And to put her money where her mouth is, she’s barring the big engines from indexing her site so that it won’t appear in their results pages. The minx.

Jennifer previously wrote a series of posts about building a successful online business in 30 days, and she cracked that task. Her breastfeeding blog now brings in over $1,000 per month in revenue. She cites two main reasons for embarking on this anti-Google experiment:

First, those four engines are not the only sources of search traffic. Blog engines like Technorati, smaller search engines and directories and the search features within social media sites like Flickr and YouTube all serve up traffic and leads to web sites. Things like good old fashioned link building also come into play. I’ll also be exploring more areas of social media marketing including creative ways to market within communities without crossing the line from helpful member to annoying advertiser.

Second, the work that I do on this site in the early months will lay the foundation for solid search engine rankings down the road. Nearly every business finds their way into the major engines eventually. The goal here is to build the type of content and link foundations that will help the site quickly rise to the top when we do allow the spiders to come in and play.

I’m intrigued to see how this experiment will pan out and what techniques Jennifer will use in building up her business using predominantly social means. And, of course, I’ll be watching to see if she uses entirely above board techniques, or if she’ll dip her toes in ethically shady territory.

However, the glaringly obvious criticism of Jennifer’s approach is that she has the exposure of Search Engine Journal to help her market the site initially. For the rest of us, we’d be starting a little bit behind Jennifer, as this latest project will receive a fair bit of attention from the SEO world.

Oh, the site? It’s called Bento Yum. There’s a backlink for you Jennifer!

We’ve used it recently with our website and had good coverage with local press and media. In fact, word has it that the BBC spotted Lisa on a rival channel and tried frantically to get in touch, even ringing people with the same surname in Crumlin! We must’ve forgotten to send them the press release!

Aaron Shear, who I’ve been reading for the last few weeks has some useful pointers if you’re considering press releases as a marketing strategy for your blog.

Firstly, Aaron recommends using an internet wire service, presumably PR Leap or PR Web. This is your best bet anyway, although we’re trying to amass a database of relevant journalists and publications that we can contact directly also.

Another important point is to include hyperlinks in the document to specific pages in your site. You should also target the link text for appropriate keywords, because if your release is used, you will receive very well targetted backlinks!

Probably the strongest suggestion Aaron puts forward is to publish press releases on your website. This is an approach I hadn’t considered before, but it would be useful to have an archive of press releases available for journalists to look back at prior developments.

With our TV blog, I try to write a thought-provoking piece on a topical show (say the recent race controversy in Celebrity Big Brother) or perhaps start a campaign to support a particular contestant. I’ll then create a press release linking to that piece and stating our opinions.

The most important thing – if you’re going to use press releases frequently – is to document the process: publishing a newsworthy piece (in my case), writing an interesting press release and then releasing it. You’ll be sending to targetted people as well as general services like PR Leap, so get a spreadsheet or database of contacts and use this every time. Add to it as other sources come up.

By documenting the process, you’ll be able to carry out a press release campaign with military precision every time.