SpeedieConsulting

Press releases are a great way to attract attention to your business and can be a great booster, if you get picked up in the local or even national press.  For most traditional PR people, this means Job Done!  Press exposure is a key performance indicator – and righty so.

But for those of us that do our own press releases, there is a wider benefit we need to think about and that is the online benefits of press releases.

There are several places online where you can and should submit press releases. The first one is Press Box. (http://www.pressbox.co.uk).

Pressbox is a free submission service and is very good at getting your press releases into Google News very quickly.  This, in turn, means your release can be picked up by hundreds of other sites that use the PressBox RSS feeds.   It also gives you a good quality back link to your website if you build those in. TIP : You should be looking at ways to add keyword relvant links into your Press Release.

The second place you should investigate in PRWEB (http://www.prweb.com) – a huge site with a powerful reach but it is a pay to play site and should be looked into. One release on here is a great way to launch a new business or website.

Thirdly, I would also suggest looking at Online PR News (http://www.onlineprnews.com) a relative newcomer but a very good low cost option during these economic times.

There is a great resource here for a list of Free Press Release sites:

http://www.nikkipilkington.com/internet-marketing-articles/

I would also suggest adding your Press releases to any or all forums or social media places that you can.

You should also build a Press centre, or Media centre on your site and make sure you add all the releases you write.

Depending on how you set up your onsite press room, you can have these releases auto submitted to Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, to name a few.

Press releases are not just for traditional print media, they can be used online to great added benefits for your search ranking and traffic generation.

Finally, I would say, if you are emailing out press releases make sure of the following:

• Have the press release in the body of the email – Do not add it as an attachment

• If you have images that need to go with the press release do not add them the email. – Set up a page on your site and only give links to download them if I need them.  I get around 10 press releases a day and some people still like to send me 6mb attachments. This just annoys me and I tend not to use these releases.

• Have full contact details on the bottom of your release – I might want to ask you something about the product or release. So let me have your contact details.  If you don’t give them, I worry about the validity of your business and will think again before using your release.

Having said that don’t let it put you off.  Having an online Press campaign is a great way to boost your traffic, web rankings and exposure for your business.