Can You Help With My Press Release Service?
I have been running two services for about 5 years. I sift through hundreds of of releases per day on one service as there is a paid and free submission. I would say 95% of these are spam and are deleted. The spam includes such basic obvious problems as massive keyword (blatant) dumping, horrible grammar, huge number of links embedded, no 'story' or 'news', too short or wrong topic (sex, pills, etc). I have worked very hard over the years to keep it clean and that is why my sites still get tremendous pickups from the likes of Google News and other organizations. I have many customers on monthly plans for releases that have been with me for years. But here's what i tried and what for the life of me I cannot figure out. Hopefully I can see the other side and tweak my thinking with your help.
For the free release site, I find many release that are news worthy. Our software setup strips out hyperlinks in the document leaving just blahblah.com instead of a real backlink. The system shows one small ad with the release to offset costs which does not look so great but it is not intrusive into the release. Here's the dilemma. Of the 5% that are real news that have an actual real email address, we offer a simple upgrade to a paid release complete with links in the release (backlink), no ads, and top billing on the site. The price? $10. A far cry from what other services charge. To me, this is a fantastic deal. A nice backlink from a PR6 site. Sometimes I even throw in a month link on the attached PR6 web directory with internal pages set at PR5. With the upgrade comes a host of other things getting the release out... The problem? Either nobody is getting our offers after submission, or just ignoring us.
If someone has a site where they spent time, money, effort to develop or has a paying client... isnt $10 for a release that has a great shot to be picked up by outlets such as Google NEws a great deal in the scheme of things? I know people spend hundreds on other services or even on coding/design/graphics/advertising. For $10 we review the release, reformat it, fix problems, syndicate it etc.. I think its a good deal.
Is it just people sending releases through some automated tool hoping some get approved and they get one more backlink? I have enough content from real releases coming in that I dont need junk and dont want junk next to my paying customer's releases anyways. Im just trying to see from a marketing perspective where I may be incorrect in my thinking or strategy. To us, press releases are some of the best methods to get backlinks and traffic but we are biased I suppose
Appreciate any feedback as Im pulling out what hair I have left trying to figure out the lack of responses to our offer.
Thanks GP
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