Bob Baker's Indie Music Promotion Blog

News, notes and ideas on music marketing, self-promotion, artist empowerment and more

October 05, 2006

Win a Free Ride On the New 'Billboard Publicity Wire'

This just in ... Today Billboard and Vocus announced plans to launch a major music and entertainment online press release service called "Billboard Publicity Wire." Billboard, of course, is the company that publishes the music charts, the trade magazine, and more. Vocus is an online communications company that recently acquired PRWeb, a popular site that pioneered search engine optimized (SEO) and social media press release distribution.

What does that mean?

Combined with Billboard's brand and Vocus's technology, the new service will help everyone from indie artists to major labels reach a wider audience on the Net when they post their press releases.

Here's the cool part: The service will be very affordable -- even for the most budget-minded acts -- with pricing plans ranging from roughly $80 to $200.

But here's the coolest part of all ...

I will be giving away 20 free press release submission coupons for the new Billboard Publicity Wire service. Look below for details on how to enter to win. But first, a little more about it:

When you post a press release through the new Billboard service, it will be indexed by major search engines and published on many news and entertainment sites, including Yahoo! News, Billboard.biz, eMediaWire and PRWeb. It will also be delivered through more than 20,000 PRWeb RSS feeds that reach millions of consumers and thousands of journalists daily.

Press releases will also be search engine optimized and enabled with such features as blog trackbacks and Technorati tagging. Each release can be categorized geographically and tagged with up to ten subjects and genres. Customers can elect to receive distribution reports that show how many times their releases were accessed, downloaded and printed; the most popular search terms used to find their releases; and a geographic breakdown of readers.

"Okay, enough with the hype, Bob. How can I enter to win?"

One more important thing: The Billboard service will officially launch on October 24. The press release coupons I'm giving away to 20 lucky winners must be used and posted sometime between October 16 and October 26. So if you won't have a press release ready to send during these dates, please don't enter. I only want people who will use them to win.

Here's what you need to do to enter:

By email, send me a short headline and subhead of the press release you plan to distribute using the Billboard Publicity Wire. That's all I need. So make them mouth-wateringly good! I'll select the 20 best headline/subhead combos and those smart people will get a free ride on the new service -- at the premium Double Platinum plan level.

For info on what a good headline is, read this recent blog post and this older article for insight into what I'm looking for.

  • Email your entries to MrBuzzFactor AT Gmail.com (please replace the AT with @)

  • Use the subject line "Billboard PR Entry"

  • Deadline to enter is Thursday, Oct. 12.

Good luck. And may the best PR headlines win!

-Bob

posted by Bob Baker @ 5:19 PM   1 comments

1 Comments:

At Oct 18, 2006 11:46:00 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Gulp. I think the e-mail I received said the deadline was Friday the 13th -- which is the day we entered. Hope we made it!

Either way, I'm excited to see the winning headlines. We stand to learn a ton from this real-life case study!

 

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