The Web Challenge

In a web-world the term press release sounds pretty old-school. Or at least I thought so. Up to a few weeks ago I was a press release skeptic, to say the least. It’s easy to spend upwards of $1000 on a nationally distributed press release via PR Newswire and the results are never guaranteed. So when faced with the decision to do a targeted ad-buy or sponsorship vs. a press release, I used to almost always err on the side of the ad-buy.

A few months ago, thanks to Dan Green joining us at MediaSilo, we started to look into press releases in more detail and found a surprising number of services that offer free press release distribution. After just a few releases we saw a huge spike in traffic and much better visibility of our service in search engines. After sending our second free press release with prmac.com we even got invited to a podcast. Site conversions went up, although that was not the primary goal. We are now sending about two releases a month and have sustained traffic increase of about 50%. Not too shabby considering how inexpensive it is.

Mashable.com has a great list of free or low-cost distribution services, so does MixesMarketArts.com and this Blog.

To promote The Web Challenge, I chose PRMac.com. As the name implies, the site is mostly focused on Mac related news, which is a perfect fit if you’re looking to target designers and web creators. Ray Barber has been doing a great job at building a truly useful service. The site offers a free service which sends releases with a three day delay, or a premium service with immediate delivery for $16.75. Once you have set up an account,  there are plenty of resources that help you write a good press release as well as tools to track who has written about you, spidered you, and viewed the release.

What other distribution service have worked for you and why? Comment on this post.