Wednesday, November 3, 2010

6 Ways to Get Your Website Noticed by Mainstream Media

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One of the quickest ways to see results in ranking and getting more traffic to your website is getting noticed by the media. Of course, if it were that simple, then everyone would be doing it, wouldn’t they?

If you want to truly separate yourself from your competition as an online business, it does take some savvy and creativity to get yourself noticed by the mainstream media to get even more traffic to your website.

Below are the six steps to make your website noticed by the mainstream media:

1. Check Out Help a Reporter Out

This is a complete resource online that has 80,000 different mainstream sources available at the click of a button. This is the site to use to submit information about your products, business, or new developments to get potential quotes from The New York Times or even ABC news. Luckily, the site is free to use, but you do have to sign up and provide your information to get started. You can then submit your own queries to find sources for your news information, which will prevent unsolicited sales pitches or spam from other companies online. (Link: Help a Reporter Out)

2. Become an expert at ReporterConnection

One of the quickest ways to get noticed within your industry is by setting yourself up as an expert, which you can do at ReporterConnection.com. You can sign up for free to become an expert source in your niche, where you will then be referred to producers and top journalists as a source for your subject as needed. This can give you the perfect opportunity to get quoted in the mainstream news, thus providing invaluable exposure and back links to your website. (Link: ReporterConnection)

3. Use Twitter To Connect To Reporters

We all know that anyone and everyone out there is using Twitter for promotion today, but to go deeper, you may want to check out JournalistTweets. This is a resource that helps journalists to stay connected, and you can use your Twitter account to reply and converse with many of the top news tweets. The reason that this is helpful is because news exposure for your company is about business connections, which you can begin to facilitate by contributing to journalists’ tweets regarding topics in your industry through this simple website.

4. Contact the media directly

If you have a new product or information regarding your company that deserves coverage, check out news websites and blogs to find the contact information of mainstream reporters or bloggers. This will give you the opportunity to contact them directly to offer information on an interesting topic or provide first-hand news about a new product or service from your company. Most reporters are looking for leads and will respond to a good story or tip. The best way to do this is to an assistant prepare a list of media contacts that are actively writing about your niche. You can approach these guys later on with a personalized email about your story.

5. Try blog networking

It is important to subscribe to the RSS feed of many of the mainstream media blogs so that you can stay up to date within your niche market. If you want to get news exposure for your business online, you can begin to comment on these blogs, link to them, and send e-mails to the webmasters to offer further related news and content. Reaching out in this way will help to make valuable connections with reputable news blogs that may someday choose to link back to your website if applicable.

6. Create link bait

Creating link bait is one of the best things that you can do for your company because you will create an idea, product, or concept online that people will be talking about and want to link to. If this is done successfully, your link bait could become viral so that thousands and thousands of other websites link to you and dramatically increase the rankings of your website. The best way to do this is by truly studying your market and demographic to find out what people are looking for. Once you have a basic idea, you can create a product, service, topic, contest, charity – you name it – to target this untapped need. If you introduce an in-demand idea to the market, people will be willing to link to it, circulate it, talk about it, and even provide news coverage on it. Of course, this last tip is not something that is done easily, and it requires serious thought, research, and creativity to find out what your market is looking for so that you can give it to them as a news-worthy concept online.

The truth of the matter is that getting news coverage for your business through the mainstream media will prove invaluable by offering authority links back to your website. No matter how many SEO tactics you have used, these authority links will give you a boost in your rankings that you can’t get anywhere else!

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