Develop a Newsworthy Press Release for Online Distribution and Increased Site Exposure

Traditionally, a brick and mortar business would have a PR firm who generated press releases to build up a buzz about a company in the community. Today, marketers are using a virtual press release to get more traffic flooding to their sites. The problem is, most marketers don’t know how to differentiate between sales copy hype and press release news.

Press releases are written factual statements about a product or event that someone is promoting. A press release is a newsworthy description given to media outlets providing information based on accurate facts to promote the item of interest.

Press releases are read as if they were a news story and not a sales letter. Sales letters describe a product or service by building anticipation and interest so the reader reads all the way to the bottom of the page to find the important information concerning the product.

Press releases are the opposite of the sales letter. They describe all the important facts right away in the beginning to grab the reader’s attention and the rest of the information that’s not as important goes towards the bottom. There are many steps to follow in writing an effective press release. Let’s break them down and discuss each one.

Plan Your Press Release

Every good product starts out with a plan. The press release is no different. Start by writing down descriptions and points about the product. This is an informal part of the process, so don’t write sentences describing it.

You only need to write a couple of words to get the point across. For example, if you were going to write a press release about a sales event coming up, you only need to jot down things like one day sale, 15% off, etc.

Also there’s no need to write these words in any certain order. You only want to jot down what the product or event is about. You’ll sort through them later on to determine what’s the most important and what’s secondary.

Now that you have all the information jotted down on your list, take a look at it and decide what you feel are the most important facts concerning your product, service or event.

Divide them up into two groups; the primary ones and the secondary ones. The primary ones are what will describe the product in the who, what, where, why and when format. The secondary ones are good points about the product but they don’t describe it as well as the others.

Decide on some related keywords to place within your article. If it gets published online, you can take advantage of the search engines to get the press release noticed. Only come up with a few keywords and don’t try to stuff the release with tons of them.

Your main objective is to grab the reader’s attention on what the product or service is about. If they see a bunch of keywords stuffed within the release, they’re more apt to lose interest quickly.

Do a search on the ‘net, and find other press releases to get ideas from. You’ll see the ones that are more likely to get published are the ones that don’t provide a bunch of fluffy words trying to make the product sound like more than what it really is.

Start Writing the Press Release

We’ll go into online press release distribution in the next section, but don’t overlook offline niche publications. You can get a Writer’s Market and look up consumer and trade publications and fax them to see if the company will pick up your info for a future issue.

If it’s going to be faxed to offline publications, which is strongly suggested as a merge with your online efforts, then the press release should be on the company’s letterhead stationary with all of the contact information placed at the top. Make sure the website links are right with the name and address of the company.

The next portion of the press release is the headline, but skip this for now. Leave room for it later and move onto the first lead sentences of the release. The headline will tell a reader what the product, service or event is.

The lead paragraph or the first couple of sentences is what’s going to describe that product or service using your primary descriptions from your plan. Write these sentences in the who, what, why, where and when sentence format, basically summarizing the press release in a couple of sentences. Before writing the lead paragraph, make sure you add the city, state and date and then lead into your first couple of sentences.

When writing about an upcoming event, you need to make sure that you’re describing who’s offering it, what’s being offered, where the site is located and so on. Only provide facts and not the fluff you see in sales copy.

Now that you have the lead paragraph done, you can move onto the body of the press release. This is where you go into more detail about the product or event that the release is being written about.

Make sure you keep the sentences short and also provide some quotes from an expert relating to the product. The quotes should be just their description of the service or product and not an embellished testimonial.

Toward the end, state the product or event again and summarize the press release as you did in the beginning paragraph of the release. Add any pertinent links for resources if they’re appropriate or the contact information for the company.

Make sure you add the link for your website, to encourage the readers to click the link and go to your website for any more information. To signal the end of the press release, place 3 # signs below the last line of the release and center them on the page. This signals it’s the end of the release and ready for immediate distribution.

When you’re done, go back and write the headline for the press release. This is what describes the event or service and really grabs the reader’s attention. Press releases are only meant to be around 200-500 words in length and not more than one page long.

Make sure all of the important information is placed at the beginning since the end of the press release may not get read or it may be cut from the editors due to not having enough space to publish it. If it’s an online release, then space isn’t an issue.

Before sending your press release on to a distributor, ask a few people to read it over for you and correct any mistakes they point out. It’s always nice to have a second pair of eyes reading your release in case you missed some mistakes. Your release needs to look professional, so don’t be afraid of any critiquing comments you receive.

Tips for Submitting Your Press Release Online

First, make sure that any information listed in your press release is current and not outdated. If you added information like statistics, the editors might reject the press release if it appears that you didn’t use current resources.

If your press release needs to be immediate, then you’ll need to make sure you place “IMMEDIATE RELEASE” in the left hand margin right above where your headline is.

This is to ensure that your press release gets out in a timely manner. There are many news wire services to submit your press release to. Choose only a few a day because submitting to too many of them at one time will cause the search engines to weed out what they see as duplicates.

By spacing them out a little bit, you increase your chances of the search engines picking up your keywords for all of the submissions you make. The more popular newswire distribution websites are BusinessWire and PRNewswire.

They are easy to use to submit your press releases to and they offer their services for free. There are many more distribution services to use, so a quick search on the Internet will bring you many results to choose from. Some are free and some have a tiered payment system – the more you pay, the higher your release ranks in the results and feeds.

Once you’ve submitted your press release and it’s accepted by one of the newswire services, they’ll send it out to over 80,000 journalists and several thousand websites where they’ll either accept it or reject it, so it’s important that you write your press release well.

If possible, provide an image on your press release that’s related to the event or service since these are more likely to be read. People like images, so use that to your advantage, but don’t overdo it.

They should be rather small in size and must be related to the service or an image of the product. If it isn’t related, your press release may not get accepted by the newswire services.

Press releases are effective for getting your product, service or website noticed to a broad range of people. If you write them properly and avoid placing sales copy like wording in them, you can get your release accepted by a newswire distribution service and ultimately into the hands of journalists who take them and publish them.

The more people who will get to see your release, the more chances you’ll have that they’ll click your website link within the release and visit your site. With a free service like that driving traffic to your website, how can you go wrong?

It’s time to take your traffic strategies to a higher level. Advanced traffic will help you hone in on an even more narrow audience so that your clicks convert to sales more easily.