I would definitely recommend PRWeb. Here's my experience: PR Title = "AppearFirst's Unique New Automated Service Promises To Build Goodwill With Website Visitors." Contribution = $30 Date = Aug 9, 2004 Reads = 20374 Estimated Pickups = 616 PR Title = "Free Advertising for Small Businesses Announced By AppearFirst Media." Contribution = $80 Date = Mar 15, 2005 Reads = 27596 Estimated Pickups = 476 It seems contribution amount definitely makes a difference. Got to 20k reads in a month with $80 compared to 9 months with $30.
Ya prleap seem to be waste at least for me on 50 people have read the PR this is over 36 hrs very poor compaired to prweb
I'm looking at 40 myself today. Not a big deal, but it wasn't that expensive to try out. PRWeb is much more expensive. I'm looking forward to seeing the results. Google, Teoma/AJ, Yahoo Slurp, and Alexa have stopped by to check it out though.
I did my second press release today (for friday release - same $80 - position 22 right now) Interesting thing happened with the first press release. The page I had linked to inside it; has disappeared from the google API rankings; but still shows up in the google SERPs. It happened the next day after the press release was sent out. Has not come back yet (4 days) - but that same page is #3 in google still. Not sure what to make of that; but it is very interesting, I think.
I paid a little more to be the top Press Release on Sunday. So far... 51,575 Reads 524 Estimated Pickup 4 prints 45 downloads 100 Clickthroughs that show a referrer from the PRWeb Release compared with 13 from PRLeap for the same placement. More stats and a good analysis in a week or two. Right now, I have another important announcment to make.
Thanks to this thread, I have investigated PRWeb and decided to do my first press release. I am VERY nervous, because it goes out today (Monday, April 25th). I have no idea how well this will do. I paid $80 and that supposedly got me to position #6 -- however that was on Friday. I have no idea what it's at now (hmm, let me log in and see... WOW, I'm at position 59 now). Double WOW! It's already released, I guess. They must have done it right at the stroke of midnight. It's at 2,066/31/0/0/1 (reads/pickups/prints/forwards/downloads). I am trying to do extra to foster getting my release into magazines. I have created a "press room" on my Web site -- the important trick (I think) is that I added some short text blurbs there as an option for editors to pickup. The reason I think that is important is because one of the links you guys mentioned in this thread stressed that short press releases get more pickups. I also wrote up a backgrounder and other stuff for journalists to review. I would provide a link so y'all can review & try out my ideas, but I'm a newbie. No links allowed. My profile should have the link, though. Unfortunately, I'm in the same quandry that most of us appear to be in -- I am launching a Web site, and the press release is to promote that, but editors get hundreds of similar press releases daily, and discard most of them. How to rise above the noise? I'm not sure. Here is what I tried: I mentioned my target audience directly in the heading, and repeated in the first paragraph, and I highlighted that my services are free. I did not try to find a way to tie my press release into current events. I hope something good comes of it.
If you want to get into print media, there are two more things to concern yourself with - one is prnewswire - which reaches a lot more print media people. $125 membership + $610 for a 400 word release OR $600 one time through PRWebDirect. The second is to have something newsworthy to release - which you definitely will have before plopping down $600+ dollars. A site release won't cut it. You'll have to arrange it with a product release. I'm going to do this soon, so I'll share my results here as well. (soon could be a couple of months) I'm looking for your release now.... You can post a link - just not a live one. Let us know which release is yours / and which website is yours. --- nm - I found it... www.publisherdatabase.com it looks like a pretty interesting idea. Nice site! One thing in the future is to try sending $81 or $85 to get above all the other people that just do $80. It's worth the extra buck or two for positioning. I like your press room section. I'm going to do something similar now. One thing I would say is: I'd rephrase that slightly to something along the lines of "please include" instead of "be sure". You don't necessarily want to turn off a potential hit because he doesn't know what kind of details to include. The "Press" might be a blogger who isn't familiar with what you are talking about.
Thank you for that. I'm totally new at press releases. Yes, it's publisherdatabase.com, near the lower middle of the PRWeb page right now. Will it stay there the whole day? I hope so. Oh man, I wish I had talked to you yesterday. That is such good advice and I just didn't think of it at all. Also great advice, thanks. I have already changed it, although I didn't use "please" because the sentence had a "please" in there already. Hopefully the reworked sentence is friendly sounding. The one thing my press room doesn't have yet is high-quality logos. Print journalists are going to want that, I'm sure. However, my logo is so bad at this point, that I don't want to encourage them. After I get an E-lancer to improve my logo, I'll add some EPS & high-quality TIFF files. I think it's also important to have a nice, dull, official portrait for journalists to use. So far all I have is my grinning garage-start-up photo. Once I've taken care of those two issues, I think my press room will be fairly good, considering I'm a one-man shop. Thanks again for the advice, this thread has been worth 5-stars, no doubt.
Well, just to follow-up, here's the conclusion to my PRWeb experience. After almost a week, my press release has 64,346 reads, 400 pickups, 5 prints, 2 forwards, and 33 PDF downloads. According to my logs, about 30 people came to my site after reading the press release on PRWeb or one of its spinoffs (like emediawire). I have attached my stats, showing the increase in traffic starting on the 25th and (to my surprise) sustaining. The problem is that Google is just kicking PRWeb's butt in my logs. Google sends FAR more people my way. On the low days, I get 3 new members from Google. On the high days, I get 7 new members from Google. Very little substantial membership increase that I can attribute to PRWeb. And I have not seen a single mention of my site in the press. So while the stats show an immediate sustained increase, I can't yet put my finger on what the benefits are. I'm still happy with the results, and I expect that I will spend another $85 to do another press release in June. But I think that's it. No regular releases for me. Putting $85 into Google ads is just going to net me far, far more members. Of course, maybe the second time around I'll see my site in WSJ or something and become a devout PRWeb advocate. It just didn't happen this time. -Tony
the one benefit of PR's is links.. you get links back to your site where adwords doesn't get you links also PR can help give to you and your site credibility and its help build name brand recognition, which in the overall scheme of things is much better for your site
FYI FWIW: I popped a press release over at PRWeb about doing my Christmas Lights for real (had fun writing this - let me know if you think it's funny) ... but haven't really seen anything ... but then again, I'm cheap and opted for the free submission.
Nice... You should forward it to a couple of your local media outlets and see if an AP guy doesn't pick it up. You never know.
OK, I've just done a PRWeb press release and have to correct some of the bad information in this thread. 1) You are getting nowhere near 50,000 real pageviews or whatever it says. Mine said the same, trust me, that's not right. I did the $82 thing on Saturday, 6th or 7th in the list. Got about 20-30 visitors to the actual site from it - there is no way that 50,000 people clicked on that press release and 20 came through to the site. I'm guessing that PRWeb is skewing the statistics they report - I did some searching to find sites that carried the press release, and every one just had the title and the summary or the first paragraph. So I'm guessing PRWeb is counting anyone who loads up any of those pages (which are basically RSS feeds with like 20 press releases listed). 50,000 does not mean 50,000 read your release. 2) You are not going to get backlinks. You get one or two permanent ones - one on PRWeb, one on some other newswire partner they have. Mine still haven't shown up after 2 days. Why not? Because all those 400 sites that "carry" your press release are just what I described above - RSS feeds with a small portion of your article. You could get some actual backlinks if you be SURE to stick your URL in the title, summary, and first paragraph of your release. BUT - these are not going to last very long, because the feeds will change and get re-indexed. If you don't have the URL there, don't expect squat. Those sites just link back to PRWeb's page with your release. 3) No one in the real press is going to contact you and write a story on how you started a web site. I wasn't expecting this, but trust me, it's not going to happen. 4) One potential plus - it did get google and msn to go look at the site (I think). No actual crawling though, but front page got indexed. Not worth the price in my opinion, go post your site in a forum somewhere. My opinion on it: nowhere near worth it. Wouldn't even put down a dollar on it again - the people here are accurately posting the statistics PRWeb tells them, but it is pretty clear that PRWeb is skewing those pretty dramatically.
I did my first and only press release months and months ago. I'm preparing another one right now for october 8th. If you google for the title of my original press release, there are 699 results - not all of them link to me directly, but a lot do. Yahoo shows 105, MSN 35. Closer to the press release date, Yahoo and MSN showed a great deal more than google did. At some point in this thread, and if not certainly in this forum, I pointed out that my click throughs were pretty horrendous - but I gave very little reason in the press release to actually click through. Just because somebody clicks on the release, it doesn't mean they'll sit and read the whole thing. The stats PRWeb shows are from hits on their own site, yahoo news I think, and a couple of other sources - I think RSS feeds might be one of them. They also send out e-mails to people who ask for them. Most people in the PR industry will tell you that services like PRWeb/PRNewswire are important, but you will get much more effective results if you make your own press contacts - email them directly, call them to pitch stories, etc. There are a lot of reasons to use PRWeb, but really you have to be clear about what your strategies are and what your expected results are. I get emediawire emails and I rarely read them because a lot of releases in the categories I'm interested in are just not what I'm looking for. But once a month or so, I'll delve through them looking for something to write about and I'll contact a few people and write a few articles. I'm not really "the press", but I do try to keep current information on my sites. Site announcements and the like don't really inspire me unless they are something innovative or otherwise interesting. So if you chop your stats up and say of those 50,000 page views, probably 10,000 or less spent any real time reading your release and of those you would probably expect a .5 to 1 percent click through to your site unless you had a very good reason to click through - so 100 clicks/$80 = $.80/click - pretty high - you may have done better with adwords. But then you group other factors that made you write the press release in the first place, and you say that's worth $40 or $50 - now you are down to $.30/click. I think if you plan it right, the press release is definitely worth it - but if you are expecting huge results in either a media buzz or immediate traffic, you won't get what you are looking for. It's a tool like anything else. If you know how to use it really well, you get much more value. If not, just look at the basic results and ask yourself if that is worth it. 100 links from various class C blocks seems worth $80 to me. Especially in niches where there is not a lot of SEO activity - that can be enough to make a site a powerhouse. If you do it once a month or twice a month you end up having a pretty solid link base, plus the ability to control the buzz surrounding your site - because your press release results will litter the SERPs for anybody searching for info on your site. For a one time thing, like what I did - 699 site mentions out there on the web several months after the fact definitely made it worth it to me. Re-evaluate things after a few days or weeks and post again. One of the reasons I started talking about PRWeb in here was because it was really hard to find good information out there about people's opinions on whether or not it produced good value.
Well, right now I'm trying to test the backlink thing with a free release - trying to see whether you can get enough backlinks with that to justify doing it. My big mistake was not having the URL in the title, but I'll report back with what happens with the free thing. Seems to me like that might be a better idea if it goes to all those sites (Google News or Yahoo news or whatever don't matter under that approach), but I'm not sure exactly what level of distribution the free releases get.
I would suggest you all to submit press release on top free sites too for additional traffic and better exposure.
You mean like the one in your signature? LMAO!!!!!!!! Nice self promotion there! This thread was started back in 2005....
that is the advantage of signature. However, CTR is not more than 2-3% so not really very effective. But if you disallow signatures, many people (so called experts) like me will not be so willing to post and discuss. And sorry I did not see it was 5 years old. You must close threads where my great great grandfather has posted.