Ask HN: Is there any press-release service that you can recommend ? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there any press-release service that you can recommend ?

6 pointsjacquesm7 comments

Reocities.com is now starting to be full enough to be of actual use to people, I've restored well over 500K accounts and I would like to announce this somehow.

There seems to be a great glut of companies that claim they are specialists in getting your message out there but I wouldn't know how to tell the real ones from the wasted money ones.

Is there a service anybody here has used that they can recommend ?

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My experience is while press releases are valuable marketing tools, press release services are worthless. I've done probably a dozen press releases utilizing some of the expensive services. Not once has a service been directly responsible for a write up or driven any substantial amount of traffic.

Identify your target audience of bloggers and writers and get your press release directly to them.

I wrote my experience with press releases here.

http://www.bigstartups.com/matt/blog/122/Effective-Ways-to-P...

Check these 2 people out: they are pretty good at what they do:

http://www.imalwagner.com

http://www.publicityhound.com

Whatever you do - don't go for a cookie cutter plan where all they do is write a press release and submit it out and then offer tracking services. Make the publicist sit down with you and create a customized plan.

Instead of a press-release, you could try contacting some blogs individually which focus on your target audience (admittedly I'm not sure what your target audience is).

Pretty much everybody that got caught unawares by their sites sudden demise. The mail I'm getting makes me believe that rather more people than you'd expect suddenly realized they had some precious family photos and stuff like that on geocities and thought they'd lost if forever.

That makes a lot of sense. It would probably make a lot of sense to optimize your site for search-engines as I'd imagine that is where a majority of your users will go looking for you. Additionally, you may want to go around and post on some forums as well (such as this thread which is #8 for "geocities backup" http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=33&th...).

I realize I've effectively managed to not answer your original question at all - good luck though!

Edit: Also if you haven't already, post to Digg and Reddit. This thread might also be helpful - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=908275

Posting on here will get you more coverage than an actual press release.

Could of course always submit to techcrunch but they lurk here as welll.

Ok, did that.

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