Free public parking spot for your downloadable stuff

So you have a great photo of your new product, or a one-sheet with pricing information about a special offer, or you’ve written a time-sensitive response to a recent event, or you have a date-specific announcement, or an almost-press release. You want to make this gem of information available to the media, or to anyone else who’s interested, for that matter, but you don’t want to go in and modify your website, then have to un-modify when the item is no longer timely. You also know well the rule about not including attachments when sending emails to the press (unless they’ve asked for them), so you don’t want to attach this file to an email bound for distribution to a group of media contacts.

What to do?

Well, “there’s an app for that.” I mean, an online solution. And it’s quick and it’s free.

One solution is Mediafire, a free online parking spot for documents and other files. There you can either create a free account, or upload files even without an account, and then share the URL for the file with whomever you please. Documents, presentations, videos, and images are all allowed.

Another option is to create a private page on your blog and then place your images, pdfs or other documents on this post. Simply add a new post, set its visibility to “private,” and then place your files into the post. You can share the URL for that page with journalists or whomever you wish to have access. They can go straight to the page to get your files. Since the page cannot be reached from elsewhere on your blog, you don’t have to worry about taking the page down if and when its contents become stale. Simply stop sharing the URL. Or, if you absolutely want to prohibit access after a certain date, even to those who’ve been provided the URL, go in and move the page to “trash” whenever you wish.

You can now include your URL linking to the mediafire posting or to your private blog post in your pitch. If you want a shorter or customized link to include in your email, you can take one further step. With the link still on your clipboard, go to the Tiny URL website. Click in the window under “enter a long URL that you want to make tiny” and paste your URL there. To the right is a small bar where you can enter a custom name element if you wish. Click “Tiny it!” and a new shorter URL appears, which you can now copy and paste into your email.

2 Responses to “Free public parking spot for your downloadable stuff”

1. Lisa Underkoffler says:

   January 29, 2010 at 3:34 pm

   Another option to store and share documents is Adobe’s web service, Acrobat.com (https://acrobat.com) – where you can store and share either with a designated group or make the url so that anyone can access the file.
2. admin says:

   January 29, 2010 at 5:38 pm

   Thank you for adding this information! Adobe does offer this service at three levels, ranging in price from about $40 a month to a free option.