@Jouranalistics asked a great question:  What’s the best day to send a press release?

Traditional PR professionals will typically tell you Tuesday or Wednesday are the best days because it gets you out of the shadow of the weekend where readers are spending more time catching up or planning their week.

We took a quick look at some PRWeb stats and provided a comment on the above mentioned post, however, since then we’ve received a number of inquires, and as such, we wanted to offer a second look.

Of the five releases to date this year that have garnered the most page views (ranging between 5,000-16,000 page views), these releases were issued on the following days:

1.  April 28, 2010 (Wednesday)

2.  March 11, 2010 (Thursday)

3.  May 24, 2010 (Monday)

4.  July 6, 2010 (Tuesday)

5.  July 21, 2010 (Wednesday)

It’s important to reiterate that PRWeb releases receive residual traffic from search engines.  Since PRWeb releases are hosted permanently, they have in essence, shelf-life.    In fact some releases, like this one, continue to draw thousands of page views.

We’d certainly caution against drawing a direct correlation between the date these releases were issued and the volume of page views.  This is because the data does not indicate, the quality of writing, the newsworthiness of the announcement, or how well a given release was optimized for search, among other contributing factors.

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The best day to send a PRWeb press release was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

Janet Thaeler, a regular PRWeb customer,  recently wrote this blog post – A Press Release That Led to BIG Sales – and it demonstrates the success of one of her clients had with a PRWeb online news release. Among the very measureable outcomes:  page one ranking in Google and sales.  Yes, sales.

We’ve heard from other PRWeb customers that also cite sales from press releases as a business outcome, and given Janet’s success, we thought it would be useful to point out some of the PRWeb features used that helped contribute to that end:

For anyone interested, Janet has written a guide book to online PR called, I Need a Killer Press Release…Now What? In addition to blogging at Online PR Book, she also posts at Newspaper Girl and Tweets from @NewspaperGrl and @onlineprbook.  Thanks for sharing this story Janet!

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Anatomy of an online press release that sells was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

It seems listening to our customers has paid some dividends.  As you know, earlier this week we launched a newly redesigned Website along with some feature enhancements (blog post | news release), and those enhancements were the result of customer input.

So far the feedback on the new look, feel and features has been solid.  Here’s as sample of the buzz leading up to — and after the launch:

• “PRWeb will reveal a better look and feel of their online identity, including the site design and a refresh of their logo, the new one being bolder and more modern looking…But the design changes are less important than the new features that will be added starting July.” – Everything PR
• “As part of the changes, the news center section of the online press release newswire will be overhauled to include a greater focus on SEO, which Vocus said will mean greater visibility and increased traffic for customers.” – PRWeek
• “With over 500,000 pages, implementing SEO friendly design and architecture changes to a site like PRWeb is no small feat. Structuring the news center according to industry categories creates more of a news destination vs. a repository of press releases. Better design and content organization provides a better user experience and will attract more links.” TopRank Online Marketing (Disclosure:  TopRank is both a customer and consultant to PRWeb).
• “Of course, the number of news release pick ups and the volume of traffic to sites will continue to be the criteria of success for users. It’s too early to tell how effective these changes will be, but they seem to be promising. I’m looking forward to trying the re-engineered PRWeb site with my next release, and see if I notice an uptick in responses.” The Art of Telling Your Agency’s Story

We’d also invite you to check out some of the comments on the post on the day we launched the new PRWeb Website. And to wrap things up – here are a few comments we found on Twitter:

So far, so good: Redesigned of PRWeb well received was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

This past Friday at midnight, we rolled out a brand new PRWeb.com.  This launch was the result of countless hours of effort logged by a wide variety of individuals – from developers, to designers, to writers and more, this was truly a collaborative effort that spanned the company.

Also worth noting is that the launch is a mashup of several different projects that have been on our roadmap for a while now.  Some changes will be immediately obvious, such as the updated look and feel of the site and the new press release template.  Other changes on the other hand, will reveal their impact over time – but more on this in a bit.  What is common throughout all the updates is our intention to better serve our customers – from providing them with more tools to get started to ensuring that the releases perform more effectively online, this launch was all about continuing to offer industry leading visibility to our customers.

As with all significant changes, there are sure to be questions that arise.  We want to take this opportunity to address some of the more significant changes you may notice with the new PRWeb.com:

1. We are no longer listing all $140+ releases on the home page

Back when PRWeb was a free service and publishing a far more limited volume of releases, front page placement was a benefit granted to certain customers willing to make a financial contribution to the company.  At this time there were more tangible benefits to front page placement in terms of readership and SEO.  Over time, the volume of releases published daily has swelled to a much larger number and we have ended up with a home page that can contain too many articles at times.  This has made the home page less than optimal for both users as well as search engines.

Our solution to this challenge has been to evolve from an architecture that focuses on one front page to one that has multiple front pages (from a search perspective). Tactically, we have done this by creating a section of our domain completely devoted to customer news releases, organized around industry verticals (i.e. arts & entertainment, technology, etc.).  This technique is one that is used by many sites with a large volume of content and is a generally accepted method for creating value in certain silos within the hierarchy of a Web site and passing value to the pages located within these silos (customer news releases).

As a result, we fully expect this new architecture to increase the volume of traffic to your release as well as your site.

2. We have made some major changes to the news release template

The PRWeb news release has undergone some significant changes.

First, you’ll notice that there is far more room being given to multimedia elements like video, images, and file attachments.  In the last several years we have gained a lot of empirical knowledge about the way that people consume news online.  Our own research into the effects of multimedia on news consumption showed that the presence of relevant images and video increased the average time users spent on news releases.  There is also notable research that has proven the correlation between multimedia and action.

Then again, all it takes is a quick look at the home page of CNN.com to see how multimedia is beginning to dominate the visual real estate of news sites today.

The second major change we have made is to place links to various actions such as sharing, further inline with the news content.  These days, news releases are not just about getting people to read a story; they are also about getting the reader to take some form of measurable action: to share on Facebook, e-mail to friends, and more.  Subsequently, we have optimized the placement of these links to make our news more action-able.

The final change we’ve made to the release is behind the scenes.  After years of adding code, the time had come for us to step back and optimize the code behind the release to make sure it was optimized for faster load times and better performance in search.  Speed is not only important for users, but leading certain search engines have been very vocal about the growing importance of speed when it comes to performance in search.

3.  We have introduced a dedicated learning center

Over the past few years, we have been consistently investing more time and resources into customer education.  We realize that although there are some folks who have been sending out press releases for years, the practice of creating and distributing online news releases is still relatively new.

What’s more, the varying backgrounds of our customers has created a need for a range of different types of content.  We have PR folks who want to learn more about SEO, and SEO folks who want to learn more about PR.  We have small business owners who want to move from sending out one release each year, to a more ongoing cycle of communication that results in the long term development of online visibility for their brand and their business.

So in response to the ongoing demand for educational resources, we are launching a dedicated learning center that will serve as a hub for all the various articles, webinars, and white papers we have put together.

Hopefully these points address some of the more glaring questions you might have.  If you have others (and I’m sure some of you will), please post them to the comments section of this article and we will make sure to address them as quickly as possible.

We’re looking forward to the conversation.

Introducing the New PRWeb Web site was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

At PRWeb, we review and distribute hundreds of releases on a daily basis to countless bloggers, journalists and Web sites.  If we sent every piece of content to every single member of our audience we’d quickly overwhelm them with and it wouldn’t be long until we saw our news recipients opting-out.  In order to ensure that we get the right customer news releases to the right targets, we use regional and topical category schemes.

Whenever a PRWeb user uploads a news release, they are prompted to choose certain topics and regions that are relevant to their news release.  These selections are reviewed by our editor before the release is published.  At the same time, when users sign-up to receive news content via RSS or e-mail, or publishers sign-up to become syndication partners, they make decisions about what regions and topics they are interested in receiving news releases on.

Ultimately, the topical and regional selections are largely what determine the specific bloggers, journalists and Web publishers who receive our customer news releases.

Targeting Specific Regions and Topics with PRWeb was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

This Friday we are going to be rolling out several additional updates to our analytics dashboard including the following:

• Hovers for ‘impressions breakdown’ - We will be adding hover menus with help text over the various fields in the breakdown table for impressions to better explain what those different values mean.
• Table with exact counts for impressions, reads and interactions - We will be adding a table into the impressions, reads and interactions reports showing the actual count for each of these statistics by day.
• Premium impressions – Premium impressions was an idea we had during development that was rolled out as part of our beta release.  Unfortunately, we weren’t able to acquire the proper data and will be putting that feature on hold for the time being (until we can get the proper data to filter through).

You may also see some changes to our category taxonomy.  We’ve made these changes for a number of reasons.  First, we’ve added a lot of categories over time based on customer request and it was simply time to take a step back and evaluate the overall quality of the taxonomy scheme.  Second, we wanted to start imposing more of a hierarchical logic on the overall scheme that better organizes more specific categories (i.e. chemistry) into broader categories (i.e. science).

Finally, I wanted to mention that we are in the midst of making some significant changes to the layout of the PRWeb news release itself that are going to be a big step forward in terms of search-friendliness and overall look-and-feel.  There are also going to be some goodies thrown in.  We’ll be talking more about some of these upcoming changes in the next several weeks so stay tuned!

More Updates to Analytics, Category Updates and More was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

On January 8, we rolled out a batch of fixes to the release editing tool and analytics dashboard, including the following:

Release editing tool

• Increased the lag on pop-up help menus – Although many users (particularly those newer to the release creation process) liked the pop-up help menus, the velocity with which they appeared was fast so we have introduced a 2.5 second delay on the pop-up.
• Keyword character limitation on URL customization field – We’ve introduced a field-based 25-character limitation to each of the URL customization fields.  The limitation was already there however it was being represented as a validation error instead of being field-based.
• Tickers for quotables and headlines - There are now tickers available for both quotables and headlines so you can see how much runway you have for these pieces of content.

Analytics updates

• Inclusion of export functionality – ‘Export’ functionality was absent in the beta launch of analytics and has been added back in (in PDF, CSV and XML).
• Introducing ‘legend’ into impressions, reads and interactions - Graphs for impressions, reads and interactions show both cumulative and counts by day.  We’ve added a legend back in to help people distinguish the difference between these two.

In addition, there were several additional updates to both the release editing tool and analytics dashboard probably not worth noting at this point in time.

This Friday we are going to be introducing some additional fixes to the analytics dashboard that I’ll be adding to a subsequent blog posting.

Updates to Analytics and the Release Editor was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

Today we are announcing the launch of our updated news release creation tool.  I wanted to take this opportunity to provide background into the thinking and effort that went into this update, which is probably one of our most significant user experience enhancements we have made in the past several years.

Planning for this revision actually started back in November of last year.

At that point in time we were rolling out a fairly lightweight newsroom product and our lead developer on the project pushed for us to use a ‘What You See is What You Get’ (WYSIWYG) approach that allowed the user to interact with something resembling the final product.

Upon launch, the initial UX feedback was extremely positive and at this point in time we started seriously thinking about using a similar approach with the news release creation process.

Intuitively it seemed like the right decision.   Our existing tool, which used a form field based approach, had been initially developed in a text-based news paradigm.  Over the past several years we had rolled out dozens of feature enhancements to the news release and its public facing form had evolved into an interactive, multimedia Web document.  On the back end however, the functionality had outgrown the form field based tool and new, powerful features were sometimes getting lost.  A new release creation process seemed warranted given where we had come with the news release.

However, changing the news release creation process meant we would be altering the most fundamental behavior on PRWeb.  This was a process that thousands of users had grown accustomed to and any fundamental UX change with such a large user base is a daunting consideration.

Inhaling deeply, we wrote down the following goals that would become our guiding light throughout this  process:

1. Ensure that existing PRWeb users would experience a seamless transition to the new tool and better able to take advantage of the full array of features that PRWeb offers.
2. Make it easier for new users to create multimedia news releases on PRWeb and take advantage of new features and technologies.
3. Create a more flexible, scalable framework that would allow us to do a better job supporting new features moving forward.

After agreeing upon the goals of the project, we presented a variety of approaches with internal and external user groups and ultimately decided that a WYSIWYG-type approach was the right way to go.  We then designed a plan that would A) be driven by user feedback from multiple types of users, B) provide us with the flexibility to iterate until we were comfortable launching; and C) take into account best practices of proper UX design.

After two quarters of development, numerous iteration and several rounds of user testing, we finally got to a place where we felt comfortable deploying the tool.

Our plan moving forward is to run the new tool in tandem with the legacy tool (for existing users) until the feedback authoritatively shows that existing users are comfortable transitioning.  At this point in time we will permanently switch to the new tool.  During this time, I do want to note that we will be introducing new features and enhancements into the new tool exclusively.

The news release has changed.  It is our sincere hope and belief that this new tool will cut back on the time and effort associated with managing content in a multimedia news release and provide more time for our users to focus on creating content.  As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section.

Announcing the New PRWeb News Release Creation Tool was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

Last night we rolled out our new client console.  The overall functionality behind the console remains largely unchanged however you will see significant enhancements to its overall architecture as well as the visual design.

We undertook this project with the underlying goal of making it easier for our customers to use PRWeb by focusing on the major objectives they want to accomplish: creating, distributing and analyzing news releases.

Additional goals included the following:

1. Making the console experience more customer-centric by placing information about their news releases and analytics front-and-center.
2. Making the navigation more intuitive and removing elements that customers don’t use.
3. Providing easier access to educational information and customer support.
4. Using consistent design elements throughout the entire client console.

As with most of our enhancements, the main architect behind these changes was you, the end user.  What you see in the client console when you log-in today is the result of the ongoing dialogue we have with our users.

We hope the updates make it easier for you to use PRWeb and give you more time to focus on creating great stories to tell the world and stay tuned…we’re in the lab working on other major enhancements so we can continue to provide you with the highest quality of news distribution service in the industry.

New PRWeb Client Console was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

PRWeb has made an ongoing commitment to ensure our service is usable by everyone – regardless of their technical background. From the Fortune-500 PR person to the local business owner, we want to make sure that everyone who has something worth saying has the ability to say it through PRWeb. Our new console enhancements will make the news release submission process easier and more efficient for users.

We have simplified the submission form and advanced features menu without removing any core functionality.

First, the news release submission form:

Click image to view full size

As you can see from the screenshot above, we have made the news release submission form substantially cleaner and simpler. All of the help text is still present but it won’t appear until you have clicked on the input field where it is applicable. In addition, we have hidden the optional ‘second contact form’ so it is only accessible to those who really need to use it.

Next, we have added an interactive calendar to help you choose your distribution date.

Finally, we have made some changes to the advanced features menu that should make it easier to use (and more approachable).

Last Summer, we launched a new file management system that allowed users use a drag-and-drop approach to their news images and file attachments. Since all multimedia assets are available through this tool, we now simply offer one link to ‘multimedia.’ Also, the MSA and industry category selections will only be available through the news release submission form.

The initial user feedback on these modifications has been extremely positive and spending less time uploading and optimizing your news release means more time dealing with journalists, bloggers and customers, who find your news release once it has been distributed!

PRWeb Simplifies News Release Submission Process (Even More) was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com