Last year one of the shows we were going to made this offer: We could get a free press release published by PR Newswire.
Now I don’t really care much about press releases. But for this show we actually had news, and were working with another company on a new project. A press release would be great! Of course the PR had to mention that we would be at the show.
A couple of the publishers for that industry did run the press release in their newsletters, and their websites. But the press release was published on another thousand websites.
A thousand websites! Forever, apparently.
We don’t really need our news of corporate cooperation posted at CBS-19, The Eye of East Texas. It’s still there eight months later. If it had a link back to my website, it would at least give me some Google juice.
I can only assume that these 1,000 websites hope that they get some traffic to their sites so that they can earn page-views for their advertisers.
So, what’s the point? Stupid stupid stupid!
Hm…I would love to know more details about the syndication package PR Newswire used for their free offer. My guess is that it was their bottom of the barrel package which didn’t offer the kind of genuine industry exposure their pricier options do.
Not to defend PR Newswire’s choice to publish the release (sans links) to The Eye of East Texas (lol!) – distribution to publications like that is completely useless, and unfortunately, they often make up the bulk of PR syndication providers’ purported “10,000s of trade journalists!”. The POINT is supposed to be links links links!
I agree… this really is a stupid idea.