Using Press Release For Promotion (PRWEB)?

[jesse-landry]

Interesting. I've never seen PRWeb work well for anything post "GET ME A LINK NAO!" era. Can you elaborate on how the 4 PRs per day in the financial sector get good results? What benefit do you gain from them and how do you  measure the results of press release distribution? Reposts, conversions, etc?

Thanks.

[SErOb]

The usefulness of PRWeb seems to depend on the market/industry.

PR Newswire is a good general one. But I've found better results with going directly to market-specific journals and news sources. Some offer pretty decent packages with good syndication/distribution.

Check the services that show up on Google Alerts, TalkWalker, etc.

But like you said, there are better ways to spend your time than churning out PR's just for the sake of it.

[Keith-Eneix]

We tested with 1 PR per day for a couple of months. Basically, we  just reverse engineered a funnel within Google analytics to our form thank you page which told us how many conversions actually came from PRWEB. In April of 2013 we made almost 20k off of Press release distribution efforts in the financial sector... however, the PR results we've gotten in other areas areas barely worked at all for form conversion or call conversions (i.e. we use call rail and wufoo for phone and form tracking).

Now, press release results have taken a sharp drop since April. We still make money but it's a fraction of what we were making when we first bought the program a year ago.

I really like your question because it's exactly what I'm asking... despite the fact that PR made some money... right now there's really no lasting results aside from the fact some spammy links had to be disavowed : ). If we had made an effort to invest our time in paid search avenues I'm sure we may have had more lasting results.

We achieved very little solid back-links. Comparing PR to a viral article or infographic... there's just no comparison from a link-bait perspective. Basically, PRweb has just been a good way to drive traffic for a short amount of time on a specific topic... no real lasting results.

[Keith-Eneix]

Have you used HARO much when going direct?

[Keith-Eneix]

Thanks for the insight Tom, really helpful!

[CFSSEO]

I'm interested in answers to this as well since we've used PRWeb for about 8 months this year submitting press releases for the websites we build.  We had keyword links to the sites we built in the press releases though, and I'm wondering if I should disavow all those press releases now.

[Keith-Eneix]

Great quesetion CFSSEO. We had to go back and look at all the links PR gave to our clients. Some were decent and some were just really spammy. The problem with the whole PR industry is that I'm not seeing a lot of highly trusted websites with PR back-links to them anymore which leads me to believe a disavow may not be a bad choice. I would like to hear more from other Mozzers too?

[jesse-landry]

Wow that's a helluva return! Impressive. I had no idea people actually respond to PRWeb articles. That's fantastic. Obviously less now, but still... Thanks for this thread.

[jesse-landry]

Well the "best practice" now states to nofollow any paid links, PR or otherwise. How much that's being enforced by the Cutts team is up for debate..

[Keith-Eneix]

I know PRWEB is nofollow now. If you're using some of the free resources for PR, some of these are still dofollow. The problem is that some of these PR sites link systems don't allow you to use the nofollow tag (no HTML manipulation). So, it's probably best to just disavow these. I would love to dive deeper into a discussion about how Google is treating the nofollow tag now... it appears from my research that much more citation and trust is being passed now? Anyway.. different topic : ).

[Guest]

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