A few weeks ago we released a major press release about our new free Real Estate Property Analyzer on LandlordMax, and I said I would post an update about it since we decided to go a very different route. Normally we would only use PRWeb as our distributor, which is very affordable. This time however we decided to go mainstream and we used a major news wire service called PR News Wire. Both are very good and very different. Unfortunately for us, I learned a very hard lesson which I already knew but completely forgot this time, which is to test the press release in a smaller and cheaper distribution first rather than releasing it nationally right away. This is an absolute must, especially if you’re going to use a major service!

Let me expand a little and give you some context. As I said earlier, normally we release our press releases through PRWeb, which can be free to virtually any price you want (of course I’ve never seen one go for more than a thousand dollars on any day) depending on the placement you want. We often use the $80 option as this gives us some pretty good coverage and traffic and it’s very affordable. So far, our press releases have all been successes, all with over 100’000’s reads directly from PRWeb alone, and lots of reprints from the feeds, in the thousands. So I’m fairly confident in my ability to write press releases. I’d never really had an unsuccessful press release before, so I didn’t anticipate one this time.

Therefore on this iteration, I went directly to PRNewsWire without testing the press release first, and I went with the bigger coverage (being picked up by the major publications). In my head I wanted to go this route because I figured “old news is no news”. That is, if it wasn’t new, no one would be interested in publishing it. And this was my mistake that I hope you learn from because I know I did!

I opted for a very expensive high distribution press release without testing it in a smaller distribution first. I went with the “US1 Financial Services” where I should have gone with something like “New York”, which costs about 30% of the price. I could also have used PRWeb to test the success of the release since it’s even cheaper, about 15% the price. Had I done this I would have quickly learned that this particular press release wasn’t as successful as normal. By the way I think the cause was the headline, I have to admit I did have some doubts about it when I released it. Anways, it did get attention, just not on the scale I’m familiar with.

So the tip of the day on how to get the most value out of your press release is:

When doing a press release, ALWAYS ALWAYS release to a smaller distribution first before doing a full scale distribution. By doing this you’ll be able to commit your hard earned income to only the most successful press releases you write.

Additionally, as an extra update on the original article as to its success I’ve posted my report graph from PR News Wire below. By the looks of the graph, I’m highly confident that this press release will result in a positive ROI (Return On Investment). However had I just tested it first on a smaller scale first, I know I could have easily increased the ROI.

As an extra little addendum, from what I understand from talking to their representatives, this is what you should expect from a normal press release. Of course some news items have much larger pick ups, such as the latest news on celebreties, the war in the middle east, gas prices, etc., but in terms of a smaller company with a new offering (even if it’s free), this is what they told me you should expect. However after running the same press release through PRWeb a week later and achieving only about 20% of my normal results, it makes me think that I could have done much better… Hence the tip of the day!

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