Article - Top Tools for Digital PR Outreach By Allie Gray, CollegeOnline.org

Top Tools for Digital PR Outreach

Allie Gray , CollegeOnline.org - Marketing 0 Comments | Add Yours

About The Author:

Allie Gray Freeland is the Director of Marketing Communications of CollegeOnline.org, a guide to online schools and a learning resource for distance education. Allie earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota. Connect with her via LinkedIn.

We live in an over-communicated world, which makes it difficult as marketers to have a resonating message that effect our bottom line. The Union of Concerned Scientists stated that the average American is bombarded by about 3,000 advertising messages a day. Fifteen years ago, DMNews cited “Each of us sees more ads alone in one year than people of 50 years ago saw in an entire lifetime.” Think about how the Internet has exponentially grown the exposure to information over the last decade and a half...

As messages become more competitive to our end user’s (journalist, target market, et. all) share of mind, as a digital PR specialist, we must be that much more strategic and smart with our outreach. As we work daily to create meaningful content through articles, infographics, press releases, media alerts, and even multimedia - we must select the right medium for us to maximize our effort and time spent. Here are a few of the best tools for digital PR outreach.

FINDING A HOME FOR YOUR CONTENT

My Blog Guest
When once public relations professionals’ gold medal was print coverage, now a guest byline blog placements is a digital PR professional’s bread and butter. Which is why social media pioneer, Ann Smarty began My Blog Guest, a fully online system created to serve as a platform for guest posts. My Blog Guest understands the power of a guest post - and that's why they offer a system for publishers around the globe to share infographics and unique guest blog posts.

My News Deck
Founded in 2003, Mynewsdesk remains a Bona fide pioneer in digital PR. The service, which is also web-based, connects content submitted from PR professionals to journalists and professional bloggers. With the system, PR professionals can upload press releases, guest posts, multimedia, and video to journalists and bloggers who are in need of relevant and timely content, who can then take the content and republish it as they please. PR professionals can also start following companies directly on Mynewsdesk, engage with the news content, and become part of a network of influencers.

PRWeb
Though there are multiple press release wire services, PRWeb distributes press releases to exclusively online channels - making it the optimal newswire service for measurement and search engine optimization (SEO). PRWeb can send any given release to 30,000+ journalists and more than 250,000 PRWeb opt-in news subscribers. Once your release is published, PRWeb hosts your release on their site, a service that provides traffic generation and search engine optimization. Plus, you can optimize your release to include video, multimedia, and keyword-rich words.

MASTER ANALYTIC AND OUTREACH SYSTEM

iAcquire
iAcquire is a membership-based “digital PR” system that serves as a bible for web analytics, qualifying online outreach prospects, and an all-encompassing tracking system. iAcquire continuously crawls the web through 10 million websites and 40 billion links and facilitates targeting and filtering through SEO metrics like page relevancy, site traffic, and search engine rankings. Then, the technology extends into a proprietary system to manage communications to online publishers. Basically, this system serves as a one-stop shop for digital outreach.

QUALIFYING YOUR CONTENT

Compete.com
This web analysis service serves up visitor data for the top 1,000,000 web sites in the world. This website can be used when qualifying specific websites for PR outreach.

Alexa.com
Another web analytics tool, Alexa is used to discover the websites by keyword, category, or location. The analytics can be used for competitive analysis, benchmarking, market research, and quantifying prospective media targets.