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Getting your news out there


published on Thursday, 13 August 2009 . by Julie Hopkins

There are a ton of web sites that claim they’ll distribute news releases for free. But my experience is that many of them are more trouble than they’re worth and they are constantly pinging you with upcharges.

Today I came across a great blog entry that ranks these “free” distribution services by:

1. Page Rank – What is the Google page rank of the site? I’m only listing free PR sites that have a page rank of 4 or higher. To determine the page rank of a site,

Check Page Rank of any web site pages instantly:
This free page rank checking tool is powered by Page Rank Checker service

2. Google News – Are most of the press releases that are published by the site picked up by Google news? To find out if a PR distribution site is getting their content indexed by Google news, go to Google News and do a search for “site:sitename.com”. This will show all of the stories by that site that have been indexed by Google News. As an example, a search for all press releases for the free PR site BigNews.biz, would look like this “site:BigNews.biz

3. Traffic – Does the free press release site get any traffic? For this list we used Alexa.com to check traffic. You will have to set your own standard for what you feel is acceptable. For this list, I’m using any site that is ranked above or around 100,000 by Alexa.

4. Cost – For this list we are looking for sites that are primarily free. However, they may offer additional premium services for a fee.

As a result, I tried the top ranker – http://www.PRLog.com.

I just submitted 2 releases (one for Hopkins Marketing and one for OstermanCron) and that experience was excellent… compared to previous experiences on other sites. The real proof will be in whether or not we get online exposure… but so far so good.

Great utility for managing passwords


published on Monday, 10 August 2009 . by Julie Hopkins

Randy should be posting this but he sent it to me, I love it, and thought I’d post it.
Are you familiar with LastPass? ( https://lastpass.com/)

It’s a free and extremely secure online password manager. The guys on the PCMAG.COM podcast talked about it in reference to a story about a recent Twitter hacker. All of the PCMAG guys use LastPass and really love it.

Also, here’s a PCMAG story about this product: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2343565,00.asp

I’ve been using it for several days now and REALLY like it.

Hopkins Marketing and Vital-Marketing both recommend it!