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I was asked at a workshop if I really thought there was enough value in a service like PRWeb to justify paying for press releases. The person’s point was that his agency puts out a lot of press releases. In his mind sending a release off to the usual suspects of news paper reporters and TV stations is free. In reality if an agency staff person is writing and sending out a press release it will never be free, because that staff person’s time is paid for.

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.