How to Get Free Press for your Software
Have you heard of “any press is good press”?
It will make people aware of your product regardless if it’s any good when it times for them to buy.
Build credibility, get exposure, and more traffic to your website. Forget about generating back links through bots and blog commenting. It is much more effective doing it the following ways.
One of my first startup projects had its first sale from an article on a different website. How did I know? I had referral clicks recorded in my google analytics. A press release is an announcement of an event, product, service, or discovery which is issued publicly. It is important to have something unique or an angle to what you have to offer in a press release.
Here are some different tactics to get you free publicity:
Through Jornalists
Marketer Derek Halpern of http://socialtriggers.com/get-press-with-no-connections/ mentions…
- Make a list of 5-15 competitors. You don’t have to compete directly, but instead, list 5-15 people who are in a similar world as you.
- Find where they have been mentioned in the media. If they haven’t been mentioned, find competitors or related companies who have.
- Figure out how to contact the journalists who featured these companies.
- Don’t just pitch yourself, and ask for links. Reach out the journalist with targeted pitches, as I described in the drafting technique.
I would revise on #4 because it’s vague and non-marketers may not know how to do this. So my #4 is this – many journalists can be contacted easily by Twitter. When you read news sites/blogs, you can usually search articles by author name. Then see the trends of what they like to write about and pick a journalist closely related to your product.
When you are ready to send the journalist a email, make sure it’s about THEM first. Such as: “Hey Jane, I noticed you cover social apps and if I’m correct you like those especially about cooking. You might love this new app that automatically offers ingredient alternatives for cooking recipes. Here’s the link for it!”
That’s it for the email, brief and simple. Don’t ask for any favors or links right away. That will push them away before they think about responding. It’s also common that you won’t get a response so wait 1-2 days and send another email, with slightly more information so they won’t have to click the link for your app. You can include a description and add “I know you’re probably busy writing another marvelous article, so I included the app description here.”
This addition essentially boosts their ego and gives them less work for you!
Now here’s the easy route…
Distribution Services
Albeit less effective you can write the press release yourself and submit it to several PR sites like throwing it on the wall and see what sticks. Here are two websites, although you can surely find more via a web search. This is the lazy alternative and you would get similar results commenting on blogs.
http://www.free-press-release.com/
Something in between
Reporter Matching
http://www.helpareporter.com/ – I’ve personally heard from a few people that it is worthy and will get you good results.