The question becomes one of return on investment. Calculating this with traditional releases which are faxed or emailed is difficult. Certainly if the story gets picked up you can assume that the investment was worth the time and trouble. How many releases are you sending out the traditional way; though, that never get picked up? How many never even get read by the reporters who you’re hoping to influence to write about your story?

With an online press release you can always measure your roi. True, some press release distribution services either don’t give you statistics or make you distribute your press release at a higher dollar value than you’re comfortable with to get those statistics, but you can always measure how many people came to your site from clicking a link in the press release.

Chances are that you will find every time you do a press release (if you know how to maximize its reach) that it is getting read and you are getting visitors. My suggestion is that you keep sending releases out to the news departments because you can hit real grand slams when they make the media, but that you also distribute at least one a month via online channels.

When I submitted my press release I did what I always do to get maximum visibility I targeted all the rss/news feeds that PRWeb would allow.  If you’ve never done an online press release, you may not know that there are two ways people (be they reporters or anyone else) are going to find out about your news.  They can search Google and Yahoo! News for the topics they are interested in or they can sign up for news feeds.  PRWeb has well over a hundred news feeds that you can choose from.  The trick in my opinion is to go as wide as possible.  So for example when I did the release on Tuesday I chose search engine marketing under the business category, nonprofits, miscellaneous, Websites, and small businesses.  That meant anyone streaming any of those news feeds from PRWeb would get my story.

Of course, I also took advantage of the two primary keywords I was optimizting the press release for search engine optimization and nonprofit.  This way anyone not familiar with PRWeb but signed up for news feeds with Google or Yahoo! news on either of these topics would also see the release.

What do I mean by this well the release went out a week ago on September 3rd.  Today I checked to see how many pages it had spiraled into and Google has 133 instances for a unique sentence in it.  Now I haven’t checked each of those pages, but from the way I wrote it and the sentence that is appearing my client can anticipate 133 new links to his website in just over a week.  Considering that it was  a new site this is amazing for him.

Here’s a little tip if you’re writing your own press release – try to get a link to your site in the summary.  This will significantly increase the number of links coming back to your site.

Lately I’ve been looking into alternative places to submit press releases. PRWeb is a my favorite source, but I am always wanting to keep options open. That’s how I came across AC. At first glance they looked pretty good. I ran across a story in the news about a researcher at UT Southwestern Medical Center who had found a mouse model that may help explain autism. Now I am guessing that UT Southwestern did not submit this press release to Associated Content, but rather that they slurped it from the UT site. Either way with my FireFox extensions turned on I was able to quickly see that the outgoing links in the release had been marked as rel=”nofollow”, so that any potential goodness for a linkback (the least AC could do for using the content in the first place was robbed from UT).

Now, I’ve never submitted a press release or article to Associated Content and I never will so why am I so steamed about what they’re doing? If they just nofollowed it, that would be one thing, but what they are doing is sticking links in the content to other pages on the Associated Content site. These are links that weren’t included in the press release in the first place but were slipped in by Associated Content. The Rain Main Mice release for example had a link where the words “United States” appeared naturally in the article to a completely unrelated article titled: “Is Free Trade Killing the United States? Myths of Free Trade Revealed.” Now clearly this is way off topic and hopefully it is caught by Google filters as nothing but a spam link, but imagine a press release on mortgage default and how AC could manipulate that story for lots of links back to other content on the AC site related to mortgages.

Clearly what Associated Content “The People’s Media” is doing here is little more than link spam – and worst of all – if you have ever submitted anything to them, they are using your hard work to do it.