Steve Jackson is a consultant and entrepreneur, born in the UK, lived and worked (and played rugby) for a while near Princeton NJ, and who has lived in Canada since 1979.

Nope. I handle some big-ticket consulting with some clients and I sell a variety of products online but I do NOT normally offer online services to clients.

ANY business can benefit. And not just businesses … any organization, in the right circumstances. But I’m aiming to help local businesses in communities of 50,000 to 250,000 or 300,000 because the leverage is greatest for many of the benefits.

Press Releases can convert interested eyeballs directly to increased business for “trade” service businesses. Professional services. Stores. And entertainment businesses. Hospitality businesses. All sorts!

To be cold-blooded about it, think this way: how sophisticated are your competitors with their online marketing? If they’re not very, then your advantage from a Press Release will be major. But even if they are tuned-in to things like Search Engine Optimization … in 24 – 48 hours you can leap past them. And the chances are they’ll never work out what you’re doing and even if they do work it out, the barriers to THEM doing it are formidable. There are a lot of moving parts to doing it right. That’s why I do it all for you. If you’re first-in!

If your objective is simply attention, publicity, branding, positioning, image … again, ANY business.

If your intention is specifically increased profit then you need to ask yourself, is my business good at what it does? Because if it IS, if you ARE, then the issue becomes — can you convert 100’s or 1000’s of eyeballs seeing your Press Release to (for example) to an additional measly $123.75 of profit per week for 4 weeks? Or an extra $61.88 profit a week over 8 weeks?

That’s all it takes to break even. To cover the expense. Anything beyond that is profit.
If the Press Release HAS to convert to increased profits, and if your business can’t achieve those tiny gains, then there won’t be a direct payback. But you probably have bigger problems to think about, if that’s true!

But let’s get more professional about this. For some businesses, the Press Release can lead to a customer making a 1-time purchase. For other businesses, a customer becomes a repeat customer, perhaps for years, even decades. So the issue becomes, what is the “Lifetime Value” of a customer?

I need to use them to promote my own businesses, so I bought a 20-unit monthly “Package deal.” I don’t need them all myself. I’m a businessman so I’m selling the surplus for a bargain price to provide a little boost to my cash flow. That’s 6 – 10 a month that I’ll be selling.

Nope. I do those things for myself but I don’t offer those services to others.
The Press Releases are just a 1-off opportunity.

Yes, I do. I’ve been using computers since 1971. I’ve been “online” since 1984 — which is before there were any web sites or even public access to emails. (I had thought that was before the word “online” existed but I’m wrong; apparently it was coined in 1950.)

A lot of elements come together to make a Press Release successful. Two big ones are:

• Keyword Research — I’ve been doing that for more than 10 years. My wife and I managed a 6-figure ad account for years and that was 100% based on keyword research.
• Copywriting — I’m a natural English speaker, Grammar school educated with an Engineering degree; and more importantly with a wife who’s also a product of a UK Grammar School and University education, who was a teacher in UK schools and whose proof-reading is consequently ferocious.

I wrote a regular column for a print magazine for years back in the early 80’s, and I’ve been writing marketing copy for decades for myself and also for some other organizations for decades. I wrote ads that appeared in print magazines in the early 90’s. I’ve been writing online ads for more than 20 years. I’ve even written a book (386 pages, been on sale for a few months). I’ve written literally 100’s of pages of content for websites.

I use a highly-trusted Press Release publishing and distributing service called Newswire. These folks charge an arm and a leg because they are one of the very best.

Google trusts them because Google knows they have extremely high standards for every Press Release they publish. When I want to publish one I have to submit it for human quality review and I get back a report which grades me on SEVENTEEN different criteria. If I’m not up to snuff on any of these, I don’t get published.

This high standard means that Newswire’s syndication is also highly trusted; other News Sites want anything published by Newswire because the quality is guaranteed to be high.

Yes, you could.
Your Press Release would be published along with 1000’s of others written by people with appalling English, appalling grammar, no sense of news or structure or keywords, where the headlines read like something that would be rejected by the National Enquirer as too hypey, the content reads like a sales pitch (if you can read it at all), the Press Release is buried in the middle of so-called Press Releases on topics including porn, gambling, cannabis, viagra, vaping, and various “Miracle” products … and no Online News Service with any credibility or authority whatsoever would touch it with a 10 foot pole.

Good luck with that.

Well, you can consider value from three perspectives.

• One is, the benefits you get. If you can’t generate $125 a week additional profit for 4 weeks based on 100’s or 1000’s of eyeballs seeing your business or products or services promoted in a very authoritative way, then I hate to be rude but you probably aren’t very good at your business and spending $495 on a Press Release is the least of your concerns. If you ARE decent at what you do then you should be able to convert 100’s or 1000’s of eyeballs into a heck of a lot more than just covering your investment.
• Another perspective is, the time and effort and expense that I go to, to deliver your service. Go take a look at everything I do in the “Details and Pricing” web page. It’s phenomenal. Then consider what I pay for the Press Release service. And for all the other tools I’ll be using — for keyword research, for Social syndication, and so on. If I do what’s recommended — put a professional value on my time, add-in the out-of pocket costs, then double it to give me a 50% profit — I’d be charging 4 figures.
• A 3rd perspective is, what others charge. Now there’s a wide range. But a SUBMISSION of a fully-prepared Press release to one of the comparable Publishers costs more than $250. A good writer — and remember I’m not some green kid fresh out of college — can cost as much as $800, although $250 – $500 is more common. If you went to an outsource resource for the keyword research, image selection and optimization, and so on you’d pay more. My price to have everything handled in a single place and everything taken care of, is an outstanding bargain.

It varies a little, and if there’s some urgency in your timing — a new launch of something or an event you want to promote, for example — we try to reflect that, but plan on 7 Calendar days from when you make payment until we press “Submit.”

Normally we’d hope to be much faster than that, though; 4 or 5 business days. It does depend on your responsiveness, to some degree. If you promise a photo and take 2 weeks to send it; if it takes you 2 weeks to review and approve the draft I give you; don’t hold me to a 7-day commitment!

Short-cut the process and make payment within 24 hours of when we emailed you to make first contact.

We’ll still go through all the checks and balances and if we don’t agree we have a “fit,” we’ll refund.

No.
Press Releases are the one time that Google completely understands that the fast generation of a lot of backlinks pointing to your site is entirely legitimate.
Syndication of News makes sense.
That’s one of the beautiful aspects of a Press Release! All the gain, none of the pain.

Almost certainly “yes” but let’s discuss it first.

I don’t accept press releases that are in the following niches:

• Adult or porn
• Gambling
• Pay Day Loans