Last week I fired off a press release (thanks for all your input @jeffhasen) to announce the launch of IdeaMensch. I ran across a $100 coupon for PRWeb so it ended up costing me $100 to send out that release. Why did I do a press release? I wanted something official looking that I could a) fire off over the wires to gain some incoming links and b) be able to send to some friends and acquaintances. At some point, I might also use it as part of a bigger pitch to social media and marketing bloggers. According to the folks at PRWeb was seen by around 120,000 people with about 5,000 people actually reading it. It was probably picked up by about a couple dozen of different websites and I'd say that maybe 100 people clicked through to the website.
Am I happy with the results?
Truth be told, the impressions and number of reads are pretty meaningless in my opinion. Impressions are completely useless and I have no idea whether the readers were actually engaged with the release. It seems like if there was a lot of interest, more people would have clicked through. The actual click through numbers were low (measured by my onsite analytics). In that regard, there are much more effective ways to drive people to my site for $100.
With that being said, I was pretty happy with the number of pickups. I see value in having a bunch of positive stuff show up whenever I google the site. Also, I was able to use the official press release to re-kindle conversations with a number of stakeholders which led to more PR and mentions. And as mentioned above, I will probably use the same release in future conversations with social media and marketing bloggers.
This release cost me $100 and a couple hours of my weekend. So overall, I am pretty happy with the results. What do you think? How do you use press releases these days? What wire/syndication service do you use?
Hey Mario,
Good insight, I would agree that for $100 can get you a lot of traffic.
We at Amplify Interactive use press releases for link building efforts for SEO. When your release is picked up by the wire(s) and syndicated, you get a lot of quality links to your site. Those links are a little temporary, as the big 3 engines will, at some point, stop spidering the release.
Spencer, what wire services do you guys like to use?
I would ask Ben about that. I don't know the specifics, but we have a whole optimized release deliverable, and I think part of it is submissions to the preferred wires. Definitely something I should ask him as well.
Mario, I am curious how PRWeb defines the statistic for tracking users that actually "read" the press release. I found a nice article that explains PRWeb statistics...you might find useful.
This article states 200-600 "reads" as average, which indicates that your 5,000 reads is well above average.
http://www.networksolutions.com/...e-statistic-report-2/