PRWeb - Online Press Release Distribution Service

Basically, it's a place where you can post your press release for free, where it will run and be archived in a searchable database on their website.

You can also receive extra features and services by "contributing" money to PRWeb.

So, for $10, you get tracking, showing how many times your release was seen, picked up, emailed to others, and printed using their printing tool.

For more money, you get additional services, the most important being that the more you pay the higher up your ad shows in their listings and that you are included in the RSS feed sent out to reporters and websites requesting that category area.

As I'm looking at it today, the bottom release on their first page has 6 stars. That means they donated $60 (actually, you can get one free start for referring someone else through their site, so maybe they donated $50.) So, if you wanted to be on that first page, you probably need to donate $70.

Does it work? Well, clearly you can get submissions to PRWeb seen lots of times. Those of you who've been around for awhile may remember an article I wrote for GreatPR in March of 2003 entitled "Doing Business In Time Of War." I submitted that article to PRWeb, where it has been seen 4764 times, and selected for publication 364 times. But I can't tell you that it was carried anyplace major that I know about.

Let me show you an example. One of my friends, Joel Comm, posted a release with PRWeb on December 8th, 2003 for his website http://www.dealofday.com/ which offers hot deals on a wide range of products every day (a great site). I encourage you to look at his release (which is actually more of an article than a release - a great idea, by the way!)

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2003/12/prweb93074.htm

His biggest strengths in this release were

1. He contributed $70 plus got an additional star for referring someone which put him in the number 5 spot for the day

2. He had a great headline: "The Twelve Tips of Christmas Shopping Online from DealofDay.com"

He's given me permission to tell you that within 24 hours he had 11,034 reads and 434 pickups for publication. That's not bad! Now he's hoping that his article actually gets run!

Doing a search on Google for key phrases in his article shows that as of right now, Google has picked it up through PRWeb, but not from any other source. That doesn't mean that it's not out there online, as Google may have not yet indexed the listing.

Searching Google for the Doing Business in Time of War artile shows 22 listings, so it was picked up.

I also encouraged Joel to fax the release out to his local media. He did, and spent part of this morning with a reporter putting together a feature! Lesson learned -never let the distribution services do the job you should do yourself. Always make sure, no matter what service you use, that your key press contacts receive your pitch directly from you or your publicist (unless they tell you not to because they're getting it from another source.)

Tags: Online Press Releases