PRWeb Statistics...
Hi Soloset,
Please find my responses within yours, below.
Warm regards,
ME
I have a few questions for you, eAgent. Do you have any affiliations with PRWeb outside of your own marketing efforts?
ME: I'm on the Advisory Board. I've been a user of their platform since early 1998. Early 2003 I began using the platform with an eye toward SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as my Pay Per Click campaigns were costing upwards of $3,000 per month, and we were not performing nearly as well as I would have liked.
Within 6 weeks of using PRWeb, we were able to cut our online advertising costs in half, and use 50% of the savings toward PRWeb press release distribution.
12 weeks into the program we chopped our online ad campaign budget again, and put another 50% of the savings toward online PR.
The client tripled his sales in that 12 weeks. By 5 months we have 65,000 web sites linking to us, and sales were 700% above over when I started the campaign.
How I met PRWeb: I've founded 9 companies, and sold 6 of them since 1986. I was "hacking" the PRWeb process in 2003 when I received a call from the founder (at 2:30 or 3AM, immediately following a submission I'd made).
We had a great chat, and a short time later he but a block in the system fault I'd been using. We laugh about it now, but at the time, it was a serious flaw that I was taking advantage of to save time and money rewriting releases (but it was not so good for the integrity of PRWeb).
I then wrote an ebook and web site to share my understanding of the company's technology and how to create optimized online PR. 6 months later the company asked me to join their board (I declined a job offer, which was not one of my smartest moves... but an entrepreneur is an entrepreneur!). My experience in building and selling companies was the initial draw, as well as truly using the PRWeb platform to the limit. What they have is truly special and unique in the web space, and totally unique in the PR space.
I'm not familiar with the phrase "top NY Times bestseller marketer". What does this mean?
ME: This means that either of these folks can take a potentially good book and ensure that it makes the NY Times Bestseller list. They do it through creative marketing and understanding how the listings work, and then working the PR (on and offline) the channels (bookstores) and the relationships (credible testimonials for your book), as well as other techniques.
There are fixed factors that are at work in regards to who makes the list. If you approach those factors systematically, you will be successful in getting visibility on The List(s) that matter to your readership.
Keep in mind that the NY Times list does not require a ton of books to be sold. A small vanity publishing run of your work is more than enough, if you get sales in the right areas, and get them at the right time.
By "picked up in traditional press" do you mean "someone at a newspaper does an article on you"?
ME: Yes. Any time traditional media (newspaper, periodical, TV, radio) does a review. If you read my blog on
PR Secrets, you'll see some of the maxims me and my team live by in terms of PR, events and such.
Keep in mind: traditional media pickups are great. They provide nice filler and third-party credibility for you. But if you guage the traffic and results you receive from them, most of the time they create a spike, with a rapid falling-off of results.
My clients are not in the game for ego satisfaction. We focus them on long term climbing sales in the markets they best address. If we lived from event to event, we'd all burn-out within a few months, and we'd be backwards in the checkbook.
Go for long-term sustainable results, and layer these results to gain the kinds of sales and media momentum you're looking for (unless you are going for that "invisibility" position, in which case, hide!...;-).
Do you happen to have any statistics, say, for how useful this company's services are for self-pubbed authors who are trying to sell their books? ME: I have lots of statistics, and you can
download a PDF of some case studies I did on a few of our RichContent clients. We have more coming, and you can visit my PRSecrets site for more updates (check out the recent $1.1 billion waterpark press, and the client's response).
My client's range from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to my own software firm, a pool fence manufacturer to a niche sporting goods manufacturer. We've done it all in terms of promotion in the last 20 years.
As for book promotion: Yes, it's a great tool to get online visibility and results. If you take a portion of each chapter of your book, turn it into a press release, focus on a top keyword in your category (a keyword is a word or phrase people use to find your type of book on Google or Yahoo), and make sure you have good Keyword Density (go here to check these elements for free:
WordTracker. And to see what people are paying for specific keywords, go here:
Yahoo PPC Costs), you will eventually dominate your market.
Let me know if you find any of this useful. And I'll get with the book marketing guys and do some interviews and case studies. As soon as they're ready, I'll post them here for you and the other Watercooler folks.
Warm regards,
ME