vital marketing

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,

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.

If you’re not already using Google Analytics, you should give it a try. It’s
an incredible service!

Google Analytics analyzes traffic for one or more of your websites and
provides easy-to-understand reports on your visitors—how many, where they come
from, how they found and use your site, what converts them into customers, and
much more.

Here’s just a few good reasons to use Google Analytics:

• It’s FREE—spend on marketing, not on web analytics.
• It’s easy to use—simple enough for novice marketers, while delivering all
  of the capabilities that experienced web analytics professionals expect.
  It’s a hosted service that runs on the same servers that power Google. Just
  paste the Google Analytics tracking code into each of your website pages and
  tracking begins immediately.
• It’s powerful—it has many of the features you’d expect from a high-end
  analytics offering. From large, high-traffic corporate sites to small sites,
  Google Analytics delivers consistent service.
• It’s integrated with AdWords—if you have a Google AdWords PPC account, you can
  use Google Analytics directly from the AdWords interface. Google Analytics
  also calculates ROI metrics from automatically imported cost and keyword
  tracking data, saving you time.
   

Track your blog with Google Analytics
I’m currently using Google Analytics to track my WordPress and Blogger Blog.

Thanks to Andy Wibbels for his simple instructions for tracking these three popular blogs with Google Analytics:

• Blogger
• TypePad
• Wordpress

Google Analytics Dashboard