Writing press releases and submitting them through various online distribution centers has long been recommended as a strategy for building in-pointing links. It isn’t one I’ve ever experimented with before; it’s not cheap, and when you’re working full time on other ventures, it’s difficult to get the time to create something “press worthy” to write about.
Since I’m pretty much focused 100% on UltimateFatBurner.com and Real-Customer-Comments.com these days, and since there’s lots of new stuff to talk about, I thought it might be something worth revisiting.
Some of the things that appealed to me the most about trying the press release strategy is that it works in numerous ways…
- It increases exposure and hopefully generates some new interest in the site.
- It boosts the number of in-pointing links to your site.
- It adds credibility to your online business.
- It leverages your link building efforts – i.e., you can obtain a lot of in-pointing links with a single, well-distributed press release.
The problem with link building efforts on UltimateFatBurner.com is that with around 4,000 in-pointing in-pointing links or so already being reported, searching new ones out one by one seems like a dreadful waste of time to me. I’d be better off creating more great content.
Anyhow, with that said, I decided to send out a press release using the services of PRWeb (I used the $200 “SE Visibility” package). As you can see, the date of the press release is January 29, 2009. As of January 26, three days prior to posting the release, here’s what some of the various link tracking tools were reporting for UltimateFatBurner.com…
Google’s webmaster tools: Reports 4,699 in-pointing links
SubmitExpress.com: Reports a total of 8,453 in-pointing links
MarketLeap: Reports a total of 3,025 in-pointing links
How are things looking today? Good question. Here’s the updated data…
Google’s webmaster tools: Reports 4,442 in-pointing links
SubmitExpress.com: Reports 10,472 in-pointing links
MarketLeap: Reports a total of 3,841 in-pointing links (an 815 increase in links on Yahoo/Fast/AV but only a single one in Google).
It should be noted that since the original press release, I have also sent out another one (about a month ago). Although this one focuses on Real-Customer-Comments.com, it also links to UltimateFatBurner.com, so this too may be contributing to the results we see here.
And what of the results?
Well, these are early days. I plan to send out several more press releases this year, and continually track my results (don’t worry, I’ll report back on them here). At this point at least, it appears press releases may have a greater impact on the Search Engines that place less emphasis on link authority (i.e., Yahoo!, MSN, etc) and much less of an impact on Google.
This may be an expensive way to confirm what I already believe; creating truly great, unique content is the only REAL way to get the links that mater.
But we’ll see.
Stay tuned.
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