Part Two of a Three Part Series

Last time we provided some insights on why you need to add online press releases to your marketing strategy. We offered a few tips on how to write a newsworthy release. Once you have the release written, it’s time to decide which service you’ll use to syndicate it.

Customers often ask us: ‘Which service is the best?’ It’s not really a question of which distribution service is the best, but which one will meet your needs the best. We have used a number of these services and we recommend several of them depending on the client we are working with.

Before we examine some of the features of a few syndication services, we want to provide an important tip that should always be top of mind:

Ensure that the service you are using keeps your press release online permanently. Every so often you’ll run into those that don’t, and if that’s the case, you’ll lose the long term link value.

Now we’ll look at three solid syndication services that offer enough options for any budget and distribution need:

1)    PRLog.com: There are a number of free and low cost services you can use, and we haven’t used all of them. One that we see that is a great value and does get releases into Google News is PRLog. Here is their comparison page so you can rate their features. They offer a very low cost Premium ($49) upgrade to get distribution to news sites, 5 clickable text links vs. 3 plain links in the free model, up to 1500 words max length and up to 10 days prior scheduling. That’s a good deal; especially as the $49 tier is ad free. PRLog offers a more sophisticated Premium Plus level at $399, but that $49 option is very enticing, especially since it offers a good basic set of analytics.

2)    Onlineprnews.com: This service has very helpful editors that respond quickly when you have questions. Here’s their syndication tier comparison page so you can gauge their offerings. We like their $79 level (it’s ad free) as it offers 80% of what their $349 syndication tier offers; even embedded video, images, up to 3 attachments, interactive online report, 40 guaranteed full page syndications (they provide a report with 40 news sites listed that have picked up your release and your release’s link on those sites); and a number of other features. While we really like the $79 tier with onlineprnews.com, their $22 Social Media Press Release is also intriguing. It is ad free, contains sharing buttons, syndicates your headline in RSS feeds, provides 3 anchor text links and offers image embedding. Onlineprnews is a tremendous value for getting your release into Google News and other top news sites.

3)    PRWEB: Their $199 syndication tier gets you a lot for your money: Extensive reach across their network, pickup by Google News, 10 industry and 5 regional news feeds, enhanced blogger visibility, quotables, file attachments, SEO enhancements, embedded news image, and more. PRWEB’s news template is very clean and search engine friendly. Their reporting offers a good selection of key metrics and does link you to a number of the news outlets that have picked up your release so you can see the links. As a venerable domain on the web (since 1997) and with their variety of syndication tiers and package deals, PRWEB remains a solid value. Check out their $89, $159 and $369 syndication tiers for more options. The $369 tier allows for maximum reach, video embedding and more.

We invite (and really do hope) to hear from additional press release distribution services in the comments below. If you do write, let us know if you leave the link to the release up permanently, what tiers of distribution you offer (or link us to your distribution options comparison page) and tell us the main advantage you offer your customers; we really want to know, so tell us!!

Next time: In the final installment of this series (we’ll post it in the next few days) we’ll discuss how to optimize your press releases for maximum search engine visibility.