Since I’m writing a book about online PR, my posts center a lot on the subject. I’m thinking about it A LOT. As always my blog reflects my current adventures.

I recently suggested that PRWeb let you put phone extensions in the media contact. They replied that it’s already possible (but very clumsy).

You can add extensions to the phone number, if you put a + symbol before the extension. For instance: 555-555-5555 +01. As you probably already know, the system will now allow you to type an “x” or “ext” in the phone number for the media contact, but it will allow you to use the “+”.

Thanks PRWeb – I wish I knew that sooner!

I asked an editor at PRWeb the best day to release your press release. They said on a Tuesday or Wednesday. That’s generally speaking. I’d avoid Friday or weekends in most cases.

Targeting Cities with your Press Release
Here’s another PRWeb tip (I will have time in a few months to finish recording all I’ve learned about PRWeb) about the MSA regions you select. When you submit a press release, you can select 5 US cities/areas to target your release to. These are in addition to the entire US.

There are two ways this is helpful: first, there’s a link on PRWeb’s home page that says, “search by MSA” that lists the cities alphabetically. So anyone can click there and see a list of cities. From there you can see all releases from that particular area. Second, people can sign up to get RSS feeds from PRWeb. So if a news organization is tracking news from their state, they could subscribe to that feed. They can also limit the press releases they see by area, category, and by editorial score. I only sign up for scores of 4 or 5 otherwise you get too many and you’ll get lower quality releases.

I have been submitting press releases to PRWeb at work and it’s been going well. Most of the time I submit on the $200 level. I haven’t experimented going above that price point yet. On the $120 level you can’t see the search engine terms that were searched on to find your news item. You get less distribution. Plus you can’t schedule a free podcast about your news release.

Here are the number of reads so far. As you can see, it seems to generate MUCH MORE press at the higher level of distribution. I’m sure there are other factors (day released, the newsworthiness of the release, etc). However, there is a significant difference in traffic.

All of the releases spiked traffic for several days. I have a potentially large success story that I can’t blog about just yet…

Week #1

Now a few days later you can see the long tail of PRWeb press releases. Unlike traditional media that has a short shelf life, the reads, downloads, pickups, and prints continue to grow. PRWeb keeps the press release up forever and people searching the internet or their site continue to find it. You have a permanent URL and it continues to bring traffic to your web site. Businesswire unfortunately doesn’t have a permanent URL and if you click on an old release, like I did today, you will have an error page. I’d rather pay once for traffic over time.

Week #2

Week #3 – Oct 25

Incidentally SEO is also very beneficial. I got one new link from a site with a pagerank of 7 last week. In one week it has become a huge traffic generator (#3 overall). It also generated leads that are increasing each month. If I could add one like this each week or even one every few months I will see a huge impact. Plus it’s FREE (well, my time isn’t free, but you get the idea).

I’m also experimenting with targeted contextual ads in place of Google Adsense for content and starting more email marketing (this isn’t going well so far). I can’t wait to develop that channel to do more lead nuturing and email marketing. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I just needed the company to support my efforts.