About This Site and How it Can Help You

My name is Tom Campbell. I run a couple of reasonably popular websites, and I sometimes use press releases to increase awareness of my businesses. Press releases resemble news articles. They are written by someone at your direction, then distributed as widely as possible so that media organization can make use of them. Often those organizations will run the ads without change! More commonly they will change a few small elements to make it their own.

 

Press releases are useful for any business or organization interested in achieving any or all of these objectives:

• Getting favorable editorial coverage at low or no cost
• Anyone needing more targeted customers
• Improving search engine presence (making it easier for people to find your organization when they type related words into a search engine

Getting the Most Out of Press Release Distribution

This site is the result of an attempt to find the best way to get wide distribution of a press release with the fewest resources.

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As a businessman I like knowing how to get the best job done using the fewest resources required to do it well. When I release a new product I wanted to know how to spread the word most efficiently. Traditionally press releases have gone to newspapers, magazines, and TV stations. Now we can use the Internet to spread the word to those same organizations, but what's the best way? I built this site because I wanted answers to the following questions:

Which press release distribution sites resulted in the best submissions?

There are many places that take press releases and many submission services offer to submit to hundreds or thousands of them, but I wanted to understand how best to use the Pareto Principle: finding the 20% of the sites that get 80% of the work done for me. I did not restrict myself to free sites. An impressive number of high quality options are avaiable for the budget-constrained user, but most businesses or organizations of substance understand it's worth a few hundred bucks or so to get the right set of eyes on your site (or physically showing up to your establishment).

How do you determine what the best press release submission sites are?

This is a work in progress. I first used as much quantitative data as I could (such as Quantcast, Compete, and Alexa rankings) to learn what I could about these sites, then added anecdotal evidence from experienced users of these submission sites. I also ran some controlled experiments, attempting to measure the effect on websites before and after press release distribution. Finally, the very existence of this site means that you can contact me with feedback.

How do you write and distribute a press release?

For those new to the press release game I have created some resources to let you get started as quickly as possible, in both writing and submitting your press releases.