If your website content is to target businesses or consumers, Press releases could put your organization in the fore.
In the beginning
Initially press releases were for the purpose of communicating between companies and the media. The concept of the Press release has evolved. Press releases can now be effectively used as a direct to consumer communication tool and to distribute content to the media and to consumers. Press Releases can be syndicated enabling you to reach a large audience in a relatively short time – and with relatively little effort.
Think of the press release as not just a media relations tool from the onset. Be creative about how you state the information in your press release, making sure that it contains some kind of angle that makes it a story. You will be able to measure how successful your release has been by seeing how well it ranks in the search engines and how well it drives traffic, sales, or other actions from online visitors to your free website. So it’s judged not only by how many news stories or blog posts were written about it.
Press Release Sites
Online wire services like Business Wire, PR Newswire, PRWeb and Market Wire makes it easy to get news content into these popular news search engines. As an indication as to how popular online news search is, it has been reported that half of all internet users visit an online news site in a given month. These opportunities that the news search engines offer, has many company marketers continually work at making sure their press releases receive maximum exposure.
Tips for maximizing the visibility of press release content:
- Have something worth announcing. Boring news just doesn’t cut it no matter how well it’s presented. You should focus on a specific topic avoiding too much information. Also, too many keywords could dilute the message.
- When distributing the release via a wire service like Business Wire and PRWeb or PRNewswire, send it to only one service each day. If not, it is very likely that the news search engines will filter out the duplicates.
- Upward and to the left is the rule, important keywords need to be near the top of the document with the most important keyword phrases first.
- Entice the reader to want to stay on your page. Any release needs to offer more than an announcement of news. It should provide the reader with an opportunity to take action. Some examples would be; free trials, special offers, podcasts, reports, email newsletters and consultations.
- Provide a landing page to convert visitors who were referred to by your press release, into prospects.
- Embed relevant links in your press release to function as a call to action. Make certain that it is designed to bring the visitor further along the path to sales
- Provide a list of media contacts for the release. Email the release to them along with a succinct summary of the press release.
- Take advantage of social bookmark sites as a clipping service, using social bookmark services such as del.icio.us, Furl.net or blogmarks.net. Such services may be linked to the online media room and many become crawl-able links for search engines.
And Finally
It’s not so hard to follow these rules when it comes to internet press release formats, creating the releases is easy. The hard part, however, is in engaging the attention of the media, specifically in the introduction of your free website. You have a short amount of space to demonstrate to a potential publisher that your information is worthy of their publications. So apply extra thought from the very beginning. Make certain not to make your release sound like an advertisement. Your press release is a marketing tool (as in advertising); publications don’t like giving you free advertising space.
