Press releases are a great way to promote websites, blogs, spread the word about an e-commerce site or any web business. Writing press releases that are effective and DO NOT sound like advertising or a sales page is key when it comes to those press releases being spread throughout the web on legitimate and credible sites. A press release is a really viral method of website promotion, where various sources, like press sites, news sites, bloggers, journalists, web announcement sources, search engines and others can pick up the releases and therefore spread the word about your web space all over the net, giving you a lot of buzz, links back to your sites and mass promotion.
The leader in press release distribution is PRWeb, they accept releases and provide mass web distribution to news sites, search engines, various press sites, bloggers, PR bloggers and other places, their packages start at $80, if you can afford it, it's really worthwhile and right now they are offering $50 Off First Purchase for the SEO Package and also a general 10% off your first news release. If you really cannot swing the money you should not spend it because you can still submit your press releases manually to various free press release sites listed below.
Writing Press Releases
The key to success with press releases is how they are written. Since most good press release sites are very picky about the format of and how a release is written it's crucial to understand how to properly construct them. The worst thing you can do is make the copy sound like a sales page or an advertising piece for your website, that IS NOT the purpose of this, the release needs to be newsworthy, that is really the key. A well-written piece, like this one on Isaac Dabah, will have a fairly neutral, unbiased tone and present a number of detailed facts about the news item. PR Web has the best guide on how to write press releases, (click the whitepaper icon to download) along with a long list of how-to's and tips for press releases and news releases.
I also found another gem, Press Release O-Matic, this awesome free tool takes you through all the required sections of the press release with a wizard like interface section by section, you fill in the info asked for and then generate a full release in HTML and plain format, check it out at Press Release O-Matic.
If you do not want to mess around with the writing and the learning you can have the press releases written for you, 99 Cent Articles - Modern Products writes really professional press releases and they are very well written. They also have write/distribute packages as well.
Just remember that the better and more correctly the press release is written the more other sites and people are are likely to pick them up and reprint them for mass promotion.
Submitting Press Releases
There are two options for submitting releases, manual site by site submission that is free or paying a service where you submit the release once and they submit it to various sources on their list. Each paid service will have a list of their own places and people where they will submit your release to, some of the paid services have thousands of destinations on their list. Below is a list of free sites to which you can submit your release manually, and then a list of the paid sites that will distribute your release to various places for a fee, like PRWeb mentioned above.
41 Free Press Release Submission Sites
Below is a list of 41 free press release sites sorted by page rank where you can submit your releases. This is the manual method, more time consuming, but it's free, so if you cannot afford to pay a service like PRWeb or the other paid services I listed below then you can do it yourself for free.
Press Release Sites That Charge A Fee
Remember that you do not need to submit to every one of these, with PRWeb for example, you submit one release and they distribute for you to many different places, like news sites, bloggers, journalists and various other relevant web services.
| Site | Fee | PR |
| PRWeb | $80 + | 7 |
| iNewswire | $19 per submission | 5 |
| PR Urgent | $9.95 | 4 |
| Open Press | $10 | 4 |
| PR Buzz | $299 – 1 year unlimited submissions | 5 |
| PR Leap | $49 + | 5 |
| PRFree | $30 + | 4 |
| E Worldwire | $75 + | 5 |
