Wisdom - Search Marketing 32

We started with a release every 2-3 weeks, and over the summer finally reached a point where we felt comfortable creating one every week. Because we could track pickups, RSS distribution and views in our press management console, we could pretty quickly get an idea of what was working and what wasn’t. But what happened was very unexpected: As the press releases were being broadcast via the PRWeb platform (as well as the pickups that happen from keyword searches), we began to experience a sharp increase in Page Rank (the value of a page on Google or Yahoo based on inbound links and traffic). We were also seeing long-term sales ramp-up we could track back to the PR (click-tracking on our client web sites). By December we had 65,000 inbound links, and a PR7-rated web site on our hands. But the best part was watching sales ramp with the increased traffic, and being able to reduce our other online budgets to increase overall ROI by much higher margins. Since January of 2005 we’ve created a predictable PR program: if we place 4 press releases, spaced roughly one week apart; well written and with good, relevant links and attachments, we typically receive 1,500-1,900 SERP’s for a given site within 6 weeks. When we do this consistently for 12-16 weeks, we can predictably generate enough new traffic, sales and media write-ups to snowball for many months following. We think of it as Persistent Pay Per Click, but with a Pay-Once, Results Forever sort of twist (yes, we’re still getting clicks on our 2003 releases).

Mark Alan Effinger, RichContent, http://www.richcontent.com