How to do a Press Release
People are under the assumption that press releases are only for large corporations and don’t see the significance in learning how to do a press release for a small business. However press releases are a great way to build link juice for your website. Link juice is accrued when you have a link to your website on another page with a lot of traffic.
So if learning how to do a press release can really drive a lot of traffic to the site that it’s promoting, then why aren’t more people writing them? According to an article on how to do a press release on SearchEngineLand, “perhaps it’s this semiformal nature of the press release that makes many small businesses overlook it when planning ways of promoting themselves.” Well have no fear, we are going to offer you 12 tips on how to do a press release, and you’ll be on your way in no time.
How to do a Press Release | The Tips
Before we jump into it, there may be some naysayers out there that would try and dissuade you from learning how to do a press release all-together. You may hear them preach about the new Google, Yahoo, and Bing algorithms or that most sites are doing a “nofollow” for press releases. While some of these facts may be true, press releases are still a great promotional vehicle for your service or product, so learning how to do a press release is still a great skill to possess.
Here are some tips when writing a press release that will help your chances of getting picked up by a local news source or shared on social media:
- Be sure to cover the basics — specify the who, what, where, why and when.
- Naturally, mention the city and other locality names for the “where” to target your local market, and to help develop relevancy in local search relevancy algorithms. Local businesses should include their full street address and phone number near the end of the press release to get any possible citation value from it.
- Tell a story with each press release! Providing a human interest narrative can help get your publicity distributed. Go beyond a terse listing of the facts; write with a wider audience in mind to better appeal to those who might be inclined to push mentions out via their social media accounts.
- Perform keyword research and include the local phrase combinations that best match what more consumers would be searching for when seeking the topics you’re writing about.
- There are many press release sites/services out there. Some free PR sites can be worthwhile, but some of the paid options have advantages as well. Will the release be permanent? Are links allowed? Will it get distribution through news search or major news sites?
- Include images optimized for local search, for press release distribution services that allow it. Some of them allow embedding a video, which is also helpful.
- Including an optimized PDF version of the press release can also help — it can result in multiple pages linking to your site versus one release, and PDFs sometimes get copied and re-hosted elsewhere, resulting in more link options.
- Include a press releases section on your website, and archive copies of your PR in there. This is yet another valuable keyword content source for your own site.
- Include a few links to your site in your press release. You could also include links to your Facebook and Twitter accounts instead of a couple of the links to your site.
- Promote the press release itself once it’s issued, by linking to it, mentioning it in your own social media accounts and sending it directly to local reporters and hyperlocal bloggers in your area. Just exercise due diligence beforehand to be sure you’re sending it only to people who might be interested in it. A press release about a cool new hamburger is not going to be of interest to reporters who only cover city council politics or bloggers who only focus on the local music scene.
- Here’s a tip borrowed from Matt McGee: Only issue a release when you have something newsworthy to report — don’t waste journalists’ time. Since journalists are not the only consumers of press releases any more, let’s take this a step further and avoid issuing press releases that wouldn’t interest your target audiences of consumers, journalists and bloggers.
- Avoid PR fatigue in the public by not issuing releases too often. Also, use different distribution services over time to diversify where your releases are appearing.
How to do a Press Release | Bottomline
These tips can really bring you a lot of success and ensure that you are learning how to do a press release correctly. However, if you’re not a writer or a marketer, it may be best to assign this duty to someone in your company with some creative skills. Knowing how to do a press release takes time and skill so be patient.
Press releases create duplicate content, but duplicate content is normal. Duplicating an existing content in a different context changes its value. In particular, trust might be added if the new host is trusted by a specific audience. Other times, you might just add a different contact information below the press release. This is normal. Of course, there should be some legislation or standard to give credit and part of the benefits to the original authors, but the duplication of the content is not in itself the problem. It is normal, useful and unavoidable. People misunderstood the problem of duplicate content in search results, which is a real problem, when they started to condemn duplicate content on the Internet. On the Internet, it is the opposite. It is definitely necessary to adapt content to the different needs and expectations of visitors and this requires a lot of duplication. Even modification of small details can be important. Sure, it is more difficult to manage in search engines, etc. but there is no other way.
The counter argument that the original authors do not receive credits is not valid. Often the original authors get most of the benefits. For example, if the authors own a local business and the street address, etc. is inserted in the content, they benefit a lot from it. Also, the nofollow links are actually often followed by Google.
The cross domain canonical tag was proposed as a solution. The idea is that all occurrences, say of a press release, will get indexed under a single canonical. I don’t know what is the status of this idea ? Is it widely implemented ? In any case, this leads to an interesting question. If the different variants of a given content have different contact info in their header and footer, will the canonical tag be respected? Some people say that street addresses and phone numbers are so important for search engines that the variants are not likely to get consolidated into a single canonical. I might be spamming here, but it is for an experiment that attempt to answer this question. I am hoping that the readers of this blog will have some sympathy for this issue. We have pages that are identical except that they have different phone numbers and street addresses in their header and footers. Each of these page has an associated page that is dedicated to its own subject, but has the same phone number and street address. I want to test that the dedicated pages will be indexed separately while the almost identical pages linked by a canonical tag will be consolidated. I need links to the pages with unique dedicated content that includes a phone number and a address and links to almost identical pages that are linked by a canonical tag, but distinguished by the same phone numbers and addresses. Just delete this post if you think the question is irrelevant.