What is the benefit of launching a new free press releases website (powered by Wordpress)? Quite easy to set up and manage but is it easy to make profitable? Is it Google friendly? What about the duplicate content issue? Any opinion?
What do you intend to offer in that website? Do you intend to host the press releases or do you intend to offer submissions in behalf of clients?
Speaking from the point of view of a professional press release writer, public relations professional/agency owner and press release submitter, I think this is a very promising idea. There are lots of established press release websites out there and with more and more people offering press release submission services, you can be sure that you have a good target audience. Public relations agencies like the one I own and manage also want to tie-up with websites that have that kind of concept since they want to increase their clients' exposure. Don't forget to have a good domain name for the site. Good luck! Let me know if it's all set up and I'll be first to visit
Thank you what Well - This a SEO issue anyway Quite easy to set up and manage but is it easy to make profitable? Is it Google friendly? What about the duplicate content issue? Any opinion?
Actually there are some good press release directories, but if you can create good press releasde site it will be useful for people. Good niche I think!
I've been planning to launch a similar service for about two years now (although more heavily focused on the media than solely hosting the releases), so I've thought a lot about how to monetize it to make it worthwhile (and this is also coming from another PR professional who does this "fun" stuff for a living). I'm not going to share all of my ideas for monetizing, but here are a few things I've gathered: 1. People will pay more if you can get yourself included in Yahoo News. At a bare minimum you should make sure you're picked up by Google News before charging people. 2. If you make it a free site, and you want any kind of editorial control (if you don't, chances are slim to none that you'll get, and stay, included in Yahoo News), you'll need to be prepared to outsource to editors or put in a lot of man hours yourself (which you should only be doing if you're experienced in the field, or you risk damaging your site's credibility). That's a huge cost, either direct or indirect, once you start picking up steam with submissions. So I'd suggest either offering only paid options (a built-in quality control, b/c you'll deter some spammers), or only offer free submissions for a limited time to kick things off. If all you care about is ad revenue and not actually earning through submissions, you may not care about the site's news credibility, in which case free releases would probably suit the situation. 3. People also are willing to pay more for SEO-friendly releases, so build in as many optimization tools as you can.
The site hosting the (relevant) press releases provides exposure and backlinks My main concern is still the duplicate content issue and how to get a natural traffic growth
If you have no interest in actually distributing the news, you'd really be running the equivalent of a news aggregator - in that you'd be giving no one any real reason to publish to your site first, and therefore yes, you're going to have duplicate content issues. A basic site hosting a release has little to no value to someone trying to distribute it, so the only type of people you would get natural traffic growth from would be the spammer crowd publishing garbage anywhere they can for links. That type of content (without decent editorial controls) opens you up to problems (why the bigger sites don't allow certain types of things - like releases bashing a company other than your own). It sounds like you need to start by re-thinking a few things. 1. Why do you want people using your site (what's their primary motivation)? 2. Why should they use yours instead of someone else's (this is where the value added services of deeper distribution and SEO features come in handy to attract that natural traffic and word of mouth marketing)? 3. Why would people NOT submitting go to your site? If there's no quality control you risk attracting no one but submitters, and they'll very quickly catch on if your site isn't leading to any additional links or traffic for them from what should be your primary visitor base - people coming to look for information in the releases. If that happens, they'll stop using you in the future, and you won't get that natural traffic growth from viral word of mouth marketing. Remember, people don't submit to PR sites because they're going to host the release. They submit to them because doing so gets them picked up on a lot of other sites as well (from legitimate coverage to scraper sites). If you aren't offering something that provides that extra potential, even the spammer crowd will be hard to reach. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying here, but no one looks for a press release "host." They look for press release "distribution services." That's where the value is for them, and where the income potential is for you. Even with niche newswires / news sites, it's about their reach with niche media and other outlets in that niche - not just about getting the release added to their database.
I use it because it has some great features. It doesn't allow Google Adsense if you sign up for an account. However, if you download the open source version and set it up on your own site you can place ads on it. It's a really professionals software and it's free!
No news aggregator because I want an editorial control but even with this control I guess there will be duplicate content issues 1/2. They would submit their information because they want their press release or corporate information published on relevant news websites even small (new) ones I intend to market the site properly. It means relevant powerful social networking and link exchanges with relevant websites and more... But my main concern is more SEO and traffic