PRWeb established the standard in the online press release space. The company is also responsible for more startup and entrepreneurial successes than you can count.

Really. Ask and I’ll get you a list.

Warm regards,
Mark Alan Effinger

I’d like more info to go on here. Based on your questions, there are a couple of definitions:

Q1: Who’s best/leading at DISTRIBUTING press releases?
A1: PRWeb.com for online distribution and direct-to-journalists. Consider BusinessWire.com (a PRWeb partner) for Public Disclosure PR (public companies). Billboard.com now uses PRWeb’s platform to distribute press releases to both the PRWeb list (and all of their syndication partners)as well as to Billboard’s select list of entertainment journalists and editors.

Q2: Who CREATES the best press releases?
A2: Lee (the voice behind this blog), myself and company, and LOTS of other folks can help you compose winning, search-optimized PR.

PRWeb also has a great in-house team to handle overall PR editing and optimizing. Each of their editors is trained to craft and optimize your press release to work well on the web — PRWeb’s area of expertise.

Let me know if that answers your questions, and feel free to connect with any additional questions.

Best regards,
Mark Alan Effinger
THoughtOffice.com

Woodcs82@gmail.com

Thanks….I appreciate the advice.

B. Rock

1) B. Rock: Is there a free press service worthy at all? Maybe. It depends what you want. If you’re looking to gain online visibility, credibility and brand positioning, I suggest you maybe look for a budget item you can pull from to purchase inexpensive press release distribution ($80-$200 per release is pretty affordable. I pull from my online marketing budget, Starbuck’s budget, and I quit smoking 32 years ago, saving me a bunch of money that I can use to fund my PR and press release distribution efforts).

In counseling many hundreds of startups over the last 20 years, I’ve found so many who weren’t committed enough to their business to forego some of the conveniences they had before their startup in order to achieve success (I’m not pointing fingers: I know nothing of you or your business, just my experience).

I literally lived in the back of a health club, in the garage, when I built and sold my first company. Those 35 degree winter nights were enough to keep my nose to the grindstone and make that company come alive.

That, and I really wanted a toilet within the same building.

2) Christian: Glad you’re having success with your preferred service. I used the service in 2003, and as I was reading through their site, realized the level of plagiarism they had stooped to challenged my integrity. I made numerous emails to the founders, with no response (I was seeking to purchase or partner with them at the time, and maybe help clean up their system a bit).

To no avail. I’m not anti these folks. I’m sure they’re probably OK guys. But I have a personal challenge when it comes to integrity issues in regards to how they run their business. As a real cheerleader for startups, I want to see innovation coupled to integrity. Blatant ripoff’s of the leading online PR platform, word-for-word, does the industry a disservice.

Just my two cents.
Best of success,
Mark Alan Effinger
http://www.ThoughtOffice.com

And just keep in mind: we won’t be returning with a tan or any other indication that we left home.

If you’re really lucky, we might send you some SWAG.

best,
ME

One element I believe many SEO folks might miss (forgive me if I’m steeping on anyone’s toes here): Spamming a release or releases through multiple wire services is more than wrong: you’re missing the layered SEO value, and losing SEO value through duplicate content.

One of the technical elements I picked up early (about the 6th release I did for a client using PRWeb), is that each release within the same RSS feed becomes a link on the bottom of the current release.

So by staying on PRWeb, I’ve created a stack of releases for each category that jump out at the reader (and at the search engines) and beg to be read. I can directly show the momentum this approach brings to my client’s bottom line in terms of sales.

It’s a powerfully simple element that David McInnis implemented very early on.

Have a great week, Lee. Will I see you at Blog Business Summit?

best,
Mark Alan Effinger
http://www.ThoughtOffice.com

I first used PRWeb in 2000 and then really started using it again frequently in 2003 in combination with SEO campaigns. Now we send 15 – 40 releases per month.(for clients)

Without getting great results, we wouldn’t be committing that kind of volume to any single wire service.

Thanks for the insights from your worldview.

I performed a competitive analysis for a European PR event last year, including PRWeb and eWorldWire.

I was personally a bit confused as to the results: eWorldWire had so little real PR and online PR distribution (in comparison) that is made for a pretty lopsided report. The report included:

1) Total mentiones in search engines
2) Total mentions in Blog Searches/Technorati
3) Total RSS feed distributions/syndications
4) Total mentions in News search engines
5) Alexa and Hitwise traffic rankings
6) Press statistics for individual press releases

In only one spot did eWorldWire come close to PRWeb: PRWeb’s AmbosMedios (PRWeb’s Spanish-speaking newswire). In that case, eWorld’s English news beat PRWeb’s Spanish news by a hair.

As for “media credibility”, I’ve walked the halls of too many tradeshows, spoken with too many corporate and individual users, and continue to write and distribute PR daily through PRWeb, with outstanding results both on and offline. I believe that there is still some resentment from old-school PR folks on their disintermediation via web-centric PR. But that’s regarding ALL online releases, not just PRWeb.

If you’d like to chat more, please feel free to email me directly and I’ll be glad to cover this in more detail.

Warm regards,
Mark Alan Effinger
http://www.ThoughtOffice.com