Online Marketing Blog

Press releases were originally designed as a communication tool between company PR staff or public relations firms and the media. But now that online news sites such as Yahoo News and Google News contain such an abundance of press release content and RSS makes it easy to syndicate news, press releases can be effectively used as a direct to consumer communication tool.

Not only are press releases an effective tool for distributing content to the media and consumers, they can easily be syndicated creating a excellent opportunity to attract incoming links. Some of the press releases our SEO firm optimizes and distributes have gained as few as 30 unique domain name links and some have garnered over 500 – all from a single press release.

After announcing that PRWeb was going to discontinue their free press release distribution service, there was quite a bit of buzz in the search marketing and PR blogosphere. Some people considered it as suspiciously financially motivated and too soon after the acquisition by Vocus. However most people, myself included, believe this is an excellent move for PRWeb.

Too many companies were abusing the free wire service to send out less than credible announcements. I’ve always believed that the credibility of the newswire is almost entirely dependent upon the quality of news releases that they distribute.

I sent a few questions to PRWeb CEO David McInnis to get a more formal response and clarification on what was behind the decision to discontinue free press release distribution, whether PRWeb will start charging for their other free services and to ask about some of the new features coming out including an ebook publishing service and enhanced press release metrics.

PRWeb announced today that they are now offering a service that will allow their press release distribution clients the ability to map the company domain name to the RSS feed of the release hosted by PRWeb.

When you submit a press release through PRWeb and associate that press release with a RSS Group in the PRWeb control panel, the release is then published as part of an RSS feed. This feed url can be pinged to the RSS search engines and also used in an auto discovery tag for RSS feeds in the company web site. That way RSS enabled browsers and feed readers can automatically detect the company press release RSS feed and subscribe to it, even if they do not have a blog.

Today PRWeb officially announced the launch of their support of trackback functionality with press releases. While press releases have traditionally been used to announce news to the media, PRWeb has pioneered a direct to consumer model that allows companies to announce news to a broad audience using PRWeb’s distribution channels.

The addition of trackback functionality creates a link between bloggers and press releases in a way that is not found elsewhere. Now when a blog comments and cites a press release distributed via PRWeb, it can send a trackback to the release, which will in turn create a link back to the blog.