Many of the lower cost press release distribution services are now offering you to specify a distribution time. The large wire service providers have always allowed you to set the release time and time zone. Your PR or marketing agency should be able to advise you on the best time for a release; but if you don’t have one here is some guidance is often asked “what time of day should my company issue a release”}?
In the absence of urgent news that must be released immediately, you should aim for a release time of 7:30am-8am in your “target timezone”.It is early enough in the morning to meet most journalist’s deadlines and late enough to catch them after their coffee. Releasing early in the morning will allow get you to the top of Inbox’s if you are pitching via email. It also gives your public relations agency the entire day to line up interviews with company executives, if requested.
Note your “target timezone” may be different than the location of your business. For example, if your technology business is in Dallas, Texas but you want to reach out to the Pacific time zone San Francisco tech media, a 7:30am PST/PDT release would be advisable. Early morning distributions have given us the best pickup.Remember you always have the option to send releases to reporters “under embaro” which means you specify the date and time of the release in the future. {However, we find sending releases “under embargo” is not as effective as a timed morning distribution}. Some editors and reporters also frown upon embargoed releases or they just simply forget about a release when it was sent to them days before.
For a press release distribution service consider Marketwire.com.Marketwire’s state-only distribution are great bargains if you are a local company.And their SEO-enhanced options at $200 is highly-recommended as anchor-text backlinks remain intact even in online news sites such as Google News and Yahoo! News. If you can’t afford Marketwire for a national release, then use PRWeb at $80 if you’re really budget-limited, or the $200 PRWeb SEO-enhanced version with anchor text links. However with the PRWeb package, you cannot pick your distribution time – the default is midnight- the $80 option releases only at midnight}.