In the whimsy world of marcomms, offering
something for nothing
might raise an eyebrow, but more often than not, it's just as likely to
raise the blood pressure: we all know that you get "ought for nought" in
real business right?
Nonetheless, the growing crop of "free" news distribution services
springing up across the web is raising more questions than answers for many
of the marketing folks we talk to these days: "Do these sites work?",
"What's the catch?", "Should I bother using them and, if so, then which
ones?" are amongst the most frequent of frequently asked questions raised on
the topic in our forums and seminars right now. So what's the score?
While these sites may claim
free distribution what the vast majority of them actually offer is
free publishing: they're not really distributing your news at all (well not
for free anyway). So long as this is understood choosing which free newswire
to publish to becomes relatively easy.
Golden rule number one: look for
signs that that your chosen free newswire ticks the right boxes with major
news aggregators like Moreover, Google
news or NewsNow. Most free services
boast "distribution partnerships" with the big aggregators and will
prominently display the logos of the best known on their site. The more
aggregators monitoring the site you publish to, the greater your chances of
appearing in online search (Google news, Yahoo News, etc).
Golden rule number two: try to
publish to a site that allows you to hyperlink back to your own site. Many
free services allow you to do this at the end of your news in the details
section but what you're really looking for is a site that allows you to link
back to your site in the body text of your news story: back linking, is one
of the best SEO strategies you can do to boost your search engine rankings.
Golden rule number three: learn
to spot the pitfalls. Is the news site you are publishing to using your
content to drive traffic to your competitors? If the site does not allow
back linking it may be using your own keywords to drive contextual
advertising and / or Google AdSence content. Before you publish to a news
site for the fist time, see how the site treats other news already posted.
Danger areas to look out for are keywords used to drive third party ad
programmes or AdWords on the page. If these features seem to dominate,
publishing to this site may be doing more harm than good.
Bottom line: there's no such
thing as a free lunch. But knowing this doesn't stop us marketing
types squaring the occasional deal over a table at The Ivy, and neither
should it stop us taking advantage of some of the free publishing offers out
there. So long as we accept the obvious limitations of what's on offer for
free, posting to one or two of the better wire services is, at worst,
unlikely to do any harm. At best, you might just be taking the first
steps towards developing a mature
SEO strategy for your
business.
