

Ask HN: Do press releases get traffic? - kapauldo

Does anyone have any good or bad experiences with press releases?  Did you hire someone to write one or just write your own?  Did you email to bloggers or papers?  Did you pay for submission to PRWeb, etc.? Please share your experiences.
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aarongough
So far I've only dealt with one press release that involved a product release.
We hired a PR company to write up the release and then we did the final
tweaking for the tech details.

The experience that I had was that the press release itself garnered little to
no direct attention. We had one reasonably well known blogger pick up on the
story and his short piece on our release gave us more referrals than anything
else. I would say that in the end it all just depends on your product, how big
your market is, and how interesting the release is to your audience.

I think that putting effort into getting relevant bloggers to cover your
product would probably get you a lot more traffic. It's also sometimes worth
looking for 'net communities relevant to the product you are releasing,
creating an account and letting them know about the product (in a non spammy
way)...

For reference:

Here is the initial press release:
[http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS139735+10-Ma...](http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS139735+10-Mar-2009+MW20090310)
(slow but definitely there!)

Here is the blogger's story:
<http://space.canoe.ca/gadgetguy/blog/view/345232>

Here is the actual product info: <http://www.intrasitesearchsupport.com/>

