Need Your News Release to Get Picked Up on the Web? Then Stop Doing Things the Old-fashioned Way!
You can achieve measurable results for your company or for your clients. But it may involve changing your press release approach dramatically. You have to write for the Internet and for the search engines.
If your primary public relations strategy still amounts to sending press releases to a finite number of media contacts, you fail to take advantage of the Internet. You are not reaching the new influencers, to use Paul Gillen’s term. Even if you are sending your news release to a wider audience by using one of the excellent online PR tools, you are still making a mistake if you don’t optimize your release for the search engines.
In a superb post on the “Online Marketing Blog,” Lee Odden compiles the best advice from the folks who are running the major online news release outlets such as PR News wire, PRWeb, and Business Wire. Here are some key takeaways:
- Use a pithy descriptive headline with important keywords and repeat those keywords in your lead. And don’t use jargon!
- Link keywords to relevant landing pages on your site–that is where many of those keywords will be found.
- Don’t think of your release is a “media relations tool.” Think of it as a mini web page that covers the news item or topic about which you are writing.
- You release should act as a portal to more information on the topic.
- If you have audio or video content be sure to include them with your release.
Odden quotes Laura Sturaitis of Business Wire on on why it is so important to pursue this strategy?
“The press release can be a powerful tool to do this because of its extensive reach online not only as a media relations tool but now is a direct to consumer communication via search engines and other online reach.”
Be sure to check out the complete post for great tips and a lot of links to other useful advice about bringing your press release strategy into the 21st century so that you take full advantage of the power of the Web.
In addition, if you’re not yet aware of the many ways to get your news to broader audience check out the following resources:
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Comments [2]
Sounds like you’ve got PR down to a science… at least the Web portion. Thanks for the tips and links.
Thanks, Samantha. Things are changing so fast that it’s hard to keep up, but we sure have to change our philosopy of how to do press releases.
Newt