OMG!  You gotta check out this website.  People vote for the products they are totally in love with.  The products with the most votes hit the homepage.  I’m totally addicted to the site.  You should submit your products and/or products you are totally in love with.

Press Releases are sort of the old way of doing business and have never worked for me.  That said I still submit a few press releases every 6 months just because you never know and it is always good to have another site linking to your store.

First you need to write a press release.  Here is a great article on Wiki How on how to write one.

There are a gazillion places you can submit your press release.  Here are the best ones:

• Ecommwire
• 24-7 Press Release
• Free Press Releases
• PR Inside
• PR Log

Personally I would never pay to submit a press release (all the ones mentioned above are free or have free options).  If you had to pick where to spend you time you are better off contacting bloggers/newspapers directly and telling them about your product.

I want to know which of our stores are blogging.  If you have a blog - email it to me or even better post it in the comments.

I like stores that blog.  It brings out the personality behind the company.  The most common comment I get is “Rishi, who is going to read my blog?  What is the point?”

The reason I am asking you to start a blog isn’t to gain more customers.  It is to to become more passionate about your business and increase your expertise in what you do.

Here are some ideas for your first post:

1. Tell everyone about your favorite product
2. Post a picture/video of you (or a friend) using the product
3. Talk about something totally personal… like what you did over the weekend
4. Blog about the things you enjoy (I enjoy ecommerce and helping small business owners like myself)
5. If you make your products talk about the process

From my experience the first 10 or so posts are hard.  After a while new post ideas spring up automatically.

Flying Cart uses Wordpress for our blogging platform.  For beginners I would recommend Tumblr.  Super easy to use and it’s free. Another really easy to use and popular blog platform is Google’s Blogger (also free).

Tell me about your blog.  I will read it, post a comment, and I will like you more.

All business pray for press, well stop praying and subscribe to Help a Reporter Out.  Peter Shankman sends out daily emails where reporters are looking for stories.  This is how we got Flying Cart into the New York Times and Gaebler.com.

Just the other day a reporter wanted to do a story about green laptop notebook cases, just imagine if you were a store selling these.  It does take time and little bit of effort but in the long run it is totally worth it.

Here are a few of our recent interviews. Read more about what it has been like starting and running Flying Cart.

Rishi’s interview with Pek Pongpaet, hack of all trades

Margo’s interview with Gaebler.com

When we first launched Flying Cart no one really knew about us until we reached out to some blogs and asked them to talk about us.  Luckily they totally did AND it really helped!

Here is how I think you can do the same:

1. Search on Technorati or Google Blog Search with keywords related to your store.

2. Find the bloggers contact information (usually on the contact page or on the sidebar).

3. Email them a really interesting story about your store.

Here are some examples of possible angles you can pitch in that email:

• How you make all your products from recycled materials
• Your product is the best in the world because it can never break or be worn out
• How you are a stay at home mom entrepreneur
• You are really young - You are really old
• You have really cheap prices because you have some crazy connection
• Your girlfriend left you and now you want to get back at her by starting a business and becoming crazy rich!
• Your products are just soo damn good looking

Be creative and work any angles you think you have.

Here is a compiled list of people that might be interested in featuring you:

• The Flying Cart blog - Ask us to feature you (make sure you have an awesome looking store)
• Get listed in Brand Habit
• The Dirty Shirt Blog
• Get your products Flung on Fling it Girl
• Subscribe to HARO and get an email with reporters looking for stories
• Get a Product Review on Riding With No Hands
• Get in Mom Central’s Gift Guide

We would like to keep this post updated with more blogs.  If you know of any please let us know in the comments.

A friend of mine just sent me a link to ecommwire.com. Its a pretty cool site to publish a press release and get your word out there a little more. So if you are announcing a sale, have a really cool product coming out, doing something innovative with your site, or just have something to say submit your press release to them.

Entrepreneur.com wrote up a story about us. It talks about our plans for the future and our back story.

We are all pretty excited about it! I am a BIG fan of the site.

Steven Finch posted a great post on us on his blog: Crenk

“Once you have built a store on FlyingCart you can befriend other stores that you like and think are worth promoting. It has to be a mutual decision between both store owners if the promotion happens or not. Basically, you send a request to befriend a store and then once and if accepted then you both will promote each others stores on your profiles. It is really just showing Link Love, just like I do on Crenk. If you need and online store, make sure you head over and set one up!”

Kristen Nicole, a writer for Popular Tech Blog Mashable wrote a great piece on our new social aspect to Flying Cart.