truly believe…

Some people say the glass is half empty, others say half full, I say… why waste time over analyzing the darn thing, slam it down and enjoy it!

If you are going to sit here and over anlyze and pick apart different things, you are going to miss out. I encourage each of you to follow along and figure out how to make this work for you. Make the best of what you are given and enjoy it.

Also, for those of you that have read the eBook “How to Build a Business and Not Just a Blog” this is going to give you a different view because the goal of the COWpetition blog was to sell in 30 days and that limited us on what we could do with it. This one is different and will be a great compliment to the eBook.

Tomorrow I am going to show how I come up with the actions steps to achieve my goals.

[poll id="9"]

So what is your feedback on this post?

Part 1 – Planning Your Promotion Strategy
Part 2 – Understanting the How and Where of Your Promotion Strategy
Part 3 – Planning the Subscriber Traffic Strategy
Part 4 – Planning a Contest to Get the Buzz Going
Part 5 – Planning the Contest Criteria
Part 6 – Protect Yourself Before You Start a Contest
Part 7 – Rule of the Contest Prize Delivery

The Last Drop For Entrecard

Jason Katzenback — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 00:01:28 +0000

We’ve had the entrecard (EC) widget on our blog for a while now and never really actively participated in their booming community. If you’re familiar with their forums, you’ll know there’s a select group of EC power-users. They seem to wake up, and go to bed with nothing but EC on their mind. Their blog’s are filled with post after post on how to increase your EC traffic, how to optimize it for your blog, how to network with the community,Top droppers MeMes, etc etc. That’s all great, but we think some are getting a little carried away with it all, unknowingly destroying the system.

Here’s the thing: The whole purpose behind EC is to get noticed in the blogosphere because your 125×125 ad gets displayed on other blogs that have signed up with EC. Obviously if your card is featured on a huge blog like Problogger (who gets sponsored by EC) or JohnChow, you’re bound get get a nice bump in traffic for those 24 hours. Currently the cost for these two blogs is 330 and 260. So why on earth would someone waste over 400 credits to get featured on a blog that has 21 RSS subscribers? You wouldn’t if you have your head screwed on the right way!

We’re not saying your blog is bad or crap, we’re just saying there’s no justification for such a high price, having compared the stats with the other blogs. It’s like us starting to ask $900 for a review, while you can go and get one for half that amount on JohnChow.com. We’d set ourselves up the bomb!

Now this is where the problem lies. The EC powerusers are so keen on getting becoming popular within the ranks of the community, that they are working hard in chain dropping their cards on all EC blogs each day, just to accumulate more credits and inflating their own advertising prices. Emails keep getting send around, asking for drops, reccomendations and whatever else it is that will get you popular on the categories pages.
Its really not doing any good for anyone. The blogs that get their cards dropped on are experiencing an increase in bounce rates. The bloggers that stops dropping quickly vanish into thin air. The bloggers that keep dropping, is happily inflating their own advertising cost. And for what? Just to get featured in the top 3 on their respective categories?

Bouncerates through the roof.

Unfortunately the current system “Effort=Reward” has become unusable since it has been encouraging this form of ‘gaming the system’ and the end result causes a distorted view of how popular a blog really is on the outside world. If you think you’re paying 400 credits to get featured on a popular blog, therefor getting high exposure to the blogosphere and receiving a bump in traffic, think again. You’ve just wasted your hard earned credits on a blog that might look popular inside the EC community, but isn’t all that popular outside the community – where it matters if you’re looking for traffic.

The only way to stop this is to alter the script so it won’t add to your ‘popularity’ when you’re dropping cards. Getting more popular because cards are getting dropped on your blog is a natural and organic type of growth, which would be a more accurate reflection of the popularity of a blog in the place where it really matters – the blogosphere. Until the EC team can find a way to prevent blog inflation from happening, we’re dropping EC.

(PS We’re waiting for Becky’s ‘told you so!’ comment).