Submitting a press release
One way to get the ball rolling in the promotion of your site is to create and submit a press release using an online press release service such as PR Newswire which will let you submit a release for a few hundred dollars. This fee will enable your release to get submitted to thousands of news services. Submitting a press release that talks about your site and of course links to your site is a great way to get some inbound links. This is important for search engine optimization as the more links to your site from high quality relevant sites the higher your site rank will be.
Its also worth finding local newspapers, blogs and other news services and sending them the release directly prior to submitting it to the public. All writers love to break stories so if your story is newsworthy and you offer them a preview of the news, you are more likely to get covered. In some cases it maybe worthwhile to offer exclusivity to a particular news source that is highly related to your news meaning that they will get the chance to write about your story before anyone else so that they can “break” the story.
Many blogs are looking for content. Simply emailing them your release may get you a quick story or re-print. Add up a lot of blogs that link to you and that maybe worth more than one story in a single large news source.
PR is a snowball. Writers all follow each other so if one news source writes about you, others will follow. Make your story newsworthy and get the word out.