SEO Tip: Make sure you optimize your press release for keywords you want to rank for in search engines. For example, if you want to rank high for “trusted professionals” make sure it’s included in your release (preferably the first 100 words) and include a hyperlink back to your site.
We generally use PrWeb.com for paid releases and have been happy with the visibility and reporting options.
Here are a list of some free services we also push out to. And of course don’t forget all your social media outlets (MySpace, Facebook, etc.) and the world of bloggers you should be working throughout this.
https://publish.associatedcontent.com/
http://www.free-press-release.com/
http://www.clickpress.com/releases/
http://www.pr-usa.net/index.php
I want to let you know about on a free service, Help a Reporter Help Out, that can help you spread the word about your company by getting it in front of reporters.
After signing up here (http://helpareporter.com/) you will receive up to three emails a day from Peter Shankman, each with 15 – 30 queries from reporters looking for a source or expert. If you can answer one of the queries, go for it.
I always tried to steer them toward a synergistic partnership, sponsorship or co-branded opportunity with an entity possessing the appropriate customer base within your desired target demo. Its more work to get rolling but the quality of the result and potentially acquired customer is usually far better.
Buying quick lists outright is can be very dicey and more often than not worthless. I have little success with purchased lists. I will not be spending my budget in that manner. You would be better sponsoring a show where your target market lives and getting the list of attendees to email after the show.
See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2861/options-for-html-scraping
Here’s some links:
http://scrubyt.org/ (Ruby)
http://rubyforge.org/projects/scrapi (Ruby)
http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ (Python)
http://search.cpan.org/~petdance/WWW-Mechanize-1.54/lib/WWW/Mechanize.pm (Perl)
http://wiki.github.com/why/hpricot (Ruby)
http://codespeak.net/lxml/ (Python)
I’m going with yegg on this…
BeautifulSoup is great.
We use hpricot to scrape it works really nicely. Nokogiri is the new kid on the block and is apparently faster than hpricot now, but I haven’t tried it yet.
We have: www.clientname.com - which is their main Website
We have ir.clientname.com - which is their investor relations Website
I’m thinking that the Google Analytics code for www.clientname.com will not work if installed on ir.clientname.com because in the Google settings, the domains are different.
Solution: Check out http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55524
