What if getting traffic from Google was easy, fast, and free? Often there is so much focus on getting your site to rank on Google Web searches that another route to more potential customers is often overlooked – Google News.
Before we talk about how to get your business’s story onto Google news, we have to talk about why. It is clear, of course, that you want your business’s story to be in the news.
But why google news in particular?
Well, first, if your business has been trying to increase its exposure in organic Google web searches or even Google shopping, a few other simple steps can increase how much publicity you will receive, in areas where your competitors cannot easily follow you.
Since you’ve already written articles, you may also benefit from more than one of them. You can create once, and benefit in a number of ways.
Google News is a reliable, repeatable source of visitors, and they’ll usually arrive sooner, while you wait for things like Google’s organic search results to kick in.
Second, reading the news is one of the main reasons why people log onto the internet every day. 85% of Americans over 18 use the web, according to Pew Internet Research. 78% of the web’s users have arrived here to read the news.
We used to read newspapers. We now scan news websites, headlines we find on Twitter or Facebook, and subscribe by email to industry news.
Since the main reason the majority of people online are using a search engine like Google, you may be tempted to just target Google’s organic search and be done with it.
However, consider this: if you can find a place to get more of the customer’s eye on your message – usually much faster than your desired keyword rankings – won’t the additional sales and leads be worth your while?
How Does Your Business Story End Up in Google News Results?
There are three great methods. The first method, is to have a press release received to one of the 50,000 publishers who share the 6 billion monthly clicks that Google News provides specifically for them. (That doesn’t include additional organic search traffic.)
For a small fee, there are many press release distribution services that will do this for you, for anywhere from $ 25 to $ 200 each time. You can also often find smaller publications that accept free or low-cost press releases.
If you want to do this every day, it can add up to a fair amount of money. However, it’s not a bad technique to test the market with and repeat, say, once a week.
There is an easier and faster way.
My favorite way to get published on google news is for my articles to be accepted by publications that are already on Google News. They are commonly referred to as Google news publishers.
You don’t have to be a marketing genius to understand the benefits of being published in a reputable publication with a byline pointing back to your site, versus the amount of money you have to spend on advertising to get the same level of exposure.
It’s a little more difficult to get into Google News this way as you may need to be approved by the editorial staff for publication. Such publications may request exclusive rights to your original article or content. If you’re not a writer, or don’t hire someone full-time to write original content, that can be a hurdle.
Reception is also not guaranteed. You can see this as a disadvantage, or embrace the fact that it will make it harder for competitors to imitate your marketing and steal your thunder.
You may be thinking “but who wants to read stories about my timeshare company or a pet furniture manufacturer.”
And you’d be right – they weren’t. It is very important for this method for you to find out what you want to read on your site, and write for them in the area related to your product or service.
This can work for any industry – the Google News publisher site focuses on everything from business travel to pet health. And if your niche is so small that you can’t nail it enough, there are plenty of publications published about your local area. To fix this, you will only be localizing your story – remember, these articles can still appear in web searches or news stories with your keywords.
Failing that, there is a third method.
This can take a lot of trial and error and cost a fair amount of money. But there’s a third way to Google News that, if you’re successful, can give Anand benefits for many years to come. Just create your own news site, and receive it to Google News.
Brand journalism is a growing trend. Why not get ahead of the trend and become not making news, but becoming the media itself?