5 step process to generate website traffic from free publicity
By Paul Green
Getting free publicity in the national media is one of the most cost effective ways to drive traffic to your website.
When I used to do free marketing seminars, I often told the story of how a client got one million people to visit their website – by sending one press release to one journalist on a national newspaper.
The fact is, big media outlets still command huge, huge audiences. Which is great news for your business. Because the larger the audience, the more people there are to visit your website.
And the more targeted traffic you can get to your website, the more likely it is that you will generate leads.
The trick is to generate a story that a) the media thinks its audience will be interested in, and b) drives targeted traffic to your website.
Here’s my five step process to achieve this:
1. Create a story idea packed with Standoutability
Journalists get hundreds of story ideas sent to them every day, mostly in the form of press releases. News desks on national newspapers have to trawl through thousands of emails. So why would they even notice your story let alone choose to write about it?
The job of “selling” your story to journalists is done by the headline of your press release. And your headline needs to demonstrate something called Standoutability. I invented this term – it’s the magic ingredient that every great headline has. Put simply, it blows the journalist away.
A headline packed with Standoutability shows that the story suggestion is highly unusual and totally relevant to the media outlet’s target audience. It screams that this is the kind of story that they are trawling all of their emails for.
Once a journalist has opened your press release email and read a couple of sentences, they are significantly more likely to turn your press release into a story for their publication.
2. Make the story about your website
Journalists don’t like giving free advertising to businesses. That’s why you’ll often hear radio presenters referring to “a survey done by a business” without naming the business!
So you need to generate a story idea that in some way makes your website essential to the story. That makes it very difficult for the journalist to cut your website out.
There are a number of clever strategies to achieve this. In some that I teach to my mentoring and private clients, you create minisites that are there purely for PR purposes, but act very well at attracting traffic from the media.
3. Send your story to journalists and put it onto the newswires
Many of the business owners I speak to worry far too much about how they are going to distribute their press releases to the media.
The cheapest way to do it is to build your own media distribution list. Gather email addresses from Google and by ringing media outlets. Send press releases when journalists are looking for new stories, not when they are on deadline trying to get their current issue completed.
If you’ve got a little money to invest, post your press releases onto news wires. I recommend and use ResponseSource and Journalism.co.uk
If you need help distributing a release, my team can send it to up 5,000 media outlets on your behalf. Please contact us for more details.
4. Track website traffic by using a unique URL
In your press release you should send website traffic to a unique URL, rather than your normal website address. There are two reasons for this.
The first is that it allows you to track how much traffic you receive from your media coverage. Sometimes a journalist can give you a really good write up that mentions your website address a couple of times, but the readers simply don’t respond as you would expect them to.
There’s always an element of luck in PR. Using a unique URL allows you to measure what is actually happening. When you can measure it, you can manage it. There’s no point getting lots of media attention if it simply isn’t turning into website traffic.
5. Capture the data of website visitors
This is the most important part of the process. It takes the website traffic you are receiving and turns it into something you really want – leads.
Data capture is as simple as offering visitors something in return for their contact details. This is typically in the form of a free report, consumer guide or white paper (named according to what type of person buys what you sell).
Once you have captured the data of website visitors you also need to put in place a tested follow-up sequence.
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