Great write up here outlining why press releases as we know them should die a slow death.

Press releases are nearly useless. They typically start with a tremendous amount of top-spin, they contain pat-on-the-back phrases and meaningless quotes. Often they will contain quotes from C-level executives praising their customer focus. They often contain praise from analysts, (who are almost always paid or have a customer relationship.) And so on…

Press releases are created by committees, edited by lawyers, and then sent out at great expense through Businesswire or PRnewswire to reach the digital and physical trash bins of tens of thousands of journalists.

This madness has to end. It is wasted time and effort by hundreds of thousands of professionals.

Agreed.

A good press release tells a story. Plain and simple. If I’m a journalist, or a blogger, whatever, I want the release to give me the angle… to give me the story. Let’s face it, and I know this will make some journalists angry, but many of them are lazy and they simply want the story hand fed to them, with accompanying facts and figures.

A good release does that. It’s not about “launching a new company” or “we just passed 1 million sales”. Nobody cares about that stuff.

Instead, what does your new company do that solves a problem for a reader? What does it really mean to the industry that you’re in that you just passed 1 million in sales?

Online public relations is changing. I fully expect to see a more robust way to get your news releases into the hands and minds of the people who want it.

The question is… what exactly is that format going to be? If I had my choice, a release would look like this.

Headline

Video - No longer than 2-minute clip explaining press release

Summary paragraph

Quotes from executives/owners, etc…

Fact and figures and sources

Story ideas

Contact information

In that example, a journalist could then take all the pieces they needed and formulate a story from the pieces parts.

More here, and here.

This is a neat story. The Flip video camera, you know, the one I keep pimping out which you can buy at BuytheFlip.com.

They’re going to donate cameras to charity. One million of them to be exact.

Pure Digital Technologies Launches Five Year, One Million Flip Video Camcorder Giveaway To Benefit Non-Profit Organizations Worldwide

Hat tip to NewTeeVee.com.

Yesterday John Reese from Blogrush sent out a very long update letter to address a few things. You can read the entire email here in a text file, it’s too long to publish on my blog.

But I am going to publish a snippet of the email where they talk about cheaters.

And a quick word to any ‘cheats’ that might be reading this letter… it’s very possible that you may come up with something extremely creative that temporarily gets by us, but you should know something… IT’S NOT GOING TO BE WORTH YOUR TIME. And I’m not just talking about the tiny amount of traffic that you’ll receive before we shut you off.

You see, we have other plans in the works…

If you attempt to cheat or abuse our network in anyway, shape, or form, we will not hesitate to come after you. Our company is well funded and has plenty of resources. And we WILL use them to punish you to the fullest extent of the law (and civil court process). Oh, you think you can just hide behind some anonymous proxy IPs? Sorry, it’s not that easy. ANY reason you’d have to try and cheat the BlogRush network for traffic and any attempt you make to monetize that traffic will lead directly to your front door — whether it’s AdSense, any affiliate program in the world, any online pharmacy, porn site, casino… ANYTHING. We will follow the trail and it WILL eventually lead to you.

Our hard-working company provides the income for MANY families. As
the CEO of our company, I take this very seriously. I HAVE TO. People that attempt to abuse or cheat BlogRush are affecting the livelihood of all my employees and their families. And I will do everything in my power to protect them — it’s MY DUTY.

So for all you cheaters that joined BlogRush and had your fun trying to siphon off some traffic, hopefully it was fun. And I’ll go ahead and make this statement right now… IF you were one of the people that has been cheating our network I’m going to give you ONE opportunity… quit now and we’ll pretend it never happened. I think that’s more than fair.

BUT… if you continue after this point, all bets are off. We WILL eventually discover what you’re doing, where you’re trying to send traffic, and we will prosecute you. I GUARANTEE IT. Sorry, but WE HAVE NO CHOICE NOW.

Don’t get me wrong. I applaud this idea of protecting your investment and I don’t want to see any cheaters beat the system either, for anyone. Hate cheaters. What I don’t get is why publish this email with these strong words?

Two things are happening here, you choose which is correct.

1. John Reese just pissed off the cheaters who will now work triple time to mess up his system. You don’t challenge hackers.

or

2. John is building what marketers call “social proof”. That’s an argument methodology you build to create credibility in your product/service. EVERY good marketer uses this. Testimonials, hate letters. The idea is, “hey, if others are talking about it and using it and trying to take it down, it must be working!”

Or maybe it’s both. I don’t know.

I know this. I think Blogrush just added gasoline to the forest fire.

Tony sent me a link to a cool search site called EveryZing.com. Love that name! Anyway, I did a search for my last name, as I always do on new search engines because I’m marketing vain, and some archived audio files came up I had forgotten about.

I did an interview with the guys from Entrepreneur magazine EBiz radio show about how to make money as a blogger. It’s in two parts, which you can listen to below. Enjoy.

How to monetize your blog part 1

How to monetize your blog part 2

Posted this update over on Affiliate Fit Club today.

Note: I never put my “affiliate” code in any blog post. I put the widget on my site, but never put my code in a blog post. John Chow is right, you have to write about it for it to truly work. To me, that is NOT doing absolutely nothing.

Where’s my flood of traffic for doing nothing as I mentioned above?

By the way, I’m #2 on Youtube when you search for Blogrush, with 132 views, which have actually sent me traffic… for doing something, go figure.

Anyway, here are my amazing stats for doing nothing.

I guess I must be making the common mistakes Blogrush users make. You know, I should start writing my headlines JUST for Blogrush. Great advice.

Is the jury still out? Really?

So while this may be very cool, I can’t see myself trying to draw with a mouse. Still… neato.

Via Techcrunch.

Go to minute 4:49. Pretty darn funny.

Today I’m 36. Yep, I’m on the back 9 of my 30’s. Last night I fell asleep on the couch at 10:30, and this morning I woke up in my bed at 9. Perhaps I needed the sleep to prepare for today.

On my birthday I am always struck by this line from an Indigo Girls song that goes… “Every 10 years or so I look back on my life, and have a few laughs.”

How true is that?

For me though, I tend to chunk my life experiences into 5’s. You know, 10-15, 15-20, 20-25, 25-30, and most recently 30-35. It’s just how I do it.

A good friend of mine once told me that the 30’s were all about ego. I think he’s right, although for me it was my 20’s. My 30’s have predominantly focused on my family and my career, which are completely intertwined.

It’s foolish, I think, to sit back and have a “plan” for your life. I do think though, that it’s prudent to set goals and to try and reach them, assuming you have learned one thing, and that is…

What do you want?

Fortunately for me I learned by the time I was 30 what I wanted in life. (Is it pretentious to say that?). I don’t want gobs of money. I don’t want a fancy car. I don’t want a high-profile career.

I want happiness. I want safety and security for my family. I want flexibility in my career.

I’ve spent all my working years preparing for the next 5 years. This is when I will make my mark. This is when I will develop a business that I can be proud of that will generate long-term income and stability for my family. This is my late 30’s.

What do I see for the 40’s? Best-case scenario? Having enough security to be able to work only on fun things.

At least now I can look back on this post in 5 years and see if I was right!

This whole Blogrush situation just fascinates me, and I’m sorry to keep blogging about it, but I LOVE good marketing and buzz, and John Reese and Blogrush deliver.

Case in point, what we’re seeing now is the sliding scale of backlash coming back about the product. Particularly, we’re seeing the guys who have had traffic exchanges for years come out of the woodwork saying stuff like “I did it already, and you just copied it, etc…” Check out this comment at Mashable from the guy who started Blogexplosion…

John

Your service is nothing revolutionary, new or even original for that matter …

I’m the original owner of BlogExplosion.com, the original traffic exchange for bloggers (which I ended up selling to LiveVideo.com some time ago)

Both BlogExplosion and Blogmad.net had text link exchanges (essentially what you do), where you can target by category etc.. But that was a couple of years ago.. You can talk up your technology to match content etc. but it’s mostly just that - talk

RELEVANT CONTENT, TARGETED - Bottom line this has been done before with exactly the same functionality (except we had a much larger userbase than you do)…

The point I’m trying to make is…

JOHN REESE MAY HAVE NOT CREATED SOMETHING TRULY ORIGINAL… BUT HE MARKETED IT AND POSITIONED IT BETTER!

This is going to sound crude, but here’s an example.

Two people could take a crap in a box and both try to sell it. But the guy who wraps it in the nicer package, the better marketer, is going to sell more boxes of crap.

Sorry dude who made Blogexplosion, and the other guys who are now feeling like they missed something. Guess what??

You did.

John Reese is a brilliant marketer. He positioned it perfectly. He got the sneezers in early to push it hard, and their minions followed suit. It was brilliant, and it worked, and even if it doesn’t last long term, he’s now sitting on probably a hundred thousand email addresses he can push income.com announcements and product to.

The summary…

Good marketing wins. I don’t care if your product is the same, or even better. The better marketing position will ALWAYS win short term. Now, personally, I refuse to market “crap in a box”. Not my style, even if I don’t get rich, I won’t do it. But you cannot argue my points above. John Reese did it again.

P.S. This does not mean you should focus on creating products that are not high-quality. In the long run, you will be able to create a long-term profitable business on the merits of a better product that solves problems… ALWAYS.