And, to be perfectly up front, I don’t pretend to know anything about public relations. I’ve read a book and scoured the web, including some resources from PRWeb itself. I’m still exploring what will be effective, as you can tell by reading my recent discussion about the state of the newspaper industry.

The right timing

First I should mention timing. I think mine was off a little bit. The book I read about submitting press releases suggested that holidays, and especially the week between Christmas and New Year’s day, can be the best time to get press. The author of the book worked in television and from his book it seems the majority of the features he did were the same day. He did his research very early and went out to get the latest news as it happened (or as close to the time it happened as possible).

News may work differently from one medium to another, and it may even be very different from city to city. My experience with the Idaho Statesman (Boise/Idaho newspaper) has been that they plan much further ahead than same day for tomorrow’s article. From discussions with howdoesshe.com it would seem the local TV station (at least channel 6) plans ahead too. They may even keep a type of backup archive of stories to use when they don’t have enough “real news” to fill the time.

As a result of my reading, I planned to put out a number of press releases during the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Another thing the book mentioned was that press releases get weeded out really quickly. News agencies and television stations have so many releases coming in every day that they only have a few seconds to decide whether or not to pass it on to a reporter. To account for this I also planned to send a series of press releases, each highlighting a different part of the program I was trying to publicize.

After some discussion with a very nice person at the newspaper, I now understand a few things that I think are really worth mentioning. First is that for the type of story I had and the type of article (write up) I got in the newspaper, more lead time would have been beneficial (more on this below about PRWeb). As it turns out, the paper had to work pretty hard to get me in when it did. The time from first press release to being in the paper was about seven days. I’m not sure if that is average lead time, but that’s about right for the two times I was in the paper. If I had given them an extra week of lead time, I might have gotten a better feature or had a chance to talk to a reporter and have an individual article. It’s no guarantee, but more time might have increased the chances.

Another bit of useful feedback I got was that from the multiple press releases I sent in, they had a hard time knowing exactly what to feature. So instead of trashing all but the most interesting, all of my press releases made it to the same person that would have to write about the program creating a 7-11 candy bar problem. Don’t you remember being seven years old with two warm quarters clenched in your little clammy palm staring at the seemingly endless choices of candybars at 7-11? I think there may have been times that I deliberated for an hour about the best purchase to make… I’m not sure if this strategy would have worked better in a different situation, city or medium, but in this case it probably wasn’t necessary.

Newspaper vs. television

Another interesting point is that while I have been successful at getting the attention of the local newspaper, I haven’t gotten any response from the TV stations. I actually expected this based on the book I read. The author, Jeff Crilley explains that a TV station wants something that is visually appealing and lends itself to video. They don’t want a talking head or a screenshot. That also explains why channel 6 picked up the howdoesshe.com group. They have put a lot of effort into both making cute stuff and taking good pictures of it.

One thing I’ll never know is whether or not my press releases made it into the hands of a reporter that never did anything with them or whether they got weeded out before the reporter. That would be a very important metric, if only there was a way to get it.

At this point one thing that I can say is the better you know your local news sources and what they like, the easier it will be to get press, if press is what you want.

News worthiness

So what qualifies as news? That might be like answering a three year old’s questions about Santa Clause. Whatever you tell him, he’s going to compare it to what he’s heard from other kids, adults and advertisers. No matter what you say, it’s going to be wrong in some cases and different in others. So why am I even considering this as I’m talking about PRWeb?

The news worthiness of whatever you want the press to cover plays a big part in whether or not anyone will want to publish it. Keep in mind that it’s news worthiness from the perspective of the journalist that might cover it. That might not line up with your view of what’s news worthy. So all of my considerations about newspapers, TV and PRWeb might not accurately represent average results if I didn’t really have a news worthy story. I obviously thought that I had a news worthy story with my Fitness Jumpstart program (on Maintain Fit).

SEO gains, PR losses

My timing blunder with PRWeb seems the most likely culprit for it’s failure. Here’s what happened. I had been looking at doing some press, but wasn’t sure about whether or not I should spend the $80 to $360 for PRWeb to publish it. What I did instead was publish a few of my releases using two mechanisms. First was www.prlog.com and the other was to use scribd and embed them on my exercise log blog.

The results from my approach were effective from an SEO perspective. With the three press releases that I put out this way I garnered some good search engine placement for terms related to my program. I also sent these press releases (as I already mentioned) to local newspapers and television stations. What I didn’t do was pay PRWeb to handle my press release during that crucial week between Christmas and New Year’s. Being the cheapskate that I am I chose the approach I mentioned above.

As soon as the first article was published and didn’t produce any perceivable traffic (remember that bit about newspapers being dead?), I started to think about other ways to get traffic for the program. That’s when I went back to PRWeb. I searched the internet and found many people speak highly of PRWeb and read about the mountains of traffic they got. While I knew that most journalists had already written their New Year’s resolution articles, I thought maybe there was a place for a late comer (aren’t there folks that procrastinate their New Year’s resolutions?). And leaning on the good things I had heard about PRWeb I decided to pay $80 and see what happened.

PRWeb results

At that price point they didn’t post my press release until two days had passed, which was on January 8th. I think you can guess what happened. Not much. True to their word, PRWeb got some attention, including a search for “mr usa” included some news results for the day of the release. Yahoo! News republished the story here. I can’t really tell how much SEO effect it might have had and I know it might have been more if I paid another $120 for the SEO package.

Google Analytics PRWeb

Woopra Analytics PRWeb

What were the actual traffic numbers? Google Analytics says that I got 12 visits from PRWeb and Woopra shows almost double that at 23 visits. That’s in contrast to the stats PRWeb shows with 65631 impressions, 708 reads and over 200 interactions. I’m not sure what interactions are, but those numbers seem to suggest that I had a 1% readthrough rate (did you like that word?) for the release on their site, and out of 200 interactions I got between 12 and 23 people to my site (with an 83.33% bounce rate). Even taking the higher number from Woopra, this would compare to a 0.035% clickthrough rate and an average cost per click of $3.48.

PRWeb analytics

Whoa! Did I just say that I paid $3.48 per visitor to my website? That can make Google adwords look REALLY CHEAP in comparison, but that may not be the full story. For example, if my story sucked, or my release was poorly timed (I do think the timing was bad), that might have something to do with it. Another thing that’s hard/impossible to gauge is the amount of SEO benefit (if any) that I might have gotten from the link on prweb.com. I did format my URL so that it would have the keywords I thought were a best fit, but they don’t turn out to be very high traffic keywords.

Press best practices for online marketers

Yahoo! News republication of PRWeb press release

So the elements that I’ve discussed in this post include timing, content (or story) and some of the particulars of direct traffic vs. SEO benefit from press release submissions. I’ve also mentioned some of the differences between what newspapers and television stations are looking for. Depending on the news source, you might benefit from a little more lead time. You’ll also want to think about whether or not what you have makes a good visual or a better written article.

As a direct traffic source, PRWeb doesn’t seem to live up to it’s cost of $80. However, with the right, well timed story, it might produce traffic through other means (e.g. someone publishes and article or feature on it). And for the record, the Yahoo! News republish of the press release brought ZERO visitors. I’m not sure how their news service works, but getting published in Yahoo! News didn’t produce any direct traffic results. It may turn out that it does have some SEO benefit, but I have yet to prove that since they use a redirect mechanism rather than just linking to my site.

If you have experience with press releases, take a minute and post your comments below.

So the good news is that with a little effort on my part and some follow up, I landed an “article” in the Idaho Statesman, which is a local Boise paper. It made sense for me to try for that since I live in Boise and that’s where it would be most “newsworthy”. What’s more it was going to be in the Health section of the paper alongside similar articles on New Year’s resolution programs.

I want to mention that the email subject line and focus of the press releases that originally got me attention was that a former Mr. USA was going to take part in the program this year. That’s the most newsworthy part, if you ask me, and the original editor Dave Staats seemed to agree. Well, the article that actually got printed not only passed on using that in the headline, but also left it out of the article entirely! That’s really confusing to me, but I will admit that I don’t understand the news or newspapers very well.

Despite leaving out what I thought was the most newsworthy component, I was still happy to get in the paper. So far so good, or so I thought. The article did run, but only in the paper. I don’t have any idea why they wouldn’t put it on their website in addition to being in their paper. What could it possibly benefit them to publish something in print and not on their website in 2010? I did notice that their online health section seems to be a bit neglected and provides a disproportional number of articles from a local personal trainer. Maybe it just doesn’t get enough online readership to justify their attention.

Before I rant any further, let’s have a look at what actually got printed.

Life Section of the Idaho Statesman.

And here’s the actual article that was published.

Fitness Jumpstart article as it appeard in the Idaho Statesman

On Monday morning I got to my computer early to be ready for the traffic spike I expected. I didn’t really have any idea how many visits I would get, but I did expect to get some additional visits. The reason I thought I would see some traffic is that the first time the Idaho Statesman published an article about maintainfit.com I got a few thousand visits. But that article did make it online and even ran on their homepage for a couple hours.

Well, the traffic didn’t come. I waited and waited, but it didn’t materialize. I did have a big traffic day, but I always do at the first of the year. Every year I get an increase in search engine traffic at the first of the year from the folks that are trying to reach their New Year’s resolutions. This year wasn’t any different, and the majority of my traffic was coming from the search engines, as usual.

In the end, I think that I can identify about a dozen additional visits that came in from the article. I don’t have any numbers about how many papers the Idaho Statesman distributes, but I really expected that I would end up with more than a dozen visits.

Warren Buffett is also losing faith in Newspapers

So, does all this mean that newspapers are dead? Within the last month, the likes of Warren Buffett has signaled the eroding market for newspapers in the wake of internet growth. What benefit is there to be had from either getting press in or advertising in newspapers?

There are some conclusions I can draw from the data I have and some that I just can’t answer. One conclusion that I can draw is that the amount of time and effort I put in to get another article in the Idaho Statesman wasn’t worth it. I could have gotten more traffic from other efforts. On the bright side is that I managed the press releases in such a way that I did end up with search engine visibility for keywords such as “new year’s resolution fitness program” and was on Googles top results page for the important days at the first of the year.

Some things I don’t know include how much traffic the other two programs received that were featured in the same article and how my offer compared to their offers. Of course when you put cash prizes up against some local guy that just has a program, it doesn’t bode well for me. If they had mentioned Mr. USA would that have garnered a little more attention? I’ll never know.

Some additional information that may be useful is that I used free press release tools for this “campaign”. I wrote the press releases myself, taking guidance from the book I mentioned above and input from my sister in law (she really gets PR in a big way). I wrote the press releases in Microsoft Word and uploaded them to Scribed. I also released my press releases using prlog.com. I did some social bookmarking to get them indexed quickly in the search engines.

Is all traditional press dead?

What I observed in this experience may not be specific to newspapers, but more broadly indicative of a shift in how people consume information. For example, I’ve long been a critic of awful billboards. There just happen to be so many crappy billboards and not much else to do while driving. I think that a billboard is a fantastic place to advertise food, gas, and other services at an approaching exit, but it’s a terrible place to advertise a url for a website. I might be alone in this, but can you think of the last time you successfully made a mental note about a URL on a billboard and actually ended up visiting that website? I’m not sure I ever have?

I think there is a rift between online life and offline life. The offline methods of advertising may be just as effective as they ever have been, for traditional offline business needs. For example, a furniture company may find Newspapers and TV are just as effective today as they were years ago, but for the emerging online society, there appear to be some different patterns driving decision making and action.

For example, in the offline world of yesteryear, people were in the habit of making notes to remember something so they could get back to it later. In order to get a special deal you had to actually clip a coupon and place something physically in the mail. In that world, maybe a billboard with a good offer really would result in action.

But in our online world of today, there isn’t any reward for remembering things. Google has trained my generation to let the search engine keep track of the details so that we don’t have to. My mind can move as fast as a mouse click. The online advertising economy has had the peculiar focus of encouraging the click, so that content is structured to keep people in one place reading for the shortest amount of time possible. Even bookmarks (the online form of making a note) rarely get revisited, because we’ve grown so accustomed to searching right now for what we need right now.

To highlight that what I’m discussing may not be limited to newspapers take the group at howdoesshe.com. Just before Christmas they were featured on the local news television station. When I talked to one of the site owners after it aired I asked if they had seen a big traffic spike. She simply said NO. She went on to tell me that the biggest traffic spikes she gets are on days where she does a “post swap”. That’s where two sites write content for each other and include links back to the content providing site. It provides the audience at each site with a fresh voice and pulls some of that traffic over to the content partner’s site. It also provides a back link associated with high quality content.

Conclusion

There are apparent differences in the way online vs. offline habits affect traffic to specific sites on the internet. These differences appear to be influenced by habits related to search, and the scattered way in which most people “surf” the web. The web doesn’t reward a good memory or follow through. Instead it rewards impulsive, random clicking with a universal fall back on search.

From the two examples I mention in this post, the value of using offline press and publicity efforts to drive traffic online is low. The value appears to be low when it comes to both newspapers and TV. In both cases there appears to have been a disconnect between the offline news source and their online website that might have bridged the gap.

As always, please share your views and experience on this topic by leaving a comment below.