8 reasons to dump press releases for a blog

If press releases are part of your work life, you’ve probably asked this question once or twice in the past year (or more). Press releases require a lot of time and effort to produce and distribute. There are hard costs associated with the process. And I’ll go out on a limb and challenge the return on investment from press releases—the results tend to be lackluster, even from those fancy multimedia or social news releases. There has to be a better way, and I think that way is a news blog.

What would happen if you stopped writing press releases and instead started a blog dedicated to your company news? If I were working for a brand new start-up today—a company that’s never issued a press release—this is the path I would take.

If you build an audience around your news blog, you create an earned media channel for instantly sharing your news with the most-interested audiences. This could be your most-trusted and most-likely-to-be-interested journalists and bloggers; it could include customers, prospects, employees, and all of the other key audiences interested in your news. A blog doesn’t charge you by the word length of your post, or try to upsell you on additional distribution. Distribution is earned by the quality and relevance of the information you share through the blog.