Enterprise Nation

Drafting a press release with news about your business is always a good idea. If the newspaper or magazine publishes it, you’ve got free promotion and editorial is always more trusted by readers than paid for advertisements. Karen McNulty of MarketingPlanWiz here makes the case for submitting press releases to online sources too.

News travels fast

If you create a press release and send it via online distribution it will also travel. What do I mean? There are several ways of launching your PR onto the Internet:

• Via news distribution services such as PRWeb (paid for), PRLog (free) and PRLeap (free) to name a few. If you choose a news service like these, look out for a good Google Page Rank when you visit their websites – that shows that they’re popular and probably well-used.
• Via your social networks (for business). Remember you can set up a Facebook Business Page, blog and Tweet about your subject area.
• Via article websites such as E-zine articles, GoArticles or Evan Carmichael. These are highly ranked by Google and used by search engines for up-to-date content searches.

The great thing about submitting any sort of content online is that if you publish it today, it’s still here tomorrow (and continues to be found by search engines) unlike traditional releases that appear in the newspaper once. There is a flip side to this however – your reputation depends on doing it well, otherwise something you’ve done badly can hang around too!

Press release = press results?

Measuring it is a dream (compared to offline “mentions”). You can use Google Analytics to track sources of traffic to your website and see if any of it is coming from where you’ve placed press releases. Or you can use some of the following tools. Most of which are free, to quickly find where your stuff has appeared:

• Google Alerts – you can set up an alert, which will be emailed to you, for any search term you choose – your article heading for example. 
• Twitter Search – if you’re in Twitter you can track tweets about your business or article 
• Statistical reporting in your news distribution service (such as PR Log)
• Google insights for search will show you trends for traffic around the search term you want to track 
• Google Blog Search – see if your topic is being blogged about or if you’ve written a blog, is it showing? 

Marketing on the Internet is great simply because it is so measurable. Good luck!

Karen McNulty is co-founder of MarketingPlanWiz