28 replies to this topic

[Trilitech]

I've submitted press releases through PRWeb before and although they had over 100,000 impressions on prweb's site, that translated to about 100 click throughs to my site. So what I want to know is can I submit a press release that is hosted on my site instead of prweb or some other service. And if so, how do I go about doing so?

[SearchRank]

Of course you can place press releases on your site and you should do so. However don't expect them to have the reach that a press release distributed through PR Web's channels does. If you want the reach then you should not only submit them through PR Web but also archive them on your site as well.

[Trilitech]

I guess my real question is when I do run them on my site, what can I do to get the word out on the wire (but linking to my site instead of PRWeb). If I can get even 1% of the traffic they get for the same price I'll be happy. Currently I'm getting about 0.1% click thoughs to my site.

[Jill]

You could put them on a page of your site that is fed to the search engine news spiders. That's the only way I can think of.

Do you have an RSS feed set up on your site?

[Trilitech]

Jill, yes I do I have an RSS feed set up already. How do I get the news spiders to come visit it? Do I need to submit it to them? Is there a list of spiders to submit to? I already use pingomatic...

[Jill]

I dunno...but I'm sure some others here might!

[toprank]

Trilitech, in order to get news spiders (Google, Yahoo, MSNBC Newsbot, etc) to visit your site, you'll need to become an approved news source.

For Google News, you can apply here: http://www.google.co.../bin/request.py. Pick "I want to recommend a news source" and fill out the subsequent form. It's not easy getting accepted though.

If you are curious about alternative newswire distribution services besides prweb (which is an excellent service), here's a list:

http://www.prleap.com/
http://i-newswire.com/
http://www.webwire.com/
http://www.pressbox.co.uk/
http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/
http://www.clickpress.com/
http://www.przoom.com
http://www.pr.com/
http://www.marketwire.com/

And if you have more $ to spend, you can use businesswire.com or prnewswire.com.

The other way to get your release visibility via news search is to get picked up by a site that is already included as a news source.

Also, make sure the release page includes an auto discovery tag for the RSS feed.

[Trilitech]

Thanks toprank. I've applied for inclusion in GoogleNews, we'll see how it goes. I didn't know about the RSS auto discover tag until just now, I'll get it added to my site tonight.

[copywriter]

It sounds to me like you might be missing the point of a press release. Those should be targeted to journalists and reporters, not to end users.

I think you're looking to get qualified traffic/customers to your site, from the sounds of it, not reporters. If that's the case, you'd be better off writing and submitting articles that are read by end users instead of press releases that are read by reporters.

[Trilitech]

Well, kind of. The goal is to get journalist (including bloggers, small site owners, etc) to pick up and run your story to reach the end users. My problem with submitting it through PRWeb is tons of sites will pick it up, it'll get included in Yahoo and Google news, etc and generate over 100,000 visits to the release. Only a very small percent of those follow the press release to my site though, and I only gain 1 backlink from PRWeb from it.
If for about the same price, I could do it myself and even get 1/10th that number of visitors it would pay off HUGE in backlinks and ad revenue. So that is the goal I'm trying to accomplish.

[Jill]

If for about the same price, I could do it myself and even get 1/10th that number of visitors it would pay off HUGE in backlinks and ad revenue. So that is the goal I'm trying to accomplish.

I think you're really overrating those backlinks, as well as their importance to anything that will have any measurable effect on your sales and/or conversions.

[copywriter]

I see. Yes, those people would technically be considered "journalists."

I understand your frustration. The best idea I can offer is to start your own list of those sites that have picked up your past releases. When you send future ones, send it to them individually in addition to through PRWeb.

[Trilitech]

I think you're really overrating those backlinks, as well as their importance to anything that will have any measurable effect on your sales and/or conversions.

The backlinks are just an added bonus, the real value would be in ad revenue from having the visitors come to my site in exchange for prweb.

[Trilitech]

Here's the initial response from Google for anyone else who is interested in applying. I'll rewrite the urls, submit again and see how it goes. Hopefully this can save someone else a few days.

Hi Jeremy,

Thank you for your inquiry regarding inclusion in Google News. After some investigation, we've found that our system cannot crawl some of your articles because of the format of their URLs. In order to have your articles crawled by Google News, their URLs must contain a number consisting of at least three digits.

For example, our news crawler would not crawl articles with the following URLs:
www.google.com/news/article23.html
www.google.com/lemurs_in_the_mist.html

It would crawl these pages:
www.google.com/news/08112003/article.html
www.google.com/news/lemurs_in_the_mist/23467.html

An example of a site that we are able to crawl successfully is http://english.chosun.com. Please note that each article on this site has a highly unique URL.

We apologize for this limitation of our system. If you are able to make changes on your end to allow us to crawl your content, please let us know. Please note also that we don't accept RSS feeds for inclusion in Google News at this time.

Regards,
The Google Team

[Randy]

Interesting info about the limitations of their system, especially the three numbers bit.

Thanks for sharing Jeremy! Learn something new every day.