Thousands
of companies, in effect subcontract the "news" and "press release"
parts of their web sites to external newswire services like
Business Wire,
CCBN or some of the other services
listed in
Press Release FAQ's.
When you click on the news links for a company like
Maxtor, for example, you leave their web
site and move onto another site managed by CCBN which retains the look and feel
of the original company's home page. There are many advantages of doing
this, including
- visitors to your web site can see your press releases on the same day you
issue them via a newswire. - That's because they are seeing your customised
page on the same newswire.
- the resources needed to keep your web site up to date are reduced, because
you've offloaded repetitive functions such as PR or investor news bites onto a
more efficient, and therefore lower cost, dedicated ASP.
But there are
disadvantages as well, which you need to consider from the holistic
marketing view.
- The content doesn't help your PR rating with search-engines like Google in
the same way it would if it were on your own site.
- If someone links to your news story - then because it's on a 3rd party site
- the pageviews and referring sites won't be tracked properly by your web
marketers. So if a publication is feeding you thousands of new leads - which
means you should consider advertising on it - you will be oblivious to that
important fact.
Conclusion
Using a newswire ASP to implement the news pages on
your web site should only be regarded as a quick fix partial solution to the
problem of managing electronic news. But your overall web promotion efforts will
suffer because the news is not hosted on your own site. Failure to understand
these issues and take appropriate action leaves you with the cost of paying for
the services, without getting all the benefits which you may mistakenly have
expected. |
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