Comments on: Using Press Releases to Promote a Website: A Case Study

By: Pat

Pat — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:55:59 +0000

Seekzap,

At this time, I’d estimate that 80% of the links still exist. Too soon to tell if they are permanent.

Pat

By: Seekzap

Seekzap — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:35:26 +0000

Pat – of those links you received, how many were permanent? My experience has been that with press releases, the links are temporary, and most are lost over time. Is that your experience?

By: Pat

Pat — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 03:56:36 +0000

Ari,

Prior to the press releases, we tried Peter Shankman’s Haro every day for about a month. Great concept, but not much bang for the buck. Rarely did we ever receive a response from the journalists we attempted to reach & when we did, it sounded like our efforts were congested amongst several dozen others trying to share their own story.

Pat

By: Rich Owings

Rich Owings — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:00:42 +0000

Shane,

I don’t really have any recommendations, but I went back to look and will share this… They were both done through PR Web. The first was the $200 package and the second (for my deals site) was the $80 package.

By: Pat

Pat — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:55:40 +0000

Tom,

Thanks for your interest. Actually, WikiCity’s traffic has skyrocketed a favorable 1000% over the past two weeks (granted, on a small base), but since we’ve been doing so many different things for the site since then, it is not possible to directly correlate the press release w/the spike in traffic. That stated, I’d like to think that the additional links out there helped.

Pat

By: Shane

Shane — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:43:09 +0000

@Tom: Great question.

@Rich: Is there anything you did differently from Pat that you would recommend (and would be willing to share)?

By: Rich Owings

Rich Owings — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:17:38 +0000

Great post; thanks for sharing. I’ve done news releases right before the holiday season two years in a row, once for my main site and once for my deals site. It’s challenging to get links for the latter, so I was happy with the results.

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:15:49 +0000

Now that it has been a couple of weeks since the publication of your press release, have you seen any differences in your traffic for better or for worse?

By: Ari

Ari — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:02:49 +0000

I think the Press Release services are useless these days – you need to be reaching out to journalists, etc. Lookup Can We Do That by Peter Shankman..

By: Pat

Pat — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:00:03 +0000

#1: Pre-publication Preparation – I would contact several targeted journalists in ADVANCE of the scheduled publication. Journalists & bloggers seem to appreciated this so that then they are positioned to share the story first.

If I could pick a #2: I think we’d opt for an on-line only press release, which costs about 1/2 of what we paid for US1.