Why bother with press releases? Here's why

[marciayudkin]

Why bother with press releases? Here's why

To promote an upcoming course on postcard marketing, on Thursday (2 days ago) I sent out a press release about it through Emailwire. Someone signing up for the course yesterday mentioned he'd found it in a Google search.

This morning I realized that although I had promoted the course to my email list on Wednesday, I had forgotten to change links at my web site so my page on the postcard course would show up in Google.

This morning, when I did a search in Google for "postcard marketing course" (without using the quotation marks in the search box), my press release for the course was main search result #2 and #5, and my own page on the course was main search result #4:

postcard marketing course - Google Search

It's not surprising, then, that someone looking on Google for info on postcard marketing found and then signed up for my course.

My own promotional page couldn't have gotten into Google other than from its link in the press release because there weren't any other public links to it.

So, my newly announced course has been getting more exposure than all but one of its competitors, within a day of my press release, because of the release. I'm pretty pleased about that!

Press releases are an underused and highly effective marketing tool.

Marcia Yudkin

[gxd5]

Have you used other press release services? Have you noticed a difference between the results you get between free and paid services? Any additional info would be appreciated.

[marciayudkin]

Have you used other press release services? Have you noticed a difference between the results you get between free and paid services? Any additional info would be appreciated.

Only a few of the free press release services get releases into Google News and hence into Google. You can check this for yourself. Pick a topic, look up those keywords in Google News and see if any of the free press release services show up in the first couple of pages. Every press release is marked there with the service that distributed it.

Using Emailwire (I have an account with them for unlimited press releases in a year), most but not all of my releases get into Google News and hence into Google. The few that do not, I redo the headline, change the body of the release a bit, retry and usually it works on second try.

Marcia Yudkin

[Chris Kent]

I noticed that they have an unlimited service for $99/month, is this the one you use?

Does this mean you can send a new PR every day if you want to, for the same product?

It could be like article marketing except easier.

[gxd5]

I actually have two sites that are syndicated by google news. If google news is the main benefit, then I would probably just skip the press release entirely and just post it directly to google news.

[marciayudkin]

I noticed that they have an unlimited service for $99/month, is this the one you use?

Does this mean you can send a new PR every day if you want to, for the same product?

Yes, but I pay $990 a year for it rather than $99 a month. (Last year it was only $499 a year.) And since I send clients' releases out through this service (charging them, of course), it's essentially free to me.

And yes, as long as the releases are significantly different, you could send a release every day of the year about the same product for this price.

That's really not necessary, though, because releases tend to stay in Google News for 2-4 weeks. 1-2 releases a month for each product would do wonders for anyone.

Marcia Yudkin