Frequently asked questions
The value of online coverage
There are 3 key – and unique – benefits of issuing your news release via NeonDrum:
- Measurable results – your story is seen by the large online audience and is visible via search; our online coverage also directly drives traffic to your website
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – online coverage will improve your keyword/keyphrase ranking in Google and the other major search engines
- Guaranteed coverage – we guarantee at least 40 separate instances of coverage, which we believe is industry-leading
- What is NeonDrum?
NeonDrum is an online distribution and monitoring service for B2B press releases. We take your press releases and news stories, tag them with relevant keywords, and submit them to a targeted list of online publications, web forums and social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Del.icio.us. We also generate RSS feeds to help syndicate your news far and wide.
Our aim is simple: to help make you famous online. Our strategy is two-fold - to get your news covered as widely as possible while also providing careful targeting of the online news services and forums that your key target audiences visit. This "breadth and depth" approach means that we maximise the opportunities for pick-up by key influencers, bloggers and commentators who prefer to "pull" breaking news and information from the web themselves, rather than have it "pushed" to them.
It's what NeonDrum stands for: be seen, be heard online. - How much does it cost?
Our price list is available for download and there are excellent discounts for volume.
- Is this an SEO service?
NeonDrum is not an SEO service per se, however, we can deliver a demonstrable boost in natural search rankings from just one release.
This boost in SEO is achieved in a number of ways, including the publishing of live (clickable) links back to your website, and through keyword association – the positive impact of having your news, with your keywords, associated with your company name online.
If you would like to see some examples, please contact us here.
- We use a wire service, how are you different?
A wire service will generally email out your release to a (usually) huge list –1000s –of editors. These services typically bombard the same editors with 10s-100s of releases per day. It’s a bit like throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping that it sticks somewhere.
We offer a far more targeted service. We email out to a smaller, hand-picked list of editors and then manually post your release to further relevant sites. This combination produces better, more targeted coverage.
We have benchmarked our service against newswires and every time we produce a better result – our price/performance is double that of a newswire. Please see our case study on the NeonDrum website.
- We’ve tried services like this and the coverage is very low value
Our service is probably different to the ones you’ve tried. Firstly, we offer a very targeted distribution – we hand pick the sites for your news release based on its content and post to the following online media categories:
- Trade
- Business and Finance
- General News
- Social Media (Twitter/Blogs/Digg etc)
This targeted approach yields very good quality coverage. Why not test the service on your next release and measure the results?
- Can we have a list of the sites you distribute to?
Are there any specific sites that you are interested in? Just let us know and we can check that these are in our database. We’re not able to provide you with a targeted list for your sector unless you are a customer.
- How do you handle any overlap with our own distribution?
Even if we are distributing to the same publication, our contacts and processes may not be the same as yours and may result in additional coverage, so our distribution is designed to complement your own.
If, however, you have specific email addresses to which you do not wish us to send your release, we can cross-reference and remove these contacts from our list before any distribution for a small supplementary charge. Please contact us for more details.
- We would like to target just the UK – we don’t want any coverage in [Europe][US]
By its nature, the web is global, so any coverage will be visible throughout all geographies.
We can exclude publications from our distribution list but you need to be aware that many sites deliberately set themselves up to be global and hide their physical location (London publishing companies host many “US”-looking sites).
When we prepare a distribution, we hand pick sites from our database. If you send your list to us, we will not distribute to those sites and will replace them with others from our database.
- Is your service just English language?
At the moment it is. We do post to all sites throughout the world that take English language news. Some of these are based, for example, in Europe and Asia.
- Why don’t you distribute consumer (B2C) news releases?
Consumer media is very much advertising-led, whereas B2B has a large, mature and targeted trade press. Consumer press is not only limited for editorial but also, we need to be careful about vetting the consumer sites in terms of the other type of stories they take and the advertising they use. We will distribute a consumer-focused story as long as it has a significant B2B angle – in other words, if we know that our B2B sites will happily take the news. If you have a release that you’d like to try, please just send it to us and we’ll be happy to take a look.
- What is "tagging" and why is it important?
Tagging is specifying the keywords in your news release. By adding tags you are enabling your content to be categorised and found according to topics of shared interest. Tags are especially useful for organising blog posts, and for social bookmarking sites where people read and rate/rank content.
- What is "RSS" and why should I care?
RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". RSS is a means of distributing content such as news releases so that subscribers to your "feed" will be alerted once new content is published. An email program may be set up to read an RSS feed, or a browser can be set to "live bookmark" a feed. Additionally, RSS feeds can be "mashed" with other content to form aggregated pages of content, such as those on My Yahoo.
- Can you get me on the front page of Digg or other social news sites?
Social bookmarking and community-driven news sites such as Digg are meritocracies. Our job is simply to submit your news once and make key audiences that use social bookmarking sites aware of the story. From there, it is up to the audience to read it, rate it, and make it famous.
We do not interfere with ranking systems or use multiple/group voting to artificially boost your popularity in any way, and we do not encourage you to do so. Our only recommendation is that you make your press releases and news stories as interesting, compelling and relevant as possible to stand the best chance of being promoted by community users.
- Why should you choose us?
Because we're good at this! We will distribute your news online in a responsible, professional manner and deliver great results.
