Utilizing Online Press Releases

The value of doing a press release is the exposure of your newsworthy items to a large crowd that would otherwise not know about your efforts. The phones are not going to ring off the hook, but as our analysis below show, there are benefits.

The secondary value is the improvement you gain in composing your thoughts about your company. Writing about your company is important. Blogging is one thing, but when you issue a press release, you are literally saying "PUBLISH THIS" and it has caused me to be more aware of my message.

The Trial Balloon

Using my release Trends, Taste & Travel Goes Podcasting as an example, let's explore the experience of these two different services and the overall advantage of doing a press release.

PRWeb - www.prweb.com - tracks the performance of your release via "views". I submitted my release on 9/14/05. I spoke with someone at PRWeb and the term "view" was defined as the combination of page views from the web site, views from the various RSS feeds, and views from their network of emails. They also track the "Printer Friendly Version" and "Email this story to a colleague" buttons on the release. PRWeb offers an upgrade for a minimum contribution of $10 and on up. I was pleased with the $30 level because my release showed up in Yahoo! News and Google News within a few hours of the release time.

PR.com - www.pr.com - free business registration and submission of press releases. I submitted my release on 9/17/05. However, I found their site to be a bit cumbersome and have a long laundry list of items they wanted completed. The benefit is that apparently they have many subscribers. I was able to find my release through them coming up in search engines with a few days - and not just on their site.

The Results

As of this writing, 9/24/05, I am seeing decent results in the search engines. When I type in the phrase "Travel Goes Podcasting" in quotes (necessary because of the ampersand special character), I received 583 results in Google, 6 results in Yahoo, 133 results in MSN, and 12 results in Altavista.

PRWeb.com reports the press release was viewed 115,539 times. 550 of those views were by what they estimate as "Pickups" which tracks media outlet views. I would guess they do this by email address or known IP addresses. The release had 7 prints and 1 forwarded email (which was me).

I could not find statistical data on PR.com.

My business site typically gets about 25 hits a day (average over the last few months). This went up to mid-40s right away and did go into the 50s per day (I put out another release on this past Monday). Both sites (www.cyemerus.com and www.parkerwebdevelopers.com) both experienced a temporary surge in link popularity as the release went out. As of this writing, the link popularity has returned to previous levels on Cy's site. Also, my hit count on my business site has returned to the mid-20s.

We did see a 10% gain in podcasting views and subscriptions, which at the end of the day is a payoff. Neither of us got a call from a potential customer or a writer, but we were both able to use the press release in three different sales calls (1 for Cy, 2 for me). I see this as another payoff. Finally, I was encouraged enough with the perceived value of the release to my sales team, that I issued another. The feedback I am getting is that it is good to have these to refer to as almost historical data. There is also some level of legitimacy perceived by potential clients when your article is showing up on Yahoo! News and such outlets.

Darryl Parker is the founder and President of Internet marketing and Charlotte web site design firm Parker Web Developers. This series on web marketing is intended to present useful tips for business owners and decision makers. The series precedes an upcoming book compiling these topics. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Making Your RSS Feed Look Pretty in a Browser

O'Reilly Network

To make your RSS feed look pretty, you add a stylesheet to the feed. There are two types of stylesheets you could use here. The first, using XSL, is more complicated, but does give the potential for some powerful features; you could convert links within the feed into clickable links in the browser, for example.

The second, which we will explore here, uses CSS. CSS can't do anything but change the display of the feed, but it's much simpler, and most web designers know at least a little CSS.

Wikis, Weblogs and RSS: What Does the New Internet Mean for Business?

Knowledge@Wharton


FROM THE WEBSITE:
The Internet may be entering a new phase that will decentralize control inside companies, enable employees to collaborate more easily, and drive efficiency. But corporations that want to use the web strategically to build corporate value will not just need to make radical cultural changes, they may also need to master a new vocabulary with terms such as Wikis (software that allows anyone to update and edit web pages instantly and democratically); Weblogs (online journals more commonly known as blogs); and RSS (really simple syndication) feeds, which distribute content from the Internet.

Arcane as these terms may sound to anyone but the initiated, the technology behind them is hardly fancy. Wikis, blogs and RSS feeds are relatively simple tools that will have a huge impact on the way people -- and companies -- communicate and do business. So how is the Internet changing? How can companies seek to understand the technological effects of these changes? And what cultural adaptations should companies make to capture value from these new tools?

Read and learn about your future.

the cool hunter & other cool blogs

Surely one of the coolest looking blogs around...

Other cool blogs you may want to see are:
LifeHacker
43 Folders
Return of Design (Web Color Schemes)
Poloroid-o-nizer
and...
RSS Newsniche which has an article called "The great RSS land grab"
According to Feedburner in a recent interview some interesting RSS metrics came to light. Based on a large sample of 60,000 publishers there shows a weekly growth of subscribers to feeds of 5 percent. This rate of growth is quite impressive for such a relatively new media.

Is RSS advertising -- placing ads in 3rd party RSS feeds -- the next hot media buy?

MarketingSherpa.com : Practical News & Case Studies on Internet Advertising, Marketing & PR

...now that Google's started putting AdSense ads into RSS feeds, and major news sites such as USAToday.com and NYTimes.com are seeing double-digit monthly leaps in RSS-usership, we bet reach won't be a problem by 2006.

Interested? Check out our exclusive behind-the-scenes look at how Citrix's GoToMeeting just tested RSS and Podcasting ads:

Use RSS Feeds to Improve Search Engine Optimization and Ranking

By Matt Foster

Keys to Website Promotion

Search engine optimization and Online marketing

Among the things mentioned are these:

- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Ezine (Online Newsletter) Publishing
- Business Blog
- Article Writing

About Business Blogging this is what is said:
Blogging for online business is quickly becoming one of the best web site traffic generators you can find that doesn’t have to cost you anything. You invest your time learning how blogging works for business then you set up your blog and start using the information you have learned to generate targeted traffic to your website. If

A blog with strong titles, quality content and strategic pinging plus rss feeds will be your key to fast search engine indexing, traffic to your blog that can funnel traffic directly to your business website.

And about Article Writing:
Writing articles with a strong resource box is your best free web site traffic generator. Due to its viral nature on the internet, articles that are published on websites and in newsletters of other ezine publishers will bring your website traffic. With each new article and publishing, your articles will reach more people building both traffic and branding You as an expert. With each article you write, your first stop is EzineArticles which is a high traffic article database used by webmasters and newsletter publishers to find fresh content. EzineArticles (http://www.ezinearticles.com) also publishes your articles in a search engine friendly format that lets internet surfers find the information they are seeking.

'Podcasting' Link Roundup For Saturday, May 28th, 2005

How To Blog For Fun & Profit! :: T. L. Pakii Pierce
(See Pierce's blog for hyperlinks to articles)
"Podcasting's First Aggregated Network"
An Attempt To Demystify Podcasting (A Work In Progress)
Blogging Meets Podcasting
Future of Podcasting
GM Experiments With Podcasting
It's nice to see a review of podcast styles. Why not slow down and take a look at what makes this me...
Jupiter Analysts Podcasting
Marketplace: Podcasting Is the Next Big Thing
Measuring Podcasting's Growth
More Female Podcasters
Podcast Hosting
S&P Says Podcasting Threatens Audble
The Lowdown on Podcasting
Thinking about podcasting
Two more thoughts about podcasting

And here is his 'Blogging' Link Roundup.
4 million blogs in China: report
Autoblogger: Get Started Not Blogging
Blogdigger Local: New Twist on Local Search
Blogging about Products
BlogPulse Intros Clickable Trend Charts
Bursting the Blog Bubble? I think Not
Google AdSense Blog?
Google Paying Bloggers $50 to Blog for an Hour
Media will change more in the next five years than it has in the past 50 years
MSN Unveils Social Media Tools at Day 2 Keynote
Politicial Blogs Cause Bias in Google News Coverage
Ripping on the Blog Coaches
the Long Tail is indeed full of crap
The Six Figure Challenge
Wall St Journal Tech Report on Mainstream Media's Future Ignores Impact of Blogs
White paper -- The corporate blogosphere
WordPress Blogs excluded from Adsense in RSS Feed

Internet and Business Online Blogging

Blog Soup Directory

-Many interesting and pertinent articles, including:
-Blogging Policies, Does Your Business Need One?
-The 7 Steps to Promoting Your RSS Feeds on Your Website
-Creating A Basic RSS Feed For Your Site
-5 Surefire Basic Methods to use in Promoting Your Blog
-RSS For Fresh Content & Better Ranking
-Strategies to Make Your Blog More Interesting
-7 Tips for Successful Blogging
-RSS Feeds Explosion
-Making Money with RSS Feeds
...and more.

Blog Advertising Network

CrispAds
With CrispAds, you can create effective text based ads that are distributed to millions of blogs and their associated RSS or ATOM feeds world-wide. Blog advertising is a brand new advertising channel that is emerging as a highly targetted, effective advertising medium.

Trying to find a feed? Try Feedfinder

Feedster :: RSS Search Engine :: Feedfinder

Not to be confused with Feedfinger.

Blogopaedia

Some useful links for bloggers:

All Consuming - aggregates what the weblog community is reading.
Annotated New York Times, The - tracks blog postings that cite articles published by The New York Times.
blogcount.com - Blogcount asks: How big is the blogosphere? What is its shape, color, true nature? Blogcount catalogs efforts to answer these questions. We collect and organize the best reports and analyses on this subject.
Blogdex - Blogdex is a research project of the MIT Media Laboratory tracking the diffusion of information through the weblog community. Ideas can have very similar properties to a disease, spreading through the population like wildfire. The goal of Blogdex is to explore what it is about information, people, and their relationships that allows for this contagious media.
Blogdigger : RSS / Atom Search Engine - Search Blogs Blogdigger is a search engine for blogs. Blogdigger uses state of the art syndication technologies, such as RSS and Atom, to index blog content and make it available for search. Blogdigger also makes all search results available in RSS or Atom, so users can subscribe to keyword searches and automatically be notified, via the News Aggregator of their choice, of new content pertaining to their interests. Blogdigger searches thousands of RSS and Atom feeds, and is built-in to many popular News Aggregators, such as FeedDemon and NetNewsWire.
Blogdigger also uses it's vast collection of blog content for novel applications:
Blogdigger Groups is a state-of-the-art online aggregator, providing RSS or Atom feed grouping into a single configurable page. A Group can be filtered either by blog or by keyword, and content is exported in RSS, RDF, Atom, OPML and OCS, making it the richest and most full-featured feed splicing tool available.
Blogdigger Link Search provides backlink checking, seeing which posts are linking to other online content, tracking the conversation as it evolves.
Blogdigger Media provides RSS feeds of recent media content for many well known media types (WindowsMedia, MP3, QuickTime, BitTorrent) that support RSS 2.0 enclosures. Subscribers to the Media feeds are automatically pushed links to media content of their choice.
BlogPulse - automated trend discovery for weblogs mined daily from new entries in over 80,000 blogs using machine learning and natural language processing techniques.
blo.gs
blogsearchengine.com
BlogShares - Fantasy Blog Share Market
BlogStreet : Blog Profiles, RSS Ecosystem, Blog Tops, Search and ...BlogStreet. BlogStreet India login faq. Blog Profile, RSS Ecosystem, Search &Directory, Blog Tops. Blog Profile, RSS Ecosystem, Search and Directory
Bloogz The Blog Search Engine: Bloogz The Blog Search Engine. ... Weblogs, Url. Search Blogs in. Italian, English,German, Español, French. All languages Order by Relevance
Daypop Top 40 Links - regularly updated list of links that are currently popular with webloggers from around the world.
eatonweb portal
Globe of Blogs An index of weblogs as submitted by their authors. ... Globe of Blogs.
Intelliseek - Marketing Intelligence, Business IntelligenceUsing cutting edge technology, Intelliseek helps F1000 companies transformunstructured data into relevant, actionable insights.
memeorandum - following the latest meme of the political and news blogs.
Myelin: Blogging Ecosystem - ranks blogs that are the most linked and the most prolific linkers.
Popdex - web site popularity index.
PubSub PubSub is the world's first Internet-scale matching engine
Truth Laid Bear Blogosphere Ecosystem, The - application which scans weblogs once daily and generates a list of weblogs ranked by the number of incoming links they receive from other weblogs on the list.
Waypath - Blog Discovery Engine
Weblog BookWatch - tracks links to books and other media appearing on weblogs.
Weblogs, Inc. Weblogs, Inc. is dedicated to creating trade Weblogs (aka “blogs”) across niche industries in which user participation is an essential

Six out of seven sales resulting from search come from natural search traffic

DMNews.com | News | Article

Give visitors what they want.
Keep it simple.
Direct traffic.
Provide a map.
Create a buzz.

"There are also blogs and RSS feeds to consider for buzz. Blogs and feeds have become a primary source of information for millions of people, many of whom are decision makers and influencers in their fields. Consider syndicating feeds for product information, company news and even special promotions. If you have expertise in a specific area, share it on a blog. Encourage a blog-friendly policy for employees. They could end up being your best marketing channel. "

Tagvertising Blogging 2 0

webpronews

As you read this, millions of individuals are working under their own volition to create a new Dewey Decimal System for the internet.
excerpt:
The consumer phenomenon is called "tagging" or "folksonomies" (short for folks and taxonomy). Tagging is powerful because consumers are creating an organizational structure for online content. Folksonomies not only enable people to file away content under tags, but more importantly also share it with others by filing it under a global taxonomy that they created.

Here's how tagging works. Using sites such as del.icio.us - a bookmark sharing site - and Flickr - a photo sharing site - consumers are collaboratively categorizing online content under certain keywords, or tags. For example, an individual can post photographs of their iPod on Flickr and file it under the tag "iPod." These images are now not only visible under the individual user's iPod tag but also under the broader community iPod tag that displays all images consumers are generating and filing under the keyword. As of this writing, Flickr has more than 3,500 photos that are labeled "iPod."

Tagging is catching on because it is a natural complement to search. Type the word "blogs" into Google and it can't tell if you are searching for information about how to launch a blog, how to read blogs, et cetera. But using del.icio.us you can bookmark this page or subscribe to its RSS feed. Then, everyday you will find the latest interesting links consumers are finding and sharing about blog marketing. Now imagine you run a blog marketing consultancy and you want to advertise to users who follow these tags. This is what's we'll see this year as tagvertising takes hold.

CNET Networks Announces BNET, www.bnet.com, the Resource for Self-Motivated Business Leaders

BNET has amassed nearly 50,000 high-quality whitepapers, case studies, Webcasts, and audiocasts. Additionally, the site offers targeted email alerts and newsletters, hand-selected RSS feeds, and business blogs, including its award-winning "Leadership Now" blog.

Who Let the Blogs Out? Greensboro News & Record and the Piedmont Bloggers

Greensboro is in the heart, and mind, of North Carolina...and the world.

The prestigious Editor & Publisher magazine has been covering the revolution taking place in Greensboro, North Carolina, the main characters being their bold and open-minded major newspaper, The News & Record, and the local bloggers, chief of whom is Ed Cone, whose name has long decorated buildings, estates, hospitals, highways, factories, colleges and universities(among other things) , and whose vision is largely responsible for the world changing in our midst...

Here are some excerpts...but you really need to read both parts to get the big picture.

- Editor

Letting the Blogs Out
Why a daily in Greensboro, N.C., decided to get "a little radical" and create an online "town square." Now it's getting national attention. Part 1 of 2.
(via Ed Cone )

excerpts:
NEW YORK (March 14, 2005) -- John Robinson is an unlikely revolutionary. He's the establishment, really. For the last six years he's been editor of the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., where he's worked for two decades. And he certainly doesn't like the implication he's some kind of radical. "It's kind of embarrassing," he says, "as I sit here in a suit and tie and short hair." But to those who spend time thinking about how, even if, newspapers will survive in a super-connected, empowered, non-intermediated, and — here's the word — blogified world, John Robinson is on the barricades.

What's Robinson doing? Merely redesigning his paper's Web site. But he's doing it in a way that also reconsiders the print newspaper, its staff, and most important, the relationship between the paper and its community. He's incorporating more Web logs and increased transparency in an attempt to create, virtually, what the News & Record folks call a town square. When the paper's overhaul is complete, it may be a model for the sort of 21st century paper that many journalism big thinkers have been talking about, chewing over, and confabbing on for the last few years. Greensboro will be the first place where this conceptually newfangled newspaper actually exists.
...

Enter the ' town square'

Greensboro is a city of 230,000 residents and three colleges in North Carolina's north-central Guilford County. There's a mix of Old South conservatism and college-town progressivism; it's a John Kerry county in a comfortably red state.

The News & Record, owned by Landmark Communications, is the dominant media presence in the market. There's also a thriving blog scene, best demonstrated by Greensboro101.com, a bustling and popular "online citizen's alternative media hub," as Roch Smith Jr., its founder, terms it. Tension between Greensboro's old-money culture and a certain "rebelling undercurrent," says Smith, has helped drive the blog movement there.

News & Record editor Robinson blogs. So do several local officials. Smith's Greensboro101.com lists 50-odd local bloggers.

...

Also in late August, egged on by Ed Cone, a nationally known tech writer and blogger and a Greensboro local who contributes a weekly column to the News & Record, Robinson started blogging, "just to learn, really," he says. Cone didn't just work his magic on Robinson; when asked why Greensboro became so bloggy, Roch Smith says, "Two words: Ed Cone. He's an excellent blogger."

Letting the Blogs Out, Part Two

excerpts:
NEW YORK (March 16, 2005) -- News & Record Editor John Robinson asked for advice on his plans to bloggify the newspaper from a likely source: Lex Alexander, who has been at the News & Record since 1987.

He's been a reporter and an editor there, and, for the last year, he's headed a three-person investigations team for which he both reported and edited. He's also, basically by default, the newsroom's go-to guy on the intersection of journalism and technology. "This is ironic," he notes, "because I'm an English major, and I know nothing about computers." He's been blogging on and off since 1997 and continuously since April 2002, at a News & Record blog called "The Lex Files." Robinson tasked Alexander with figuring out how best to create online the town square City Editor Mark Sutter had envisioned.

Alexander, like any good blogger, then asked the world what it thought about plans to build a true public square. "We plan to take some large steps, soon, toward building an open-source, online community," he wrote.

The response was overwhelming. Bloggers locally and nationwide threw in their two cents, as did readers of the News & Record, editors elsewhere, press critics, and media thinkers. On Dec. 23, only a week after Alexander put out his query, he turned in his report.
...
Alexander lumped the suggestions into five categories: community, interactivity, site additions and alterations, and revenue.

Among the specific ideas:

Community bloggers, reporting on local sports teams and neighborhoods, and a consumer affairs reporter/blogger drawn from the current staff.

More interactivity, from something as simple as easily available RSS feeds of news and sports headlines to more in-depth efforts, like bio pages and blogs for everyone on staff, where reporters can discuss stories they're working on and why they made certain decisions.

Innovations like an interactive assignment desk that follows up on readers' story ideas; letters to the editor and obituaries restructured as blogs, allowing room for feedback and tributes.

Outlinks from all news stories to the sources for facts, information, and assertions; and feedback sections on each article, which the reporter must read and, where appropriate, respond to.

Alexander even suggested blog coverage of editorial-board meetings and news budget meetings. "Doing nothing is not an option," he says. "All the trends say that if we continue to do business the way we've been doing business, we're going to be out of business in a generation or two, tops."

He sees dramatically shifting the way newspapers work as a business necessity. "And," he adds, if the model changes as he's suggesting, "we're going to get better journalism out of it — better sources, better stories. What we do is going to more accurately reflect the way people live their lives in this community, and we're going to raise the communities trust level in us" — something that, today, is becoming increasingly necessary.

Commentators are exceedingly supportive. "They are charting a new course," NYU's Jay Rosen tells E&P. "That's why I'm excited."
...
The exciting part, everyone seems to agree, is the process. "Man, it's an exciting time to be in journalism," Robinson wrote in the blog post that introduced this project. On the phone, he sounds almost like an eager j-schooler, excited just to be figuring out how best to reach people.

"The goal is — you know, as I sit here and think about this, it sounds really hokey — the goal is what every journalist's goal is: to spread the news and to get people talking about the stuff that's important and what's happening in their community. If I have to do that online, I'll do it online. If I can do it in the newspaper, I'll do it in the newspaper. We want to help people make smart decisions for their life, and help give them the information they need to participate in democracy."

Ed Cone, the freelance tech journalist in Greensboro who turned Robinson onto blogs all those years ago, the man who in some ways got this whole thing rolling, is happy, at least, that the process is finally happening in his backyard.

"There's nothing unique about Greensboro, that this couldn't happen elsewhere, with other newspapers," he says. "There's not some hothouse environment, there's not some unique situation, the water's not different."

(Hear that, Jude? The water is not different...as you once suggested. )

Stroplog: Small Business Blogs

The name of the trend: Business blogs.
Blogs are the new must-have tool for business. Even Bill Gates has shown his support for blogs. He points out the possibilities of blogging, and specifically mentions the merits of rss feeds. "

Benefits of blogging

New Communication: in the days when emails get deleted before being opened, blogging offers a new way of communicating with customers and potential customers. By subscribing to your RSS feeds customers can get notified everytime you update your site, and visit when it's convenient to them. You dont have to impose upon your customer at all!

Customer Focus: by updating regularly you keep yourself in the customer focus. You are demonstrating that you're a current business, important in the days of site-rot and bankrupt companies with websites that survive them. Moreover you can demonstrate you latest services easily: if you're a clothes business you can talk about new ranges, and you favourite picks, a IT consultancy can talk about the latest virus, and give tips on cleaning up. You can demostrate that you are knowledgble and professional, and that you keep up to date. As a small business this can be done in a easy-going manner that will tie in with the personal relationship you will invariably have/develop with your customers.

Easy Customer Interaction: Blogs allow an easy way to contact you, and indeed interact with you. The effort can also be time saving. If a potential customer has an enquiry about a product or service they may not bother to email or phone you, but they might click "comment" and ask there. Once they've done that their enquiry, and importantly your response, will be there for other customers to read. It demonstrates professionalism, care for the customer, and is another way of helping and supporting your clients.

What blogging [is] about is that you make it very easy to write something, like an e-mail, but it goes up onto a Web site. And then people who care about that get a little notification. If you care about dozens of people whenever they write about a certain topic, you can have that notification come into your Inbox and it will be in a different folder, and it doesn't interfere with your normal Inbox.
Bill Gates (edited), Microsoft.com

"Before blogs, it was difficult for small companies to afford a way to stay in touch with their customers. Now they can," says marketing consultant Jack Trout. "It's a great marketing tool."
Matthew Foge in Inc Magazine