Black Belt Web Marketing.pdf - Costa del Sol

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Exercise 9-9 – Getting Professional Help
In Lesson 2 we recommended that you hire an automatic service to register your site at
hundreds of search engines but to register manually at the search engines that were most
important. Publishing or sending a press release to the media offers a similar choice. Several
of the services summarized below will email your release to hundreds – even thousands – of
editors and reporters. They probably won’t reach the local media or the special interest
media that are aimed at your target audiences.
If you aren’t satisfied with how your media campaign is progressing or feel that you would
rather spend the money to have a PR service perform this function for you, you have
several from which to choose. They will even write your release for you if you want. This is
a way to instantly reach large numbers of the media. Just like your own media campaign,
their success hinges on how good their media list is and if they followed the same steps
putting together their media list that you were told to do in this lesson. These services also
need to have the right contacts and a relationship with the recipients that won’t get their
releases deleted because they appear to be impersonal "bulk releases".
A study of these services was recently done (http://www.urlwire.com/email-releases.html)
by one of the services so it might be a little self-serving. Nevertheless, it gives you insight
into whether or not hiring a service to conduct your media campaign is feasible for you.
Here is a summary of that study:
URLwire: Sends e-mail releases to 300 editors by name who cover the web. It also publishes an
abstract of the release at its web site and enters it at "key Web-based press release
databases". It is most suitable for announcing significant, web-based events. Content of
the release is matched exactly to editor interest profiles so it is "totally customized,
non-automated." Cost is $400-$1000.
PRNewsTarget: this service is suppose to be better for technical or computer-related
announcements than it is for new web sites. It uses an e-mail merge program to send a
"personalized" press release (500 word maximum) to what it considers the best 200 media
outlets for your product. The cost is $395.
Gina – Internet Wire: Better for technical or industry announcements than for web specific
products or services, or non-technical announcements. Your release is e-mailed to
thousands of editors, reporters, and broadcast media for $179. It is also published on the
Lesson 9 Pg. 36