When launching a new website or when promoting an exisiting site, press releases are an absolute must. Many webmasters overlook this aspect of promotion thinking it’s too costly or that there’s little or no value in it. The truth is both of those assumptions are incorrect and a well written and distributed press release can be one of the best moves made in the promotion cycle.
Today, I will begin a three part article detailing the process of creating and distributing a winning press release. Regarding the cost factor involved in issuing a press releases, there are many inexpensive solutions as well as free solutions available to publishers. Those solutions will be covered in the next two articles in the series, but for today I’ll focus on elements of style in writing a winning press release.
All press releases follow a similar format:
- Headline
- Summary
- News Body
- Company/Author Information
The Headline
The headline of your press release is the single most important piece of the puzzle. If people don’t like what they see in the headline, more than likely they won’t bother with your release. One thing to remember is *Never* use all capitals, but *do* capitalize every relevant word in the headline. Additionally, keep your headline as short and direct as possible and by all means use a catchy statement without going overboard. Whatever you do, make sure your headline uses proper language and that there are no misspellings or grammatical errors. Here’s a few examples of good and bad headlines :
Good : Is The Internet Dead And Boring?
Good : Pushing WordPress SEO Boundaries
Good : Joomla Jumpstart Releases Add-on that Solves SEO Problems
Bad : Finally, a cuddly online fad even grandma can love (ambiguous and poor capitalization)
Bad : SEO And PPC Jobs Has Increased By 200 Percent (poor grammar)
Bad : SEO: Real black hat secrets unleashed and how to avoid it (poor capitalization)
Just from the examples above you can see which articles would catch your attention, however, when writing a release, you have to be aware that you will be releasing your information to writers and members of the press who are sticklers for standards and elements of style in writing. What may seem to the ordinary person something that would catch attention, to the press and media that same catchy headline that is poorly capitalized and grammatically poor wuld often be overlooked.
The Summary
The summary of your press release is usually a 200-250 word condensed version of your article’s body. In your summary it is highly recommended to include your company name, location and other relevant data that might inspire the local print media or even television or radio media to pick up your release for distribution. Here again are both good and bad examples of press release summaries :
Good : Toledo, Ohio based manufacturing firm Acme Widgets, known for the indestructible anvils and detour signs has announced a revolutinary new polymer chemical. “This new discovery could eliminate the margin of error in roadrunner trapping and help coyotes catch roadrunners more effectively” as stated by founder and president of Acme Widgets, John Q. Public.
Bad : Does it matter if a roof looks like shingles or slate? If the house is the old Ehrsam home on heavily trafficked Main Street, the answer is “yes.”
The good example shows how to effectively use locale and company name in the summary of a release. some of you may be wondering “why should I include that information when it will most likely be listed again in the article body”? The answer is that most RSS aggregators and most feed readers will only list the headline and the summary of an article to prospective readers. This technique gives you the advantage to effectively reach local news and media sources without them having to click and read the entire article. Many news outlets scan headlines and summaries to find articles relevant to their locale. If your release is going to capture the hearts and minds of your intended audience, you must start by capturing those hearts and mind locally and your release will spread from there.
The News Body
When writing the body of your press release there are a few things to remember. If your release is for a website, for example AffiliateBestPrograms, make sure that every time you mention the site you add the domain extension such as AffiliateBestPrograms.com and not the former example. The second thing to remember is *never use negativity* in your press release. Do not, under any circumstances, use your release to exhalt your business or website over the competition by using comparison or negativity. This is one of the most common mistakes made by amateurs making press releases. Also, don’t make statements such as “XYZ company is the best…” or “XYZ company beats the others…”, or any type of self praise. Keep the body of your release centered on the facts and only the facts. Avoid excessive quotes or testimonials, save those for your website’s “about” page. Contrary to your summary, a press release’s body should only contain information that would encourage readers to find out more information about your subject.
Company/Author Information
There is absolutely no purpose in creating a press release if you are only going to leave and email address or a website address as your contact information. There is no media outlet that will take a business seriously if you do not have a physical location. I’ve seen far too many of these type of releases lately and it just makes me think the entities who create these releases are nothing more than spammers looking for a free ride. If you are seriously intending to have your release picked up by other sources, I highly suggest including a contact phone number. In the recent release I created for one of my new sites, I included my business address, phone number as well as email contact. Within one day I was contacted via phone by a local newspaper asking my permission to pick up the release for distribution in their weekend edition. The result being a flood of hits to my site over the weekend.
One last tip, do make sure you spell check and proofread your press release before submitting it. A good online spell checker is avaliable at (http://www.spellcheck.net/), also make sure your punctuation and grammar are correct. There’s nothing worse than finding errors in a your release after it’s already live and on the internet.
That’s about it for Part I on the topic of Press Releases. My next article will focus on sources to submit your newly created press release. I’ll start with the “paid for inclusion” in Part II of this article and then in Part III I’ll explore the good, bad and the ugly “free inclusion” services available on the internet.
Until next time, Happy Publishing !!
Id like to hear more about that newspaper picking up your press release. What was so great about it that made a newspaper want it?
It didn’t get picked up by the New York Times or the Chicago Tribune but by a small paper called The Coastal Press that publishes articles of local interest. Maybe there’s nothing interesting going on around here beside the constant debate over the Delaware DOT’s decision to commence construction on highway 1 during tourist season?? Maybe omebody on the newspaper staff was a dog lover ??? Although it’s a small paper, it is read by quite a few tourists in the area for the weekend. I had over 500 unique visitors for two days in a row and have been averaging about 200 every day since the release and it’s funny because today I’m looking at breaking 500 again.
I’ve just been trying to put together a press release for my website so this was just what I needed! I’m just suck on the cover note now.
btw you need a way to subscribe to comments!
thanks
I would recommend him not implement feed comments on blog posts as it bleeds pagerank and also indexes feed pages. I had to remove them on all my blogs because the search engines were indexing the feed pages due to this link being on the permalinks for the default theme.
Thanks for this, I\’m writing an ebook about starting up businesses right now so this post was very informative.
Agree with you that It is important to properly structure your Press Release. In order for “the press” to possibly pick up your article, you’ll need to structure your Press Release in the proper format. Many people have great topics for their PR, but because their format is not correct, “the press” simply ignores what they’ve written.
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[…] During the course of any successful business writing career, you may be called upon to write a press release. Regardless if you’re writing it for your employer, contractor or if you’re writing one for your own business, there are elements of style that define a typical press release. Rather than re-invent the wheel, the information presented in here today is taken from a previously published article entitled : Writing an Effective Press Release. […]