Anyone find press releases effective?

If the artiacle is interesting and news worthy, then yes it will provide traffic. And if you're lucky other websites and feeds will pick it up as well.

Content is king. Bad content and high prices make for low sales.

Good content and fair prices are a combination that attracts me as a buyer.

I have lots of buying experiences, and I assume that is what you ultimately want to do - sell stuff, right?

Dave T

Press releases IMO are the hands-down best way to launch a site. I use webwire ($19) and I get around 800-1500 views on my press releases and about 100 - 200 click throughs. I almost always get a few sales, so they pay for themselves very quickly.

As far as backlinks, I have one site with 1 page and all I did was a submission to webwire (the ONLY link) and it's now a PR 3 (using PPC mainly for that one, but a nice boost none the less.)

They're extremely easy to write as well.

Here's one that did VERY well for me...

Marcus Leary's Forex AutoPilot

It's just a quick report-style announcement. You can write that in about 5 minutes (testimonials I had to Google to find)


Oh yeah, rule of thumb for WebWire:

1) Make the title four words (use a keyword phrase that you want to get ranked for)

2) Start with an announcement, throw in some actual comments, and close with where to find more information. (no more than 250-300 words)

3) Always use "http://" links instead of anchor text. This will give your site the most boost as other sites will pickup the article (a lot will!), but not necessary the anchor text (and you want juice from the links!)

That's pretty much it. You'll get #1 in Google news for a bit and sometimes even #1 in the Google search engines for a couple weeks (depends on competition)

Try it out!

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm looking into webwire and your example PR now!

Yes, it is effective if you have a winning title, good news story and no advertising or promotion. Great for back links as well.

I've found press releases definitely help. Not just from a traffic and SEO perspective, but in my market it actually helped me get some media exposure.

But as davetdgs said, content IS king! The better the quality and the stronger the website, the better it'll perform for you.

Ronnie

Oh yeah and people...don't underestimate the power of FREE press releases. If your release is really buzz worthy, even the FREE PR sites can get you a tonne of traffic.

I got 18,000 unique visitors in a week, just from free press releases, because the news spread from them, onto the social bookmarking sites and then onto forums and blogs.

What are some of the free press release sites that you like to use?

Yes, many press release sites are indexed by Google and have decent page rank.

I also highly recommend PRWeb. As for free press release websites, you may want to check THIS. Hope that helps

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...some-time.html

There's a list of free press release sites that I have success with.

A few quick notes on how to write a press release, and this is based on my 17 years as a newspaper reporter:

1.) One of the best things that you can do it is go to Webwire, as Scott Million mentioned, or to one of the free press release sites on the list, read a bunch of press releases, and see how they are written. You will start to get a feel for it.

2.) They must be written in the third person and in a news style, not a review, not an article. If you are quoting yourself, still write in the third person: "Our new services are geared towards the mom and pop brick nd mortar store," Joe Smith, CEO of JoeSmith Inc, said.

3.) Anything that you can do to tie the press release into something current and newsworthy is good and increases the chance that the press release will be picked up by newspapers or other media. If you can do a giveaway of some time, do some kind of event for charity - that is GOLDEN. You've just greatly increased your chance that local newspapers would want to cover you. Example: dermatologist looking for business, offering a day of free skin cancer screenings at the local senior center, and including stats from a recent study showing that occurance melanoma has increased xxx percent in the past decade.

By the way Scott Million's not the first person that I have seen mention how good Webwire is, especially for the price - most paid services on press release sites charge WAY more than that - I really need to start pushing my clients to give that a try.

Thank you Dana,
some great information there.

Best Wishes
Gerry

Thank you! There is some great info on this thread and I'm glad to see that people are finding press releases useful.

One of the best Internet Marketing methods around. Guaranteed results if its done correctly.

If its news worthy, has great content and solves problems, a PR has huge potential.

I heard of this little niche site that had 200,000+ uniques and got 30,000 backlinks from one well written press release. Obviously a high percentage of those backlinks are lost after a few weeks because the news sites and blogs have archived your PR but thats not a big problem.

You dont have to settle for 1 press release during launch, you can make it a weekly investment if you can keep it news worthy. I think it was Willy Crawford that said he submits a PR every week (might be wrong).

Please keep us posted, I'd love to know. have you posted to other press release services or just webwire?

I've used PRweb for some releases recently and we've had major success getting picked up by authority blogs, one of which was CrunchGear and another was autoblog.com. Those two sites alone drove nearly 6,000 visitors in less than 48 hours.

Also, in our tests, we've found some interesting places where press releases show up. It seems PRWeb press releases we've done are showing up in Google Insights! What's cool about this, you ask?

Well, in some cases, you could be the only link on the page. In others, you get positioning as a thought leader in a competitive category. Here is a release done recently for GPS Voices that only shows our release.

I've also noticed releases appearing in news aggregators like Daylife. What's interesting about Daylife is it includes callouts from the actual releases. Here is an example when doing a search for one of our clients...

So, to sum up, I echo what many others have said about press releases, from the content and messaging to the distribution. One last thought: don't do one and walk away. I recommend a couple of month.

Finally, if any of you are interested in a package of keyword-optimized press release templates, let me know. I'll be releasing a package within the next 30 days and be happy to share a review copy in return for some feedback.

Marc

Just to let you guys know, I posted a press release to webwire and several of the free sites that Dana mentioned. I'm eager to see if I get any benefit. Is PRWeb's distribution good enough to justify their higher price?

Great information on press releases, i have only tried free press releases and it got ok results. Do you think you could do press releases for affiliate products or is it not worth the time??

PG

Dana,
thank you - thats good to know.

Best Wishes
Gerry

P.S. I have given you some more well deserved thanks

I've never used any of the online services, so I cannot vouch for them. But yes, press releases can be tremendously effective. A couple of my aviation products have gotten major free ink in several national aviation print magazines in the last year. Twice were full page reviews and they translated immediately into a glut of sales.

When I email out news releases, I don't actually embed or attach the story. I give a very brief overview and then, a link to a page that offers the actual release in both .html and .pdf versions.

If you don't know the proper format of a press release, learn this first before you start sending stuff out.

The big issue is giving the recipient of the release what he/she wants. The idea is for you to make their job easier by providing content that they can rubberstamp into their publication, newsletter, or blog. Writers need content and if you do a good enough job writing it, heck, they'll frequently just go ahead and use it as is. This has worked for me dozens of times over the years.

Read some of David Meerman Scott's info regarding press releases.

Press Releases are always a great way to jump start a website. Provided the press release is well written and newsworthy enough to be accepted by the press release sites, you should find that you get a steady flow of traffic.

I have found press releases to work great!


Micah Rush

Thanks for the PR sample Scott Million.

Sorta modeled it abit here. Hope You don't mind.

New Scientific Brainwave Entrainment Programs Boost Mind Power

Alvin Huang

Hi,
Press releases are very effective for generating a large amount of traffic to your web site, in a short amount of time.

Press release is one of the very effective medium just make sure that you the topic is really interesting.