Right now, I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that if your phone is not ringing, your fax machine is not buzzing and the only people coming through your door are you and your staff then you are probably not generating much new business. I think we can all agree that those actions are very important to the success of your business. When you use the Internet as a marketing tool, the number of visitors looking at your website is analogous to the number of people calling your office or walking through your door for information. If no one visits your site, you won’t generate new leads from this advertising source and eventually you will give up on using the Internet as a marketing tool and in the process give up what could possibly be one of your top lead generation sources.

Now, I have a confession to make. Getting traffic to your website is NOT hard!

I am very confident that I could take any website you throw at me – even if it is 1 day old – and flood it with traffic.

The caveat is that the traffic would not be TARGETED Traffic and would probably cost a ton of money. By targeted traffic, I mean visitors that are interested in what you are offering and that you can actually service. For example, let’s say you are a Loan Officer in Ohio and you are licensed to do business only in Ohio. You receive call from a company that says they can setup an advertising campaign for you that they guarantee will send you thousands of leads from people interested in obtaining a home loan and they have tons of proof that their campaign works. Plus, the price is 10% of what you normally pay per lead. Sounds like an amazing deal right? Then they go on to say that these people are all Texas residents looking for homes in Texas! Now assuming you are not in the business of brokering leads to other people, the great deal doesn’t seem so great because you would be paying for leads that you can’t service.

On the Internet, you can easily find companies that are willing to sell you 10,000 visitors for $20 or less. I beg you to understand that if you choose to test these traffic sources, the visitors will be very untargeted and will most likely have been tricked to visiting your site. Which means the odds of you making money even if you buy a million visitors is very slim. I am not saying that you shouldn’t test some of these sources (we do it all the time) just make sure you go in assuming the traffic will be untargeted and make certain you can afford to lose the money you are using for the test.

Over the next few articles, I will cover often overlooked and rarely used low cost strategies you can use to drive targeted traffic to your website. I will be going into a little more detail on each strategy because I really want to make sure you understand why you should implement the strategy, how to implement the strategy and resources we use to put them into practice.

Two major traffic generation strategies that I will not discuss in this article series are Pay Per Click Traffic and Search Engine Traffic. Although these two strategies can bring in a lot of highly targeted visitors to your site, they are not only very difficult to master in a competitive market such as the financial sector, they also rarely have a low startup cost.

Low Cost Traffic Generation Strategy #1 – Online Press Releases

It’s tempting to think that press releases are “old media” and have no part to play in the digital world. This myth can be used to your advantage. This fact is that we have seen press releases generate significant spikes in site traffic, and generate hundreds or even thousands of links back to your site from other sources (these are called back links and are considered very important for free rankings on the top search engines – I consider “back links” a bonus of using press releases as a marketing strategy)

Benefits of Online Press Releases…

Statistics show that almost 30 million people in the U.S.A use Google News and Yahoo News each month to find the latest information about a wide range of topics that interest them. When they conduct a news search, they often find relevant press releases along with articles from thousands of news sources. In fact according to Neilsen / NetRatings, the unique audiences of Yahoo News and Google News now rival the online audiences of other current events and global news destinations such as CNN and BBC News.

Other benefits include:

• Low cost
• Always a demand for news releases
• Can generate positive publicity in addition to traffic
• Effective way to build incoming links to your site
• Can get your site noticed quickly by the major search engines

What Do You Include In Your Press Release?

A press release should technically be a newsworthy story about your business. Although a press release should never be written as a blatant advertisement, you can still sell your services while still making the release appear newsworthy. A well-written release can not only dramatically increase your leads but also greatly enhance the image of your business.

Press Releases do follow a specific format so it is important that you understand the major components. I will briefly list them below and for more information you can just go to your favorite search engine and type in: “writing press releases” or “components of press releases” and you should be able to find all the information you need as well as possible sources for getting your press release created for you. You can also just search on Google News and view press releases they have posted on their site.

Major Sections of a Press Release

• Date You Wish Release To Be Released
• Your Contact Information
• An Attention & Targeted Headline
• A Summary/Description Of Your Release
• The Body Of Your Release
• An About Us or Resource Section

You should try to use a mixture of timely and evergreen topics in your press releases. For example, you could create a release that could be used when rates go down and a release for when rates go up. Here are a few example headlines to get you thinking about possible press release topics…

Possible Headlines For Timely Press Releases

• Mortgage Rates Fell by [X Amount] Last Week But [Your City] Mortgage Broker Says ‘Watch Out!’ You Still Have to Shop for the Best Available Loan
• August 14 is National Financial Awareness Day Are You Among the Thousands of [Your City or State] Residents Stuck With a Bad Mortgage?

Possible Headlines For Evergreen Press Releases

• [Your City], [Your State] based Mortgage Broker [Your Name] reveals 3 things you should watch out for when shopping for home-finance products on the Internet.
• Warning…Local [Your City], [Your State] Mortgage Broker Finally Reveals The Insider Secrets Other Mortgage Brokers Don’t Want Consumers To Know About Obtaining A Mortgage

As you can see from the examples above, I normally try to make sure the press releases are targeted for at least the city or state you are serving. If you want to find other reasons to send timely releases, just type in “odd holidays” or “obscure holidays” in your favorite search engine and you will find that there are daily or monthly observance for just about anything you can think of. So, you never have an excuse for not sending out a press release.

Where Do You Submit Your Press Release?

There are many options you can choose from for submitting your press release online. I have tried many and have found 3 that I work best for us so far. My team and I are currently testing several others but at this point, here are the top picks:

1. Sbwire.com – Sbwire is a smaller company but very Cost Effective. At the time of this writing, you can order 1 release for $19.95 or buy credits to decrease your cost. Most of the options you will need are included in the price such as adding images, files and related links. We have never had a press release denied by SBWire and find that Google News picks up their releases very quickly.
2. PrWeb.com and PRWebDirect.com – Very well-known company that distributes to many search engines and as a bonus Media Professionals go there for research. A press release submission will probably average around $80-$200 depending on the options you select.
3. PrLeap.com – Although not as popular with Media Professionals as PRWeb, PrLeap is a little cheaper than PRWeb and still distributes to many search engines. A typical press release submission will normally range between $30 and $60.

There are also several press release distribution sites where you can actually submit your release for free. This may sound like a good idea but we find that the paid submissions get much more exposure and also allow an active link back to your site whereas the free releases normally do not allow an active link to your site.

How Often Should You Submit

Press release submissions should become a monthly marketing strategy for your business. An ongoing press release effort can create a steady stream of targeted visitors to your site, increased publicity which we have seen lead to interviews and news coverage. Plus, a bonus is that you will receive a boost of incoming links to your site, which in turn can increase your long term natural (free) search listings.

At Mortgage Web Success, we believe in this strategy so much that we even had stock press release templates created that even populate our member’s contact information within the release, so our members can just copy and paste the press release content and submit it to a press release distribution site. We even now offer a service to our members where we will submit the press release for you so all you have to do is select the press release you want, make slight modifications if needed and click “submit”.

Bonus Strategy – Regurgitate Your Marketing Materials

Your press releases should always be added to your website as separate pages. Also, press releases can normally be converted articles and published online or converted to emails and sent out to your prospect list. A mistake most originators make is NOT reusing marketing materials.

KEY POINTS: Press Release submissions should be added to your overall marketing strategy because they not only create a direct influx of traffic to you site, they can also increase your publicity, leading to interviews and news coverage as well as boost the incoming links to your website, which in turn can lead to increased rankings in the major search engines.

Each month, I will be sharing with you the “secrets” to having an online presence that can actually generate business for you. Each and every month, I will give you another secret tip, strategy or resource and show you exactly how to implement it to grow your business. Next month, I will talk about another overlooked low cost strategy you can use to drive targeted traffic to your website!