Today we submitted our first press release on how a virtual assistant can help small businesses during a recession.

As I was preparing this press release, I found the reviews and information on the effectiveness of PRWeb to be sparse so I’m going to try to make this as useful as possible to someone who is trying to decide whether PRWeb is worth the money when there are so many free press release sites out there. I will update this post often over the next several days as it all plays out with stats, media response (will there be any?), incoming links, etc.

For more information, please see the only review of PRWeb with much substance (from SUGARRAE’s blog).

Purchasing: PRWeb offers a number of different options. To truly test out the service, I opted for the most expensive option which guarantees distribution to the Associated Press. It was a lot of money to spend if this doesn’t end up producing any results but I didn’t want to look back and wonder “What if…?”

I think we’ve got a pretty good angle here and I’m optimistic that it will do well.

On the submission process: PRWeb gives your press release a rating after it is submitted to them. Initially, our release got a rating of 2 on a scale of 5 which means that it would not be fully distributed! As you can imagine, this ticked me off a bit because the justifications for this were off-base. I made a few minor edits and resubmitted (not changing anything about the actual release but removing our company logo) and it was then given a rating of 4 – which is good enough.

Our press release is scheduled to go out at 5 a.m. EST tomorrow. I’ll update in the morning with the initial response.

UPDATE: 02/24/09 9:02 a.m.

I got an email at exactly 5:00 a.m. confirming that the press release had been distributed via the “Online Distribution Engine.” Here are the stats so far, 4 hours in:

From the search engines, we have gotten one Google hit each for the keywords “recession” and “recession update.”

UPDATE: 02/24/09 9:18 pm

Traffic and views have increased dramatically:

I still haven’t heard from CNN yet but I expect I’ll have a voicemail waiting for me in the morning…

Another metric not reported here, the YouTube video I threw together for this release (the package I purchased allows you to attach a video) has about 28 views. It’s impossible to say whether that traffic is from the release.

UPDATE: 02/24/09 10:34 PM

I just received the Google Alert I have set up for “longerdays” and we got a link as a direct result of the press release. It is coming from a Pagerank 2 website… but I’m just thrilled to start seeing a result. On the plus side, the link does come from a website that is pretty closely related to our niche – same neighborhood I would say.

Just as a side note, I am not linking to the press release itself or any of the sites that link to it or us simply because I don’t want Google to think this was a reciprocal link trade. Perhaps I’m overly paranoid about what Google might “think” but I’d rather play it safe. Inbound links are the ultimate goal here so I’d hate to do anything that would negate them.

FINAL REVIEW MONTHS LATER: No noticeable increase in pagerank, two incoming links, no sales as a result of the release, and no media attention. We won’t be using the service again for a while. Could be a good service for some businesses but it’s not for us.

Related posts:

1. StumbleUpon Ads Review
2. Testing out Squidoo

Quincey Hobbs of the Tucson  Citizen recently wrote an article on personal assistance that mentions LongerDays.com: 

http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/ss/business_edge_columnists/77222.php 

He raises good points on the trade off between time and money and the internet being an equalizer – virtual personal assistance is affordable enough for most people and the return in free time, less stress, etc. help justify the additional expense. 

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