There are three big things that could be holding you back.

Your Content is Forgettable

Is your site unique and/or better than other sites in the same niche?  If not, you’ll always be swimming upstream — trying to get people to visit your site when there’s really no reason for them to.  It’s a loser’s game (unless you’re just a really strong swimmer with a stubborn streak).

Get a few people who are familiar with your niche to give you an honest opinion.  If your content just isn’t as good as it needs to be, either fix that or do something else that you can be great at.

You’re Ugly on the Outside

Ok, your content is great.  Now what?  Your site has to look good too.  The Craigslists of the world aside, you’re crippling yourself unnecessarily if your site isn’t easy on the eyes and easy to use.  Most people won’t hang around to see your inner beauty — your outer appearance has to match or they’ll just click away.  Good design can have a stunning ROI.

You’re the Great Unknown

If you’re creating great content — and looking good doing it — then your problem is that no one knows about you.  It’s time to start working hard on generating traffic to your website.  If you’ve truly taken care of the first two things, it shouldn’t take long to get that snowball rolling.

Be careful, though: Lots of people think they have a great site that looks good, but they’re fooling themselves.  Compare Campus Squeeze with College Humor or Cracked.com, for instance.  Think they’re all equally good?  Sucker explains why they’re not.

Spend some time getting some honest opinions from your target audience to verify that you’re on the right track — or to discover what you need to do to get there.

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In an effort to promote the official launch of WikiCity, we decided to spend $680 that we really didn’t have to publish a “US1″ press release (the granddaddy of them all — PRNewswire’s most expansive U.S. distribution offering) entitled “WikiCity Launches a Hyper-Local City Wiki for Every City.” Simply put, we decided to invest in a press release because we wanted more traffic. As part of the decision process, we considered a number of factors, researched best practices, and did everything we could to determine what kind or results to expect. Despite our best efforts and growing frustration, none of the dozens of experts or reputable press release agencies we met would dare guestimate what kind of results we might experience. And therefore, it is this same frustration that has motivated me to share our press release results here with you so that if you are considering investing in a press release, you can draw upon our experiences so that you won’t have to make the decision in the dark. I’ve recapped our results below, but in summary, traffic results did not meet expectations, and the key learning was — as with many things in life — size doesn’t matter; it’s how you use it that counts.

Traffic Results

Not much incremental traffic, but lots of much-needed links. Unfortunately, not a single phone call or even an email inquiry from a journalist. Pathetic.

• Incremental # of unique visitors on day of release: 150
• Incremental # of unique visitors on day after release: 50
• # of links / web publications: 180
• # of phone calls from journalists: 0
• # of email inquiries from journalists: 0

Key Learnings

A variety of lessons, ranked in order of importance:

• Size doesn’t matter; it’s how you use it that counts. Even if your initial results sucked as bad as ours, recognize that a press release is a single action. It’s what you do around them that matters. Contact targeted journalists both in advance and after your press release is published, asking them if they will help share your story. Use the release as an excuse to tell everyone you know… Link the release to your blog, website, Facebook fan page, LinkedIn profile, etc.
• Credibility: Press releases, especially when distributed through reputable agencies, can get your release published on reputable sites such as Forbes or Yahoo Finance, which search engines seem to appreciate. Beyond that, these links have already helped to lend us credibility with our partners and users, while at the same time, making it much easier to share our story with selected journalists.
• Links from web publications: You get lots of them. (Quick math: $3.78/link)
• Time your distribution wisely: Avoid distributing on Mondays, Fridays, when the stock market opens/closes, or when pop icons die.
• Choose distribution wisely: We chose PRNewswire’s “US1″ distribution because it was the only way we could reach small-town newspapers within the thousands of small communities we serve. However, based on the lack of inquiries from journalists, we will need to instead find other means to reach this audience. If we were to do it all over again, we would probably select an on-line only distribution.
• Choose your press release agency wisely: Sure, each agency has a little something different to offer, but for the most part, as long as you’re distributing through the Associated Press, press release distribution is a commodity. Note: There are a lot of “free” press release services out there, and I’ll be the first to admit that they too can be used effectively to help boost credibility, but you likely won’t reach the more reputable news agencies because the freebies are generally considered “spammy”, and therefore, you won’t enjoy nearly as many back-links. Stick with PRNewswire, PRWeb, Marketwire, or Warren Buffett’s Business Wire and you should fare well. Hope this helps, and best of luck!

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Pat and I will continue our conversation in the comments, but please add your own questions and your own experiences with using press releases as well!

Virtually all the sites I’ve worked with have been U.S. sites that marketed nationwide, but I’ve worked with a handful who were only interested in marketing locally.  Here’s what I’ve learned with those clients.  Your mileage may vary, but I think at least some of it will be useful.  I’d love to hear any other suggestions (and corrections) you guys might have as, again, I’m not an expert here.

Not a Magic Potion

I talk to a lot of people who think the Internet is the answer to all their problems.  It’s not.  In fact, it may cost you way more than it could ever pay you back.  When you’re marketing locally, there are often way more effective ways to spend your time and money — especially if you’ve never done any Internet marketing before.  Don’t believe the hype.

Take Care of the Basics

That said, there’s no reason not to do some basic work to give yourself a decent presence online.

Have a Great Design

This is absolutely essential.  People will judge the excellence of your business by what your website looks like.  That’s probably not an accurate indicator even 50% of the time, but it’s what people do.  A great design can be had at 99designs for less than $1,000, so you have no excuse.

Submit to Local Business Directories

Go to Google and search for Atlanta dog sitters or any other local search you can think of.  Chances are, the first thing in the search results is Google’s “local business results.”  You want to be in that list and any other lists like it.  Three places you need to be sure to submit your business to:

• Google’s Local Business Center
• Bing’s Local Listing Center
• Yahoo! Local

Or you could just use GetListed.org.

Basic SEO

Be sure your site follows basic SEO principles.  It’s not rocket science.  You might not see much traffic from search engines, but you’re sure to see none if you don’t at least take care of the easy stuff.

Network… Network… Network…

I’m not talking about offline, though that’s a great strategy too.  I’m talking about online networking.

Blogs

Be a regular, quality commenter on blogs that a) are written by people in your geographic area or b) are about topics related to your business.  Use your real name and don’t comment just for the link.  Genuinely add something to the conversation.

Forums

Same thing here: find and participate in forums that are local and forums that are about your topic.  The advantage of forums over blogs is that you can automatically include a signature on each or your posts that tells who you are and advertises your business a little bit.

Here again, though, you have to genuinely add to the conversation.  Being a valuable member of the community is why you’re there. The publicity for your business is just a side effect of how well you do that.

Twitter

Join Twitter and start posting quality stuff.  Don’t post commercial stuff, and don’t reply to others with a sales pitch.  That will do far more harm than good.

Once you’ve been on for a week or two and have some quality stuff, start following people in your area.  You can find them using Twitter’s advanced search.

And one more time for good measure: add value to the conversation.  You’re not there to market your business.

Get Noticed

Everything up until now has allowed you to interact with people who were already looking for your business (or one like it) or who already had something in common with you.  If you limit yourself to only those people, though, you’re missing a huge segment of the population.

Be Newsworthy

What can you do that is newsworthy?  Newsworthy things get into the news (thus the name).  People read the news and find out about your business.  Pick up your local paper and see who’s in there and why they’re in there.

Be An Expert

Sites like Examiner.com give you a forum to be a local expert on a very wide range of topics.  Take advantage of that.

Or, better yet, write Examiner-worthy content on your own site.  That way you own the content and you get all the publicity (and links).  Select a topic from their application form and take a look at the questions they ask in order to get a feel for what kind of content really draws readers — then get writing!

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Finally, take a look at PPC advertising — particularly with AdWords (because of the much greater reach and much better tools).  For the people who are searching for what you’re offering, you can be front and center and control your costs down to the penny.  Start slow, though.  You can spend a lot of money in a very short amount of time if you’re not careful.  Once you get your legs under you, though, PPC is an incredible tool.

For me it was Aaron; for you it might be someone else.  For all of us, though, there are times when we just need something to put our business on a brand new growth curve.  So what better gift could I give you than a prize package that gives you that?

I’m calling it The $X,000 Business Boost, because I’ve only just begin pulling together the prizes and I don’t know yet just how valuable it’s going to end up being.  Check out who’s signed up already, though:

• Jeremy from Wildfire Marketing (the guys who do the 0% website financing) is providing a brand new custom web design.
• Aaron has donated a free subscription to his awesome SEO training — which is way more than just SEO plus a powerful forum.
• ShoeMoney has followed suit with a free subscription to ShoeMoney tools — an incredible array of applications to give your business an inside edge plus another powerful forum.
• Neil Patel is in with a Pro subscription to Crazy Egg — one of the easiest ways to see huge improvements both in how efficient your site is for users and also in how well it converts.
• The great guys at BuzzStream have donated a Pro subscription to their awesome buzz-building tools that will be released to the public very shortly.

Details on how to enter will follow soon, but what I’m looking for right now is more prizes.  Do you have a nice prize that would be a great fit for this contest (or know someone who does)?  Is there something you think would help you get over the hump, but you just can’t afford it?  Let me know!

And please help me spread the word!  Blog it and tweet it and mention it in forums.  The more people who know about it, the bigger the prize pack will be!

Update (4/22 9:01): Added Crazy Egg to the list of prizes.  Thanks, Neil!

Update (4/22 1:51): Added BuzzStream to the list of prizes.  Getting close to $10,000 in prizes!

Last week, Darren and Rand had a very similar discussion at the SMX conference in Sydney and discussed why people were now tweeting far more often than they were blogging.  Are we more interested in building up our own image, and linking to others takes away from that?  Are there just not as many people blogging now as there were a few years ago?  Or is it simply that links we would have blogged a few years ago simply work better as tweets now?

It’s an interesting discussion made immeasurably more interesting to me over the past few weeks as I’ve gotten to see a real-life example.

Tweets vs. Links – Some Real World Stats

On March 18 I published “How to Sell a Website for $1M,” and links to it instantly began to be passed along — both on Twitter and on other sites.  The exposure has been relatively equal on both, so it has been fascinating to see the difference in results.

Here’s a graph of the traffic from each source over the first 19 days:

(The Twitter traffic includes all traffic from twitter.com and friendfeed.com, as well as traffic marked “direct” over and above the average before March 18.)

In the first 19 days, Twitter sent 23% more traffic than the Links did.  However, you’ll notice that the Links traffic never goes to 0 like the Twitter traffic does, so the Links are still sending traffic — enough so that they’ll eventually surpass the Twitter traffic.

Why Links Win

And that’s why Links win: they send more traffic, in a couple of different ways.

Links are permanent.  That means that on large sites like SEO Book, they’ll send some level of traffic for months, if not years.  They don’t disappear into the ether like tweets do.

Links are also the ultimate deciding factor in what pages rank well in Google.  More links means higher rankings, and higher rankings means more traffic.

Thus, even though you may get tweeted very widely, links will always send more traffic in the long run — both from people clicking through and from the rankings boost they give your entire site.

That’s not to say that tweets aren’t fantastic — they definitely are — just that links are that much more fantastic.

Share the Love

What this means is that although link love has always been important, it’s now even more important than it has ever been.  If you want to do something really nice for someone, tweet their link.  If you want to go even further, though, link it to it from somewhere permanent.

And what you’ll find over time is that the people you link to will be more likely to link back to you.  It’s  human nature.  I go out of my way to link to people who have been good to me, and I know others do the same.

It’s a good deed that often comes back around.

Because of that unconventional nature, most of us are sorely lacking in perspective.  If remember any history we learned in school, very little of it is business history or economic history — and what is business or economic probably isn’t history in any detail.  We have vague images of the rises and falls of economies and businesses over the decades and vague images of people’s approach to money during that time, but none so clear as to be any sort of contribution to a foundation for our own success.

The more I learn, though, the more I realize what a significant handicap that is.  Success is largely about taking advantage of opportunities, and the more we know, the more opportunities we see.  Without perspective, though, we often see things as opportunities that clearly aren’t.  We draw conclusions that anyone with any knowledge of history would know are shaky at best, and that severely cripples our ability to be successful.

Well Amazon has a phenomenal deal right now on a book that is easily the best business book that I’ve read in several years — a book that has given me more perspective in just a few chapters than have all the things I’ve read in at least the past year.

Joe Nocera’s Good Guys and Bad Guys: Behind the Scenes with the Saints and Scoundrels of American Business is available in hardcover for just $6.99.  I thought that surely had to be a mistake, but I ordered it and it’s really the original hardback.

Here’s a description of the book:

A fascinating collection of profiles by one of America’s leading business journalists.

For three decades, in major publications such as Texas Monthly, Esquire, Fortune, and now The New York Times, Joe Nocera has reported on the people who dominate the business world, for better or worse. Everyone from Warren Buffett to T. Boone Pickens to George Steinbrenner to Ken Lay has fallen under his microscope.

Now, in this collection of his best work, he explores how we define good guys and bad guys in business and concludes that things are often not what they seem.

It turns out that there are surprisingly good qualities in classic villains like junk bond king Michael Milken and notorious stock analyst Henry Blodget. And some business celebrities who are widely admired, such as Steve Jobs, are not quite the good guys they appear to be on the surface.

Good Guys and Bad Guys also offers a fresh perspective on some of today’s biggest controversies, such as global warming, Apple’s iPhone, CEO compensation, the tobacco industry, short sellers, and much more.

If you’re building a real business online, you’ll never find a $7 investment that will give you a greater return.

Wow, was I wrong.

I can’t believe all the information that is available at a glance.  Every time you hit a site, an amazing array of competitive intelligence is displayed within easy reach.  So many things that you just had to know how to do before Aaron now takes care of for you — and there are many tools it reveals that I bet you didn’t know even existed.

And don’t be misled by the “SEO” label.  This is way more than just an SEO toolbar.  If you’re into website buying and selling, for instance, having all your in-depth analysis tools in one place would probably save you a ton of time.

Take a look and let me know if you like it as much as I do.