Bottom Line: A regular online press release - once per month or quarter - is a great tool for your business; both for public relations and Internet Marketing.
Public relations can be a bit mysterious - certainly more art than science - and typically not accessible to medium sized businesses. And in these budget conscience days there are some who are quite vocal about the miraculous returns that PR can generate. These claimed returns that make such great case studies can come across as alluring Siren songs to business owners and managers.
The question that keeps nagging is, “What if the claims are actually true and attainable? Are we missing out?”
We have seen it work:
- A Political Client - Within hours of a press release being sent out we attracted the entire local media to political rally they were previously planning to ignore. The client, previously unknown, was contacted and reported on by the AP, Politico.com, CNN.com and recieved an interview request from MSNBC.
- An Innovative Start-Up - A press release earned them profiles in several industry magazines and within 30 minutes the client was contacted by CNBC to interviewed live on the air about the leading story for the day.
That is the public relations side. But wait… there’s more!
By gently wading into the pool of public relations with online press releases you can accumulate some Internet Marketing wins at the same time - two birds, one stone.
For an online press release to be successful for real public relations there is an obvious catch… they need to be driven by real news. But even when there isn’t life changing news to announce the press releases still have Internet Marketing benefits.
- Inbound links - In the world of SEO, companies pay good money for links to their website. An online press release is a great affordable way to take care of this.
- Keyword Density - A press release is an easy way to incorporate the keywords that you are working to rank for. With a multimedia press release from PRWeb.com you can tailor your anchor texts for links, keyword tags and Technorati tags.
We recently sent out a press release that was less than actually news worthy. But we just wanted the Search Engine Optization benefits. And it worked! This particular client thrives on traffic that is typically very expensive and competitive - PPC visits can typically cost $15 per click or more.
With Google Analytics we were able to see enough visits to the website to account for at least the equivalent of $240 worth of search marketing traffic in addition to the long-term SEO benefits. They spent several days on the coveted Google Page 1 for two of the most sought after terms in their industry.
