It must have been a couple of years ago when I landed a job in a marketing agency.
There was a period when regardless of how many marketing campaigns I was running and how much I had on my to-do list, I would be pushed to the edge of my comfort zone.
My boss would give me & my colleagues more assignments and more challenging ones so that he can promote personal growth and test our persistence (Today, I am extremely grateful for that)
My boss would give me & my colleagues more assignments and more challenging ones so that he can promote personal growth and test our persistence (Today, I am extremely grateful for that)
So during one of those days when we had to allocate the new projects among ourselves, due to a lost bet against a colleague of mine I had to take responsibility for a project that I considered boring and even annoying.
A huge percentage of the project tasks involved writing Press Releases for a number of clients.
Although I would not admit it aloud, I considered the Press Releases Industry to be dead.
Press Release writing and distribution wasn’t quite what I had in mind for my career development– it just didn’t resonate with me and my understanding of (modern day) marketing.
As it turned out, the press release industry has undergone drastic changes and has opened many opportunities for businesses and organizations of all sizes and kinds.
I started exploring the online PR world, reading about and observing the key players – the news distributors such as PRWeb, Newswire, eReleases, PressCable, 24-7PressReleases to name a few.. and the services they offered, the tactics they used; it started making sense to me.
And as it usually goes in such cases, we learn from our experience and fix our wrong perceptions.
The lessons were plenty. One of them really stood out:
Online PR and Press Release Distribution usually do not happen the way most people (including myself) imagine.
Conventional wisdom tells you that this is a service that is booked solely by the big corporations who have the necessary financial resources to afford it. Or that it takes lots of hard work and expertise to achieve the desired results.
The smaller businesses and brands that have mediocre budgets need to keep their heads down and cannot even dream of spreading their news and stories via press releases. This is complete BS.
I’ll be damned if I do not share the truth with you.
What I have been initially considering to be a failing industry, and industry that involves expensive services, complicated processes that are not worth the time and effort of the small business owner, and supposedly lead to spam results … appeared to be a gold mine.
It was true then and today that the most recent changes in the press release industry have completely changed the rules of the game and have allowed even smaller business owners to use and benefit from press releases in their marketing campaigns.
Without further ado, I want to present you the lessons I learned the “hard” way and my strategies and recommendations for building and managing effective and affordable online press release marketing campaigns.