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I have started marketing for my startup, which sells just 1 software product and is really just a side business from my day job, for some extra cash. Google AdWords is coming out at about $2/click, and I see that PRWeb would charge only $80 for a basic online press release.

Has anyone here used PRWeb before? If so, did it result in much customer or media interest? It could be way more cost-effective than what I'm doing now, but if it just posts articles on its website and has them searchable in the news sections of Google and Yahoo, that may not be much.

Thanks.

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We used it and first did the $80 package. They have good analytics and it was easy to see that this generated about 80 clicks to us. In addition, it was easy to see that about 40 sites used our content resulting in 40 new inbound links to our site.

We just submitted another release today and this time went for the $360 option. We'll see how that works.

They have some good tools to help you create a strong and effective release. I recommend these + recommend that you put links to specific pages on your site that align with key points in your release. This will help.

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I've used it twice. First time I did the basic thing for $80, second time when I had more things to say, I paid for $200.

Now, I dont know if my first press release was total crap or not, but it generated absolute ZERO interest in the media and almost no clicks.

Second press release that I paid $200 for, did get reprinted in a number of online publications, 2 of which were actually related to what my announcement was about. Furthermore, I've gotten a number of calls from the folks who were interested in further finding out about the company and product and who have seen the PR announcement. Now, it is totally possible that 2nd release was had more interesting stuff in it.

HTH. Your mileage may vary.

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Same experience here. I've found that stuff about new releases -- new versions, or big new features going live on a web app -- seem to work best. – Giles Thomas Mar 21 '11 at 19:50
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I haven't actually used it myself but the brief look at it ... it depends how much you value your time. Submitting to all of those sites on your own is going to take a while, but you can do it.

Using bit.ly or even just Google analytics you can track the success from the click through but its a lot of work and setup.

Thanks for showing me though because I have been looking for something like this recently ... I'm busy/slack and am happy to pay $80 for them to worry about all that stuff.

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