I was talking to a client yesterday about them building a blog an also promoting their business website. They had just paid a bunch of money to have some SEO consulting done and where now proud owners of a long report... which they found to be totally useless. How could they promote their site they asked.

One concept that they particularly liked was the idea of using press announcements. It is a tactic I use frequently for clients and highly effective and cheap.

For me there are two reasons to put out a press announcement. First is to gain media pick up and second to generate inbound links from high value sites.

In meeting the first objective my advice is either hire a PR firm to do this or build your own targeted media list and push your announcement via email directly to your list of editors and follow up with a phone call. That is the only way you will get picked up unless you use businesswire or PRnewswire at prohibitive cost if you are a small business.

Meeting the second objective is very cheap. Simply use a cheap or even free press release distribution service online like eworldnewswire. They push out your news release over the internet and post it on their website. Usually, the announcement will get picked up by 10-15 websites including Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. where it will sit for 3- 6 months. Wha does this do for you? Well, if you wrote the announcement with some nice back links to your site and keywords linked to pages on your site it gets you QUALITY backlinks at low cost!