Once you have an award or some form of “recognition” to promote, either about your book or your service/product/company, you should distribute a press release electronically through the Internet. Not only do distributed press releases that contain links back to your author or company website often appear high in organic search results in their own right, but they also help with optimizing your author or company website, too.
There are a number of ways to distribute press releases, ranging in cost from $0 -$800 or more. As with everything, you get what you pay for. The free press release distribution services are appealing for self-published authors on a budget because they increase the exposure of your book, although not to the extent of a paid-for service like prweb.com.
The free press release services may also be appealing for your company PR distribution needs, although you may find yourself shying away from the free services due to an extreme case of Adsensiphobia (TM).
Adsensiphobia is experienced by marketing people when they are faced with the dilemma of directing potential customers to a website on which some of their competitors may be advertising (either via banner ads or contextual text ads in a Google AdSense box). Free PR distribution services are notorious for this, as are MySpace, YouTube, and many other “Web 2.0” websites. I fear a day will come when Twitter decides it needs to monetize its traffic via AdSense, as well.
Ultimately, however, altering your marketing initiatives due to adsensiphobia is self-defeating and, in the long run, pointless. Thanks to XML, even distributing your press release through paid distribution services like PRWeb doesn’t protect you, since some AdSense-specific websites exist solely to pick-up the XML feed from PRWeb AND display contextual AdSense links (which probably include links to your competitors). If your book or company has proven to be profitable for AdSense advertisers, there is no getting around it; and by refraining from distributing to every possible outlet solely because of adsensiphobia, you are really only shooting yourself in the foot.
If you are marketing a company and experiencing adsensiphobia, ask yourself this… is it realistic to believe that your potential customers have never heard of your competitors? People don’t drink Perrier because they are unaware of tap water. They drink Perrier because Perrier has established its value to its customers.
President of Outskirts Press 