A list of services to use for DIY press-release submission for small businesses

While many large companies use a PR agency to manage their press-releases, it's now easy to do-it-yourself and go direct to an online service for distribution. There are also some free options available which can give some SEO benefits with backlinks and through featuring in Google News. Don't expect lots of journalists to pick up on your press release though if you use these services, a more personal approach once you have identified a specialist through a tool like Vocus will work better here. There are a growing number of websites where news and press releases can be submitted online. The main business model is to offer a free, but upgradable service.  There are limitations as the sites vary in terms of layout and "how to" submit, there are issues when adding images (some are free, but very small) and…

Ideas on techniques for sharing great content

Everyone knows that having great content is the secret to success with content marketing, but if you stop there, that's only half the battle or you're missing half the opportunity. If you just rely on Google to find and display your content then that will only get you so far, even if you can compete in SEO which is far from easy. The power or maybe the necessity of making your content shareable is shown by the stats below.

First we see how some companies have been successful in driving more visits from social networks through sharing content and engaging with their audiences on social networks.

Next we see the trend of the growing importance of social networks compared to search engines. Interesting and challenging stuff! …

We really like this new Influencers report, which you can get here, more because it shares great knowledge on "influencers", what they are, how important they are and how to locate and communicate with them - in some cases it requires software, naturally. The guys at Fresh Networks decided to test nine of the leading social media monitoring tools - Attensity 360, Brandwatch, Radian6, Alterian SM2, Scoutlabs, Sysomos, Synthesio, PeerIndex and Social Radar - in order to assess how effective they are at identifying influencers across a range of social media platforms. In simplest sense, businesses are no longer in complete control of their products, brands and messages, the consumer now has a lot of control. And, in the modern day those consumers are largely influenced by their networks of influencers - this can be friends and contacts as well as independents that have a perceived authority plus brand…

In my Internet Marketing:Strategy, Implementation and Practice book I ask this question in the chapter on traffic building / digital communications. I hoped readers would think of the relative sizes of different types of sites and their representation through different forms of digital media channels both on the major sites and the "long tail" of smaller sites. So it was nice to see the BBC recently use a similar analogy in their blockbusting Internet documentary, Virtual Revolution. They had a great visual produced which I've grabbed from the iPlayer version of the show:

Since the programme Hitwise have published a more detailed map, which I thought would be interesting to compare - it's worth reading Robin Goad's analysis on the Hitwise site.

What are the implications for digital strategy?

The programme used…