How A Single Press Release Skyrocketed My Website Traffic

Many of you may have heard of website promotion using press releases, but unfortunately this topic is still totally underestimated. If you are one of the persons that have heard of it but never really used it, then you might start knocking your head on the table after you've read my story...

I built a health related website about a year ago which basically consisted of product reviews. Putting the site together took me quite a while as I set myself the goal to produce only high quality content. There are simply too many sites out there that only have scraped content from various sources on the internet that can be found everywhere. I wanted to give my visitors something special, something for what it would be worth to visit my site and of course come back in the future. It took me most of the time to write the reviews as I actually tried all of the products.

When my website finally went online, I wanted nothing more but the world to see my work and to get the product sales going. There were different options available for site promotion including articles, link exchanges and directory submissions. And let's not forget the press releases! In former times I put a lot of effort in writing articles because they always provided me with long term traffic and lots of backlinks that helped my sites to get ranked very high in the various search engines. Therefore I started to write some articles but was too tired because of the work that I did during the past weeks and decided to take the weekend off and visit some friends.

But one thing I did before I left was to write a press release. It was the first time that I wrote one and therefore I wasn't quite sure how to structure it and what to write. I spent a few minutes on browsing through some press releases at prweb.com to get an idea of how they look like. OK, time was ticking away and I wanted to leave soon. So I started to write my first press release ever about my new cool website that contains original health product reviews from someone who actually bought and used the products. It didn't take me too long until it was finally ready to be published.

At first I wanted to use the free press release publishing service at PRWeb, but then decided to pay some money for an extended service which guaranteed me same-day distribution. I hesitated a little bit because of the cost of $119 which I could have easily invested in some weekend activity, but as I was already too late I whipped out my credit card and did it. Everything went fine and there I was on the road for my weekend trip.

I came back late at Sunday night and didn't want to turn on my computer at first. But I was just too curious to see if the press release resulted in some visitors to my website and even product purchases through my affiliate links. I logged into my website control panel and clicked on the stats icon. Let me tell you that I almost fell off my chair when I saw that I had received hundreds of visitors within the first few hours that my press release was distributed. This resulted in a few thousand visitors for only the weekend time-frame. I was shocked!

Can you imagine that I almost bursted because I couldn't wait to see if those visitors had produced any sales? I must have had a typo in my Clickbank password three or four times, but then I finally saw the results. Believe it or not, but the hard work resulted in cold hard cash. The Clickbank statistics showed me 2 sales on Friday night, almost 20 sales on Saturday and another 15 on Sunday which summed up to a total $1065. Now that's a nice hourly rate.

The next few days my traffic dropped a little bit but still produced lots of sales. I even got contacted by some publishers that wanted to print my press release in a magazine and newspaper. As my press release containing the link to my website was featured on some high pagerank websites, I had the search engine spiders knocking at my door in less than 24 hours. The high traffic from the press release declined during the days, but as I got ranked very high in the search engines for some great keywords the search engine traffic started to grow very fast. It's easy to tell that I fell in love with press releases at first sight!

Today I use press releases as one of my main strategies for driving lots of traffic and targeted visitors to my websites and for getting indexed in the search engines and being ranked in no time. One thing that I changed was the distribution method. I didn't want to pay $119 for every press release and therefore I decided to submit the releases by hand. They would usually not get picked up in 24 hours, but the saved money is worth the few days wait. For my press releases I'm using a very powerful and comfortable software which enables me to do the submission in no time. I'm even able to go on vacation and schedule the press releases so that the sales keep coming in while I relax at the beach. That's the way life is meant to be!