We’ve been taking the time to create press releases meant for online publications about the recent live events we’ve done using our Twitterface tool, with some good results. 

Lisa began this practice while at LightThread using a variety of paid and free online PR channels and trackingresults. She experienced the best results from prlog.org, obtaining front page search results within 24 hours of release and months later continuing to get front page search results. Prlog also makes it easy to link on your Facebook profile in addition to bookmarking through Delicious.

The benefits of doing this are:

• Backlinks to your site helps SEO with search engines. You will get linked to from the press release sites and anyone who picks up the story and posts about it from their site.
• People find you and your offer that might not have, otherwise… we’ve seen pretty significant results with this about the Chip Foose-John Deere event we did (they are a big brand after all so that helped) but with every release we’ve sent out, we’ve been surprised at the number of blogs and sites that have found it and posted the information or linked to the release or our site from theirs.
• It formalizes your operations. Last week Lisa zipped off a list to our team of all we have accomplished in the last 8 weeks. It is surprising how far we have come in only the past 2 months since she came on board. These press releases help us see our progress over time and give us a list of “News” items we can refer back to each year to see some of the highlights of what we’ve done.
• It’s free, save a little bit of time writing the release and posting it to the press release sites. Though we will do more formal and traditional paid announcements at various times, using this approach we’re only spending the time it takes to write and polish the release, and it’s well worth it.
• It adds credibility to your small business. Let’s face it… times are tough. Capturing quotes from happy customers and tooting your own horn in a non-pushy way can only help your efforts to sell products or services in a buyer’s market. Every little bit of promotion helps add to the overall number of people who hear about what you’re doing!

In fairness, we have not tried prweb or prleap so do not have comparative results to share. Additional sites that produced front page results upon release were pressreleasepoint.com and prurgent.com.

Keep in mind the free sites take a bit of time to set up your profile but once you use them the first time they are much easier to use again in the future. Please feel free to leave your favorite press release site in the comments section!