I am working on a fairly new website (few months old). We are really starting to push the site next week and I wanted some advice. The site sells Rebuilt Engines. We are doing a giveaway where we give a member of the mailing list (going online later today/tomorrow when the terms are approved) a free rebuilt engine. We will then take the automotive message boards they submit with their registration and choose three of those and allow them to give away an engine to their members (3 months between each engine give away, to market it). I have a press release ready to go to prweb. However, how else do I get this out there? I will be posting to the automotive message boards and contacting forum owners, but does anyone have any advice to make this "viral" and have it spread itself.
Rebuild engines isn't the most linkbait worthy topic. Use services like payperpost.com and email loads of bloggers to ask them to link to you. Pay them if you have to. One good bit of linkbait would be a flash or ajaxed up tutorial about engines or some really good helpful content.
I'm sympathise with you Cyque. I too spend my days marketing totally boring and uninspiring products. You might like to think about widening your marketing to cars in general. A community who appreciate classic cars or similar. I don't know alot about cars or engines, but I would say that is one of those niche niches and you'll need to get "car types" engaged with you so that if they ever think about rebuilt engines, they think about you. Anyway - good luck.
William, That is pretty much what I am trying to do. I will be hitting some general automotive discussion groups as well as posting to all types of automotive forums. There are a TON of discussion groups and large forums out there. This is where I think the promotion could make the largest "impact". This promotion needs to serve four purposes: 1. Brand Awareness: Where people recognize the name and remember the site when needed an engine. 2. Link Building: We hope to get an extremely large number of links through automotive message boards, blogs, and hopefully some enthusiast sites. 3. Softenening future link building: Thus far, building links has been difficult. Nobody wants to link to PR0 site they have never heard of. Most of my link building contacts have not been responded to. Most of these enthusiast visit at least one of the message boards, so I hope this will soften them up and help us get some useful future links. 4. Build a mailing list of automotive enthusiasts. I was hoping some here might have some insight as to what helped them get a promotion like this out there.
Don't worry too much about PR. If you site has really good content any decent site will be happy to link to it. The people who refuse to link to PR0 sites are unlikely to be the sorts of sites you want links from anyway.