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That's a really good point about the news value of the release.

I think this news is big, but I've had trouble getting reporters to write about us. The reason for that is that we are a blog writing service. We pay writers to essentially ghost write posts for our business clients.

The reporters, already feeling besieged, think that we are somehow degrading the world of writing, so they don't like to cover us.

Our news release addresses the question of the treatment of our writers, so that's why I'm hopeful we'll get some traction with this news release.

There are some entry level plans that you can do for a few hundred dollars, and there are some new players, too. PressKing seems interesting. They say they send stuff to 20,000 publications, who knows how true that is.

We've never sent out a press release before using one of the services, and thought it might finally be time. Then I saw that Google seems to be calling services like PR Newswire out.

"Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites."

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

So, is it worth it to spend a few hundred bucks to distribute a press release, or am I better off just publishing it on my blog for my blog writing service and promoting it all the regular ways?

That link goes to a godaddy holding page...

I did go and search "is " and google suggested "Is Daniel Tosh gay?" I've never heard of Mr. Tosh, but there you have it.

So I went through the alphabet, it's actually pretty funny:

"Is Anderson Cooper gay?"

"Is Brenda Song pregnant" (I've never heard of her, either.)

"Is croup contagious?"

Then the one about Mr. Tosh, and after that "Is Darrenn Criss gay?" (I don't know him, either. Jeesh, I must be old.)

And on it goes with lots of questions about people being gay or pregnant. O was my favortie, "Is oatmeal gluten free?"

Is it possible for that to actually work? I really doubt it.

It seems like Google would figure it out after a while that only people in India are behaving that way, and given that Google localizes results it would only help in India.

Also, how can you be sure that the MTurk people are actually doing what you ask? They aren't providing you a product, they are just searching in some specific way. Every time I've used MTurk I've gotten work product that shows the minimum possible amount of work. If I used them for something that I don't get back I wouldn't have any trust that they are actually doing it.

I just don't want to annoy the writer, and it looks like it's a sitewide policy. They don't link to anyone in the body of their stories that also appear in the paper.

On their blogs they have outbound links, so for SEO reasons it's clearly much better to be covered by a blog that's part of WSJ and not by the paper, even though the paper is the most widely circulated in the world.

D'oh! That's brilliant, and now I'm kicking myself that I didn't do that.

The editors there may not have gone for that because they can see that our name is Blogmutt everywhere else, but it would have been worth a try.

I'll try that for sure next time.

I don't disagree with any of the other answers, but I have to say the target should always be 250 words. Any less than that, and basically you don't have enough to say to warrant a post.

What I've found is that if I'm struggling to get up to 250, it means I need to think about it more and then when I come back to it I blow past 250 easily.

We had this great, great thing happen which is that the Wall St. Journal quoted me in a story about contract workers. The story (here, and my blog about it here) was awesome, but it had absolutely no link. It got the name of my company right, but the only link comes in a comment that I wrote, and that is on a separate comment page that has not shown up in my Open Site Explorer, or any other tool that I can see for inbound links.

Is there anyway to help Google to understand that the Blogmutt that the WSJ wrote about is the same as the Blogmutt.com on the internet?

I don't imagine there is, but I'd be interested if anyone has any ideas.

Thanks in advance,

(First time posting here)

-Scott