The value of newspaper articles

In the last few weeks, we have been trying to get more users to come directly to our website, we have tried to get some local newspapers to print articles about ZiTYZEN.dk.

We hope to increase the portion of users who goes directly to ZiTYZEN.dk, currently we have around 3000 daily users, where around 30 (1%), comes via direct traffic, around 50 (1.75%) comes from referring pages, and the remaining 97.5% comes from Google and other search engines.

We had some help to write a story from a communication student, as we are primarily engineers, and not experienced in writing press releases for the newspapers. She wrote a nice article which she sent to a few newspapers. The process of writing the press release took roughly 14 days, so it was a fair amount of work.

The first paper which published a story about us, was a small local free newspaper called 24timer. They gave us a small article on page 18, which was largely rewritten from the press release, being on page 18 was not satisfactory. In the article they described ZiTYZEN.dk as a great new site with very few flaws, so that was satisfactory.
The actual payoff of the article can be partially read in the direct traffic which also climbed on the day of the article (tuesday the 28th of October), and the following day. The total amount of additional users were 30-40, which was a little disappointing, furthermore we believe that being in the newspaper also increases the overall click-through-rate on search engines, as people are more likely to click on URL's with familiar names.

The second paper we know the article were published in was Midt-Vest avisen, another free local newspaper. The two papers are also part of the same overall company. Hence the article was exactly the same as the one printed in 24timer. The second article was printed on wednesday the 5th of November, 8 days later on page 24. It's a little hard to say something about the impact of this article as the spike we encountered in the direct traffic statistics occurred on tuesday, the day before. We don't know the exact reason for this, but suspect that the paper might have been out already that day. If this was the case this article gave around 50 more direct users.

We also sent press releases to two other Danish newspapers: iByen.dk and Midtjyllands Avis but we don't know with a 100% certainty whether or not the article was printed, although we believe that it was printed in Midtjyllands Avis sometime after the 5th of November, although this doesn't show in the statistics.

Zummary: we spend around 10-15 hours on the press releases, with a very little gain to show for it, only around 100 users spread over 10 days, yielding 10 users per day. Nothing that shows when you already have 3000 users per day. But despite the poor result we still believe that it was worth the effort, as we got some experience with press releases, as well as we believe that it partially comes down to luck.

This time we targeted 3 media bureaus, next time I think we will try to hit even more using some press release agencies, e.g. get2press.dk or pressport.dk. In order to save time and hit more papers. Unless we have a story which is only relevant in a small geographical region, in which case I doubt it is worth spending much time on writing an entirely new article, but since we have an article now we could simply rewrite it slightly, and send it to the local paper.