4. The cost savings are obvious Anytime you can avoid high costs of sending someone on road to meet with clients or attend a meeting, bottom line savings are immediate and obvious. In addition to any costs associated with attending a meeting, you need to factor in travel costs covering airfares to taxis and tolls, hotel costs, meal expenses, and even your internal costs to process expense paperwork.

5. Soft cost savings multiply returns Spare yourself productivity drain and physical and mental tolls travel takes on your company's road warriors and you could enjoy "soft" cost savings that dwarf your hard dollar travel costs. Want an example? Look at your own calendar for past month and count up just hours you spent traveling to and from meetings. Multiply that by your hourly wage, and then by number of employees in your firm.

If reasons like these don't help you convince reluctant decision makers in your company to add video to your communications mix, please be patient with them. Historically they are in good company. There were many who claimed smeary images on hard to handle rolls of paper called "faxes" could never function in place of an original document. And who, they asked, would ever want to spend more time typing an email message when they could so easily pick up a telephone and place a call?

One of first questions I had when I first started writing press releases was what was considered a great release? What did it consist of and how was it constructed?

Being curious, I emailed my contact at http://www.prweb.com/ and asked them if they could show me a few press releases that they considered as excellent examples.

These releases have received their editorial scores of 5 on their scale of 1 to 5; with five being highest.

They sent me three of them for review and you can see each one of them here:

http://prweb.com/releases/2005/2/prweb136748.htm

http://prweb.com/releases/2005/2/prweb149213.htm

http://prweb.com/releases/2005/2/prweb203448.htm

Study each one of these against press release template to see what is required for an effective release.

Note: to get additional exposure for your press release via www.emediawire.com you have to have an editorial score of 4 or higher. So it is to your benefit to write best release you can first time around.

Once you have studied examples and want to try submitting you own press release you need to know which ones are most popular ones being used.

Here are some of press release services I have used and found to be effective:

http://prweb.com/

http://www.pressbox.co.uk/index.html

http://www.webwire.com/default.asp

http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/

With most of press release services you can submit your press release for free or via paid inclusion. Paying for inclusion gives you benefit of faster indexing into search engine news services and natural search engine result pages.

Normally your release will be picked up by Google news within a few hours after its release. From there it will normally show up in natural search results within a few days or a week.

I have used both of these services in past but have found that paying them at least minimum amount allows me to view my stats online. It also allows me to choose different categories for my press release to be displayed in, giving my release a chance for wider coverage.

So using press releases can and is a very effective marketing tool that you can use for promoting your web site or affiliate products if done correctly.

By using press releases, I have been able to create a steady flow of targeted visitors to my web site and affiliate programs while generating dozens of back links to my web site.

Even though effects of each individual press release may be short lived, they still have provided me with both free and inexpensive ways for getting hundreds of new visitors to my site and quite a few top ten positions in Google for my targeted keywords.

So get to it and write a few press releases your self and see what they can do for you!