Contributing author
David McInnis
Read more from David McInnis
Everything You Need to Know About Newsworthy.ai, Distribution, and SEO
Traditional press release tactics like mass syndication and backlink chasing are now liabilities in the modern SEO landscape. Today, visibility comes from credible, high-quality content shared through targeted, context-rich distribution that aligns with how search engines and AI evaluate authority.
Making Your Press Release Evergreen: Seven Strategies for Lasting Impact
Creating an evergreen press release transcends time; it's about embedding your message in timeless values and universal themes that resonate well beyond its publication date. This strategic approach ensures your news remains fresh and relevant, offering sustained visibility in an ever-changing digital landscape.
The Press Release Isn't Dead. It Just Became One of the Most Important Documents on the Web.
I've been in the press release business since 1997. I built PRWeb because I believed press releases should be searchable, public, and directly accessible to anyone. Since then I've watched the industry shift from fax machines to email blasts, from newswires to search engines, from SEO to social media. Every one of those shifts felt enormous at the time.
Press Release Distribution Is Dead. Retrievability Is Everything.
For most of my career, the PR industry measured success one way: distribution. How many newsrooms received your release? How many outlets carried it? How many impressions did it generate? We built entire reports around those numbers, and they looked fantastic in a slide deck. A release that generated "2 million impressions" and "450 media pickups" felt like a win. But if you followed those numbers downstream to revenue, customer acquisition, or business outcomes, the correlation was often weak. Distribution measured exposure. It didn't necessarily measure influence. That model is broken. AI didn't crack it. It shattered it.
Write the Perfect Press Release
The value of press release distribution has shifted from a media outreach tool to a direct-to-consumer communication strategy. PR should be focused on meeting the needs of the customer, not just writing for the media. Writing to personas is the best way to get engagement. You can group personas into 4 macro personas: Methodical, Competitive, Spontaneous, and Humanistic. You can reach each persona by answering one question, specific to the target persona.
Uncovering the Hidden Power of B2B Influence: Why Size Doesn't Matter
Let's do the math. You may have a lot more influence than you ever imagined.