My First Press Release

March 2, 2007 Posted by Tyler Cruz

Sorry for the delay in updating, folks. I’ve been feeling extra-lethargic lately and have been spending most of my time finishing unpacking (should be completely done soon) and.. well.. playing World of Warcraft. If anyone out there plays on Crushridge, let me know… 😉

  • My First Press Release
  • Monkey See, Monkey Do
  • MMA Lookalikes

My First Press Release

I’ve been wanting to test out doing a press release for a while now, only I didn’t have a decent story to test a release on. A few days ago, though, I decided to try my first press release to announce my $1000 PublisherForums contest.

I don’t know a lot about press releases and marketing and such, but the thought of issuing a press release to literally thousands of media outlets just made too much sense to me. My thought was that if only one reporter decided to write a story on the release, that it’d be money well spent.

Anyhow, I used PRWebdirect.com, which is kind of a premium service of PRWeb.com. I did a bit of research and PRWeb is definitely one of the top, if not the top, online PR companies. It was also recommended to me through Aaron Wall’s SEOBook.com blog, and to me personally by Eric Ward from URLWire.com.

I opted for their cheapest package, which was $169, for this was my first press release and I didn’t want to commit $400-700 on something I’ve never used before.

I wasn’t expecting a lot… I knew that my release wasn’t the most groundbreaking news in the world.. just a $1000 forum posting contest, but I did write it myself and if I may say so, wrote it pretty well. My prediction was that I would receive 3-6 good, high authority backlinks and a bunch of small, mostly meaningless backlinks.

About an hour or two after paying online with my credit card, PRWebdirect phoned me, confirming my press release and order. The guy I talked to was very friendly and helpful, and suggested I send it out midnight for optimal performance, which I agreed to. If I had wanted to, though, I could have had it sent out immediately.

A few hours later, as midnight struck, I checked and my press release was instantly online. Cool. Within literally a minute or two, my story was already on Yahoo! News! Now, obviously this was done automatically, but still… unfortunately, it appears as though Yahoo has redirect URL links to decrease external PR leakage… but I’m sure it will still benefit me SEOWise nonetheless.

With PRWebdirect, they also give you basic stats, showing roughly how much coverage your release saw. Below is what mine attracted up to now:

So, it looks good, but unfortunately other than Yahoo, being indexed in news.google.com, and a few small worthless other sites, I received absolutely no coverage from my press release.

My conclusion? Well, I’m disappointed that I spent $169 with nothing to show for it, but perhaps there will be SEO benefits that I cannot see yet. Also, I understand that my story wasn’t the best to send a press release out for.

I’m satisfied with the customer support though, and I’ll definitely be trying out another press release soon. I’m not going to give up on issuing press releases after just one try. Also, there are many different packages you can try, some of which are SEO-related. Maybe I’ll try one of those next time, and invest the $350 or so it costs to do that. Oh, there’s even podcast/audio releases where you pay to get interviewed for 5-20 minutes over the phone, and then your release is sent out in audio/interview format. It’s very affordable too.

So, what do you guys know of press releases? Maybe you could enlighten me with some information I could learn from… why was my release so unsuccessful? Etc.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

My friend, the ever-so-popular John Chow, who just announced making $7,011.05 from his blog last month, has an ongoing thread topic titled “Review My Blog”. His simple but smart idea was to offer a backlink to anyone who reviewed and linked to his blog, on their blog.

I knew immediately what his plan was, and it made perfect logic. He was enticing bloggers to review his blog with the fact that he had a high Technorati ranking. For each person that reviewed his site and linked to him, he climbed up the echelon that is Technorati. So, it was a snowball effect: as more people linked to him, it increased his Technorati score, which made even more people want to link to him.

Aside from that, he also gets free backlinks for the search engines, as well as blog traffic through the reviews.

I’m going to have to copy his idea… it’s just too good of an idea not to try. Nobody may review my blog, but I have to try anyways. Thanks John for the idea which I’m now going to steal, and remember, you still owe me lunch!

That being said, I’m hereby announcing that I’ll link back to anyone who reviews my site, in an upcoming post. The review should be at least 200 words and can be positive, negative, or somewhere inbetween. You’ll get the benefit of a backlink from my blog which is ranked 11,389 in Technorati, is PR5, and gets 900-1000 unique visitors per day. E-mail me at tylercruz@gmail.com with your blog’s URL when you’re done.

MMA Lookalikes

I’ll end this entry with some comic relief. Members from my MMAForums.net site created a hilarious thread with MMA fighters and their lookalike celebrity counterparts. Here’s the Digg link, if you enjoy the thread, please help Digg 🙂

Good luck and good earnings!

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Posted: March 2nd, 2007 under My Websites  

9 Responses to “My First Press Release”

  1. Hey Tyler, Care to elaborate a bit on the reviewing idea? Where was John placing his linkbacks?

    Sorry to hear the press release didn’t work out for you, but I’m sure it is a bit too quick to judge on the overall results.

  2. […] And lastly, Tyler Cruz is starting to do a “Review My Blog” thing like John Chow. You review his blog and he’ll link to you in one of his posts. A nice way to boost your PR/Technorati rank and I might even take part in it after the one I did for John proved to be a success. Also, just in case any of you missed it, I’m doing the same thing so if you review my blog let me know via the contact page 🙂 […]

  3. tylercruz says:

    LessThanHumble, view his Review My Blog posts such as http://www.johnchow.com/review-my-blog-batch-25/

  4. […] TylerCruz.com – Looks like another big gun in the online money making business is offering free linkbacks for reviewing his blog. I’ll add that to my list of things to do! […]

  5. XingR says:

    Hi Tyler,

    Thanks for posting the detailed information about the paid press release. Far to many people in this business either don’t try things or else try them and fail to share, even when not all that happy with the results.

    You might like this recent post on Brendon Sinclair’s blog and my comments. Getting national or international exposure isn’t always easy but from a local level (which typically gets picked up nationally if there’s an interesting story) it’s not really that hard to get press coverage.

    http://www.tailored.com.au/2007/03/how-to-get-100000-people-to-read-about.htm

    Especially for the benefit of others reading just remember two things:

    Reporters are typically under the gun to produce, produce, produce. being a reporter is like having 6 blogs, there’s a post due _all_ the time. So if you can offer them something you stand a great chance of getting in print or in front of the camera.

    The “but” to the paragraph above is, a “story” is not that you opened a website business or redesigned your site. A story is “even though it’s banned, online poker buys local 23 year old a class condo”. Or “Six-figure Internet mogul calls Namio home, wouldn’t chose anywhere else.” A printable story is about local people doing something different.

    Buying them lunch has a way of working also … and $169 will buy quite a few business lunches … or one half of John Chow’s lunch LoL.

  6. tylercruz says:

    Hi Dave,

    Good comments, to which I agree. I did know that my $1000 story was at best, a borderline story to send a press release about, but I really wanted to do a release on PublisherForums while I’m still running the contest, to take advantage of it.

    A better story would have been to mention how I brokered a domain for a broker’s share of $23,000, but since there is an NDA, it really takes out all the juicy bits out of the story such as the domain sale price and, of course, the domain!

  7. […] Sometimes press releases don’t work out. Tyler Cruz spent $169 on getting his out there but noone picked it up. Read about it as there are some lessons to take out of this. The problem for him was that his release wasn’t newsworthy – a fact he acknowledges. It was an experiment for him which will prove to be a valuable experience. (For a related post read 7 things you need to know about dealing with the media. ) […]

  8. […] provides a great amount of detail on almost any of the subjects he writes about, his first press release for example. Showing his earnings is always motivating for others trying to earn income online and […]

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