The Brinkwire blog

Encourage bloggers to reblog your news

Posted on 27. Aug, 2009 by Andrew.

This is the second in the “Brinkwire features” series of blog posts. Our goal is to help explain some our unique selling points and features.

Brinkwire uses a reblog button on our hosted press releases. It’s powered by Zemanta and is a quick and easy way to encourage bloggers to spread your news.

There’s a reblog button at the bottom of this post for you to test. In essence the post – whether it be your Brinkwire press release or a blog post – is fed into the clever Zemanta editor. After a blogger clicks the button all they have to do next is select a quote from the press release.

Once the quote’s been selected the blogger is shown a powerful blogging editor that provides some correctly licensed images to use alongside the quote, suggestions some additional links and related articles.

At the bottom of this page is a large “Publish to your blog!” button the blogger can use to automatically import this enhanced quote to their platform or they can simply select to copy the HTML to paste it elsewhere.

Our Zemanta integration featured on Zemanta’s own blog this month as an illustration of a good use of their API.

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Tracking press releases with Google Analytics

Posted on 10. Aug, 2009 by Andrew.

This is the first in a series of “Brinkwire features” blog posts. The Brinkwire press release site has a number of features that no one else does and the purpose of these posts is to offer a guide tour/how to for them.

Today we’re looking at the use of Google Analytics to track press releases.

Some of the bigger press release sites will charge a hefty extra to allow you to look at their stats. We’re not against this but we feel the nature of the press release beast doesn’t really support this type of analytics and so we offer Google Analytics tracking for free.

Does it really matter who looks at your press release? The main performance indicators of the press release should be about distribution. Shouldn’t it? How many blogs covered your news because of your press release? How many tweets did your press release generate? On site web analytics don’t really answer these key questions but with Google Analytics you can:

1. See how many times your press release was looked at on Brinkwire
2. See which sites are referring traffic to your press release
3. Look at the network details of your viewers (a network like *.britishtelecom.& suggests a domestic viewer whereas a network name of *northcliffe* suggests a journalist)
4. Where in the world the viewers are coming from – by country or by city – and which language their browser is set too.
5. How long much time viewers spend reading your press release.
6. Which links in your press release did viewers click on.

To get started you need a Google Analytics account. The good news is that these are free and easy to generate. Visit http://www.google.com/analytics. Here you can either sign in directly with your Google account or create one for the first time.

The next thing you need to do is tell your Google Analytics to track activity at Brinkwire. You do this by adding a Brinkwire profile to your account. That’s dead simple and this screen grab illustrates the settings you need to enter on the key screen.

The last thing you need to do is write down your Google Analytics tracking number. You get that when Google Analytics shows you your tracking code. You don’t need the whole code (we’ve already added that to the site) just the number we’ve underlined below.

When you come to publish your press release at Brinkwire you simply add this Google Analytics account number to your submission form and from the very second your press release goes live you’ll be tracking web traffic data (Google Analytics updates several times a day).

If you’d like to review a quick summary of Brinkwire’s features then you can do so at our “How this works” page.

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