E176 | Press Release Strategy for AI Search: What the PRWeb Founder Tells Founders

Six hundred dollars, one press release, and no results: that is how PRWeb began.

In 1997, David McInnis paid to distribute a press release, got nothing back, and decided to build a better platform himself. That decision helped start the online press release and led him to newsworthy.ai, where he now helps small business owners, startup founders, and entrepreneurs get noticed online. In this Proven Entrepreneur Show episode, host Don Williams asks him what press release strategy looks like today, when buyers check ChatGPT, Google, and Perplexity before they ever pick up the phone.

Many founders treat public relations as a shortcut, and this conversation pushes back on that idea. Don and David compare earned media vs advertising for early-stage brands and ask a direct question: if two founders each had $10,000 to spend, whose brand equity would be stronger a few years later? They also talk about why third-party voices carry more weight with buyers than anything a company says about itself. The answers are practical for anyone building a personal brand, a B2B company, or a small business on a limited budget.

AI search is the second big theme. David explains how news content can help your company appear in AI answers and why SEO, answer engine optimization (AEO), and generative engine optimization (GEO) all come down to discoverability. The talk then moves to trust, online reputation, and brand authority, with a reminder that credibility is earned over time and that persistence and consistency matter more than any quick fix. The episode closes with a free way to send your first press release through newsworthy.ai, plus a free book on news marketing at newsmarketingbook.com. Press play to hear the full story and the advice behind it.

For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com

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Press Release Strategy for AI Search: What the PRWeb Founder Tells Founders

Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. I have got a real treat for a guest today. I’ve got David McKinnis. David is with newsworthy.ai. And he was previously with a company you may have heard of, PR Newswire. David, welcome to the show.

I have to make one little edit that I was never with PR Newswire. I sold my company to PR Newswire. So I

Okay, all right. So all I was almost right.

almost right. So I I was I’m pretty much the godfather of online press releases. I started the online press release thing in nineteen ninety-seven. And it came because it came about because I put out a press release on PR Newswire, spent six hundred bucks.

of my family’s money, my young family’s money that we didn’t have. And I got nothing in return. It didn’t do it didn’t move the needle for me at all. And I was frustrated. And so I said, I’m just gonna build my own. And when you’re twenty-something and naive and you don’t know what’s ahead of you, it’s really fun to just go out and build something. So I built PR Web.

became wildly successful. I took an exit to Vocus. I sold it to Vocus and then they turned around and sold it to PR Newswire Scission. So it’s under the PR the the PR Newswire Scission brand right now. And about four years ago, I forty five years ago I I asked a friend of mine who turns out he was a integration partner when I had PR Web. I said, Hey, I wanna do this thing again. I wanna do it because I think we can get back into the space and add something new. And but I don’t, you know

50 years old, I don’t want to do it by myself. Do you want to help me? Do you want to join me? And so I’m grateful to have Mark Willeman as a partner, as a founding partner. And we’ve built this thing and it’s just taken off. I’ve I’ve actually, for those who are watching, I’ve actually written the book on news marketing. And and it’s a free download, newsmarketingbook.com. That’s the the the pitch I’m gonna give. Because if they read newsmarketingbook.com, everything else will make sense.

Love that. So so give us the give us the commercial for newsworthy.ai. Tell us what you do, who you serve, how you do it, what you do, all that.

So going back to my my roots roots is I’ve always been a champion of the smaller entrepreneur, the small business. My mother was a s a small business person. she she was just a hustler and and did whatever a lot of things to to earn income for our family. And so I it’s kind of where my heart is at is helping younger, small, medium sized companies get attention online.

And unfortunately, the media is not incentivized really to cover those stories. And so my my my life’s work for the past 30 years has been to figure out how to bypass the media and get those stories directly in front of your customer or your consumer. And whether that’s a business or or a cus or a consumer product, the idea is to take the the press release, which was a which is a media

public relations vehicle and turn it into a direct to consumer vehicle so that we can get as much attention for companies as we can. And we do that through a variety of SEO and AI, AEO, GEO stuff now. And so we’re just everywhere, we just want to put your news everywhere we where we can find a customer for you.

Yeah, so listen to that folks. We’re everywhere and we want to put you everywhere. And I don’t know where you should be specifically, except that you should be everywhere. and so that’s how it goes.

wherever wherever

your customer is, that’s where you wanna be. And

I like that. Okay.

we we even go out to like Telegram, like who would go out to Telegram? But we push out the Telegram and we I just have a lot of esoteric kind of kinda like niche sites we go to because you never know where you’re gonna uncover your your customer.

Totally agree. Totally agree. Okay. So first question. I think most entrepreneurs are.

Ignorant to to misinformed about PR. So what do you think’s the biggest misconception entrepreneurs have about PR in the last twenty years?

Well, that public relations requires relations. It’s a relationship it’s a relationship business, right? And so just spamming, just sending an unsolicited email to a to a press contact probably isn’t gonna move the needle for you. If if that’s what you want is third-party earned media, it d it requires building relationships. And so don’t

Okay.

forget the relations part of public relations.

That’s where agencies come in handy. Cause they have those relationships. They have those, well, they don’t have them anymore, Rolodex. So they have their whatever it is, their Salesforce or whatever they’re using to track now. But they they have those contacts and they have those relationships. We’re different, right? We we agencies use us to bypass the media because it’s easier to get into the news stream with a press release.

And we we curate that press release into various different formats, including video and shorts and stuff. And we just push it everywhere. And and we have AI has allowed us to do a lot of a lot of things with your press release to to allow it to surface without the need of media cov actual media coverage.

Love that.

That news stream is very important.

Okay, if I gave two founders ten thousand dollars today and one invests it in advertising and the other invests it in building credibility and earned media, who’s most likely to win a year or two or three from now?

brand equity standpoint ten thousand dollars isn’t gonna buy you a lot of advertising but but it will buy you a lot of a lot of exposure online through through PR press releases especially if you can generate some some actual relationships with people and get that third party media coverage I would go the PR route and

Gotcha.

and the PR route is just other people telling your story for you. It’s yeah

And one of

the beautiful things about that is this, folks, and ’cause everybody knows that, you know, I live in the l land of influence. How do we lead better? How do we sell more? Easier, faster, smarter, and more. And

Buyers expect us to say nice things about ourselves, but when third parties say nice things about us, that that carries so much more weight than what we may say about ourselves. And so getting other people to talk about you in a positive light, that’s great. So

Well

another thing I think is important is with a press a couple of press releases, you can refine your message a lot quicker than you can A B testing a bunch of paid ad paid advertising and spend a lot less. Right? So so because because you’re out you’re you’re you put out a press release, you’re engaging with media, you’re trying to figure out what resonates, it’s actually a good good first step to helping you refine your message.

Love that. Love that. So, what about this? You know, like everybody’s using AI. It’s AI this, AI that. Tons of content, some of dubious quality. Do you think AI can actually help you build trust? Or are we just all drowning in a sea of nonsense? Yeah.

AI slop.

Here’s here’s where AI AI can help you, and that’s in the res that’s in the AI engines. So that’s in when you when you type into Google or Perplexity or or Chat GPT question and and your company surfaces, that’s where AI can help you. And anybody that says, Hey, I can get you into AI tomorrow, into the LLM tomorrow, is probably being disingenuous.

kind way to say it because those those things have a training cycle and they take a while to to create. And if you’re selected, if your content is selected to be included in that AI in that training set, then that that cutoff happens and maybe your content was included in a training set and you you occur naturally. Most of us don’t. And so what we need is we need to bridge the cap b the the we need to bridge the

the space between the cutoff of the training data and what’s happening currently. And that just happens to be news. So when you do a search on Google or Perplexity or whatever,

it goes out it it relies on what it has in its training data, but then it goes out to the news sources, the news stream, and creates and makes a query there. And it only it only looks at about twenty eight days worth of content and comes back with the the newest stuff because news is new and it doesn’t have it in its in its training dis training set. And so

AI can help. I mean PR can help or news can help you get into those AI responses quicker than instead of waiting for the training data to catch up with your company. Hope that made sense.

It yeah, so so I I kind of interpret it like this, you know, twenty years ago, fifteen years ago, you know, SEO kind of was hitting the scene and people thought, well, I’ll I’ll do SEO and by Monday, you know, they’ll find me everywhere. And you’re like, Well, that’s not really how that works. And and so being found by the LLMs, i it’s not an instant endeavor.

The the analogy

the analogy is is a magazine and I I think it’s still a publication, the week. It’s still a paper publication and it comes out every week and it has a cutoff date. We’re an ed editorial cutoff date probably two or three days before it ships. Right. So what’s in the week is past. It’s that’s all that the week knows, that publication knows, that magazine knows about the world.

So what happens between the time that the editorial cutoff is and and when you get it in your hands and you read it, it’s all past stuff. You you have to go online and find those new sources. And that’s what the search engines are search engines are doing. So SEO is still important, right? Because SEO informs AI and and it all helps to to dis to lift your content into the AI response.

It’s all about discoverability.

Yep. Got it. So

Imagine you’re you’ve met maybe your biggest prospect, and and before they talk with you, you know, they Google your name. And how can press releases help them have trust and confidence before they ever actually even speak with you?

Because it gets you in the news stream and it’s something that you have it’s a discipline. You have to do something every twenty eight days. So you’re building up these little signals. Every twenty eight days you’re putting out a new signal for AI to so that you’re included in the in the AI response. If they first of all, you you the the expression you have ten cents to make a good impression only matters if you get the introduction, if you ever meet somebody.

Right. Th the first chance we get to meet somebody a lot of times is in a search result or in an AI response. Right. So being present online is the biggest thing you can do. If you’re not present, if you don’t have a presence, then then that you just treat that as a cold call. Right? It’s a cold it’s

Yeah, no presence if

a cold it’s a cold call and you have to do a lot of s lot more selling.

But if you have a presence and there’s discussion around what you around your company, around your personal brand, it creates a kind of a brand equity, a personal brand equity or company brand equity that builds trust. And it’s just making those little deposits every month. every 28 days, if you don’t have something to say about your company or to shine light on a client or a or a vendor every 28 days, then you’re probably not really serious about being in business.

Good point. Good point. So five years from now, is there something that can make somebody instantly credible online that nobody’s paying attention to today?

I think credibility’s earned. And I think that’s that’s the really the number one mistake people make. I don’t know if it’s the number one mistake, but they everybody’s looking for the easy button. Right?

Yeah.

And and you you’ve been at this podcasting thing long enough, right? Your first episode wasn’t a success. Right? You probably didn’t see real success until you’re fifty or more episodes in. Right? And and right, they give up.

And very few people get there. Yeah.

Right. And and it’s just about persistence and consistency and and showing up and being online and being present, being eng engaging with other people online. is giving is giving more more than you’re receiving.

Yeah. So so many times with my clients, you know, that one of the first concepts we discuss is trust. You know, if you don’t have trust, if your prospect doesn’t trust you, they’re not going to buy from you. If your team doesn’t trust you, they’re not going to perform for you. And and I can’t tell you how many times a client has said, Well, you know, how do I build trust? And looking for that easy button, kind of just push the button.

And I’m like, well, I I can tell you how to do it. If you want to build trust, you you have to be trustworthy. You have to conduct yourself in in a manner where people have trust. And trust is a bridge built gradually, yet destroyed potentially in an instant. And so it it’s not something you can fake. There’s no easy button and you have to live it.

Kinda every day, every second. Yeah.

Yeah. It’s a consistency thing. Yep.

Yep. Yep. Yep.

Okay, so I I think I know the answer to this. We’ve kind of been talking around this one, so I’m gonna ask it it’s a little different.

Reputation.

Talk to me about how AI can potentially help engineer.

reputation or engineer the

that your that your reputation is known.

I think the greatest impact a impact AI is gonna have on on your reputation is is if you use it for educational purposes. You can learn a lot from AI and then if you what you learn, you share, it builds your authority. And I’ve learned a lot from AI. I’ll I’ll be I’ll be driving down the road and just have a thought and I just ask Chat GPT something and I I’m learning a lot, right, from AI.

Just in being inquisitive. And so I think as as long as you’re learning constantly from AI and you’re and you’re sharing.

that’s one long that’s a longer longer play, but but building that authority. Reputation and authority are are linked. The other thing is I I g I gotta go back is just being present online. If if people are searching topics and your name is constantly showing up, you’re you’re building reputation, you’re building authority. If you’re hiding like a recluse spider, no right, waiting to bite somebody, nobody’s gonna you you don’t have a lot of trust.

So being everywhere, being being present online, showing up in conversations.

It’s again, there’s no real easy button. the there are people who who use SEO and and and AI for reputation management to try to bury, you know, bad stories and things that have happened, they’ll still surface. The the best thing is just don’t create any bad stories.

Who create bad stories. Yeah. It’s that goes back to like the trust thing. Just be trustworthy. It’s it’s

Right. Just just just be a decent person.

th there’s no shortcut really to do it. And and if you get a one star re

Yeah. Just be a de just be a decent person.

Yeah. And if you get a one star review every now and then, as long as you got a whole bunch of five and four star reviews, it you know, it’s not that big a deal. if if if all you have is one star reviews, that’s a big deal. But, you know

Conduct yourself in a way your mother would be proud, and it will work out most of the time. So, okay.

Also don’t

give away don’t give away your services. Because those people are always the grumpiest. The people who receive something for free will always complain the loudest, right?

Yeah, and and many times the smallest client. even if they’re paying, they’re super demanding sometimes. So so David, we have if we have listeners that have podcasts or or just want to they’re like, Hey, I I’m on most of the social media platforms, but I have not paid attention to the press release platform.

How would those people reach out to you and and to newsworthy AI?

So well we just turned on a feature last week where anybody can go on newsworthy.ai, set up an account, and and it walks them through a three step process to send out their first press release, and that’s on us. We don’t charge for that. So

Wow.

so l very low barrier to entry. get in there and then there’s even a link if you want to book a meeting with us to help you through it, we’ll do that. So do you have mute?

So they just go to the website,

newsworthy dot ai.

And

they won’t be able to do anything else except A, B, and C submit your free free press release. The first one’s free.

Okay, folks. It it it doesn’t get any better than that. Okay, nobody’s gonna pay you to do it. Okay. Go to n

You have to you

still have to put in the effort to create the press release and stuff.

Yeah, but if if you’re if it and if you’re lost on that, go to your large language model of choice and ask it to help you. And I’m not saying it’ll be great the first time out, but you know, I you’ve heard the audience heard me say this several times. You know, I’ve written ten books. I have eleven, twelve, and thirteen all in the hopper, and my first book is my worst book.

And people are like, why would you say that? I’m well, it is my worst book. It’s the very first one I ever did. I didn’t know what I was doing. Okay. And I didn’t say it was a bad book. I just said it’s my worst book. And my first podcast episode with a guest was my worst podcast episode with a guest because I didn’t really know what I was doing. So but that’s a tremendous offer. Newsworthy dotai. And

Follow the three steps, ABC. Get your first press release out there in the world. Something good could happen.

And we’re your backstop, if we everything goes through editorial editorial review. So if there’s something that that needs attention, we’ll we’ll let you know.

Yeah, appreciate that. so if you wanna reach out to David, you wanna reach out to newsworthy dot AI and and he’ll get you taken care of. David, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It’s been my pleasure.

Thank you very much.

That’s today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. See you next time. Bye now.