“Understand quickly why your press release may not have given the results you hoped for – and make sure that next time you get more traffic and the type of ROI your stakeholders can be proud of.”
Statement: In the past 12 months, Google’s ad revenue increased 69%, exceeding $50 billion. This reflects just how important online PR and digital marketing became during a time when both sales and business development functions were impacted by AI. Despite this new reality, a small number of businesses defied and neglected huge growth opportunities through insufficient budgets. Many fell for Press Wires who duplicated their content across the web, thinking it will suffice. This document seeks to put matters into perspective”. (Adriaan Brits, CEO, Sitetrail.com)
Most marketing novices go through the following learning curve when they seek to tap into the worlds’ media circles. Even the most experienced CMO’s and directors of communication fell for it once. The fact is that anyone who can remove the following lesson their learning curve will save time and get results much sooner. Here is the all familiar story:
You’ve been told that with a single press release, 5 million readers are 1 click away – and that journalists will be contacted with your release. Industry-created terminologies like a “World Media Directory”, “Mobile News App”, “Global Newswires”, “Earned Media Coverage and Gartner reports”, “Common Cloud Integration” and the all powerful “distribution report” all made it sound too good to be true.
You then ordered a press release and received a fancy report with loads of media names where your news appeared. But upon closer inspection, you saw that it was an exact copy that were merely duplicated. You were told to wait a few days or weeks and eventually more “journalists” will pick up the content.
You watched your analytics and searched Google relentlessly: Only to find that less than 15 visitors were referred to your website in a month and that no other journalist bothered to write another unique version of the news, except for all the “duplicated by newswire” results that were in the report. That is because it was never sent to “journalists”, but just duplicated via a RSS feed onto numerous other sites.
This is not an unfamiliar story: It happens to roughly 140 000 businesses per year. Anyone thinking to build an ecommerce empire and reach the entire world through insufficient means packaged in a fancy report will learn this. Duplicating content relentlessly without adding unique editorial content and littering the web with duplicate NO-Follow anchor texts only leads to costly SEO problems that will need to be resolved in future.
Realistic valuations are important: Earning, buying or owning media has a realistic value that any business should budget to invest in. If these knock-out deals sound to good to be true – it probably is and your analytics will confirm this very soon.
Time is the biggest loss: You may lose only $50 when using a cheap press release service that goes nowhere. But the time you lose to the competition while waiting for results that never come, is the most expensive at all – because THAT is the time when competitors outperform your brand.
If you are ready, let’s take an honest look at why online PR attempts fail and how to get better results:
Google & People trust authentic profiles: If your content shows the name of a newswire on Google News and not an authentic journalist profile, people do not trust it an the SEO value is zero too. Google and readers trust content that was written by impartial experts and that is precisely what a “press release” fails to deliver. This is why we blend in editorial news alongside traditional press release writing and distribution. Unfortunately nobody else in the industry is doing this at the moment.
In that “distribution” report you received, it shows all sorts of names like FOX34, WBOC and so forth. Not a single one of them had editorial involvement. This means that because the content is duplicated, Google will disregard all but the original version that went live first. The only thing it is useful for – is for a $100 startup to add a little image saying “As Seen In The Media”. Your analytics will show over the next few months that nothing else came from it.
Inadequate budgeting will ensure your story remains the best kept secret. Anyone who thought that ecommerce empires and multi-million dollar entities are built on a single $50 press release and that will get them noticed by real journalists and published in big names? Certainly not. Here you can see press release packages that reflect the reality: which is that a lot more effort is justified to create traction.
Great copy + Newsworthy Trends & Competitor Intercept = Clever PR. At the very least, one of your versions should target massive competitor brands and other trending opportunities to shed light on your business. Simply writing one release that focusses on your business alone and not on the broader industry, will not move the mountain.
Persistence + Media Diversity = Dominance. Please remember this formula since both PR and SEO need to be sustained properly so that you have ample repetition in newsfeeds, different stories that can engage. Most important of all, is to use a platform with the added benefit of link diversity for search engine optimization.
Expecting one single action will constitute a magic bullet to improve results drastically? It is not the case. A series of actions are necessary to penetrate the vast opportunities that the well developed global digital landscape offers to go to market. Below we will share a combination of steps and packages that can help you achieve market dominance and an excellent ROI:
Here you will learn how to get a different news author and site to write UNIQUE stories about your business every single week. They will quickly diversify your SEO link profile and start to send more high-converting referral traffic to your site.
Here you will get access to your OWN journalist profile, which will enable you to keep adding UNLIMITED news updates in Google News so that news announcements come at a fraction of the cost. This helps you to dominate the headlines.
Now go for the ultimate goal: Once your business is constantly in the news, hand-pick several industry websites and more special interest sites where guest posts and editorials are allowed. This gives you access to over 100 such opportunities.
Now that your domain authority is improving, it is worth adding high-quality on-site content. Here you can find world-class researchers and writers who will work around the clock to outperform any competitor content.
Sit back and let us run our famous accelerated monthly PR, SEO and strategic digital marketing plan for the best results.
As the agency that runs the biggest media list in the world, connecting businesses with media owners and audiences across continents, we have your back. In our business, transparency is important. Being tempted by $50 and $99 deals that imitate authentic journalism quite poorly, can distract you delay the moment until your brand takes it’s rightful place in the market alongside other brands and competitors.
Follow the above steps and during that process, you will get to interact with our team on an ongoing basis. A new colorful picture will emerge of the path you need to take to victory. It will not be overnight, but the sooner you get onto the right path, the sooner you will arrive at the destination you intended for your business: which is to be seen in the media and search results that appeals to targeted audiences that are waiting to meet your business.
Need PR & editorial writing services only? See our press release writing service.
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