The Publicity Hound’s Blog

PRWeb has discontinued its free press release distribution service which is probably just as well, because these freebie sites are usually worthless because your release isn’t distributed anywhere. It’s simply parked at a website.

That means you have to pay at least $80 to have your release distributed by PRWeb—a service that pushes your releases into the Google and Yahoo News feeds. I’ve heard Publicity Hounds rave about the results.

I’m curious about whether anyone has had any luck with free press release distributions sites.

There are probably hundreds of them out there. Most exist for two reasons: to either upsell you to a paid service, or to generate revenue from Google Adsense ads.

Let me know your experiences.

Posted In: Press Releases/News Releases
posted On: 10/27/2006: 2:35 pm: By Joan
Comments:

3 Responses

Carson Says:
October 31st, 2006 at 12:34 am

Noticed you linked to my post about free press release distribution. I’ll be keeping my eye on this post to find out if anyone really has had significant success with the free options.

As I indicated, I tend to see them as “something to do while you are already at it” more than as a valuable way to significantly enhance PR.

Would love to know if anyone has had “real” luck with them.

Carson

Stephen Munday Says:
October 31st, 2006 at 5:36 am

Not with getting publicity directly, but in getting back links and direct traffic through having the press release page on the free press release site indexed by the search engines. Anyway you can get another “funnel” to your site has to be good.

If you have a press release you are putting out through PRWeb anyway, why not use it on these other free sites too for the SEO and traffic value?

Lisa Solomon Says:
November 1st, 2006 at 7:43 am

I agree with Stephen. Although our business (and website) launched only a year ago, we already come up on page 1 of Google’s search results for many relevant phrases. I attribute this achievement to having many valuable backlinks and lots of good content.

Some of the backlinks are from blogs and some are from press release websites (e.g., PRWeb). We have probably posted around 10 press release in the past year, but each one gets posted on multiple free press release sites. We have used PRWeb’s paid service only twice in this time. The backlinks from blogs include links in blog posts mentioning our company, as well as links created when I comment on someone’s blog.

As for content, we have a “resources page” that lists and links to books, studies and reports; articles; blog postings and podcasts that are relevant to the products we sell and to some issues that are of great interest to our target market (our target market is lawyers and legal professionals, and the issues are the billable hour and work/life balance). We also send out a free monthly e-newsletter to our customers and subscribers, which we post on the website. (The e-newsletter focuses on work/life balance and legal humor.)

Tips, Tricks & Tools for Free Publicity

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