Traffic is the secret of success online. Not just getting visitors to your site, but getting people who are targeted and interested in what your website is all about. Prospects who come as a result of a specific topic are more than likely to turn into customers who will become loyal and buy from you again and again. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to create some buzz in the right places.
Businesses have known for years how to initiate buzz: you get the press involved. And the best way to do this is to write a great press release and send it to all the right places.
Start by understanding the format. Press releases have a semi-set format, with contact information for a media spokesperson at the top and boilerplate text about your company at the bottom. Go out to press release sites and look at formats for an idea of what you need to follow. The good news is that you can use the top and bottom parts for every press release you write in the future, so save it.
Once you have a template, look at what you are promoting as a news piece. Which portion of it is newsworthy. Use the who, what, when, where and how formula. What makes your new website, store or product worth covering. You product could be anything. People have written press releases on everything from date matching sites for self-described geeks to an automatic dog washer. Anything can be newsworthy; you simply need to find the pizazz in your product. Find an angle that will make people sit up and take notice - donate something to a charity, help the soldiers, for example, and then come up with a press release to announce it.
An example: let’s say your business makes custom doll clothes. How about matching the doll’s clothes to the child’s favorite outfit? Or working with the Girl Scouts to teach young girls how to make clothes themselves, and donate the resulting works of art to a children’s hospital or Toys for Tots? It’s things like this that make the media melt.
Write your press release like a news story. Remember a little journalistic secret. A lot of stuff you read in the newspaper is written straight from press releases. Editors dislike rewriting; they don’t want to hire reporters to go out and track down stories. Good press releases that read like newspaper articles stand a very good chance of gaining publicity simply because its well-written and formated correctly.
All other writing rules apply: clarity, conciseness, and truthfulness without spin. You want your article to begin with a hook, a compelling idea or question that will “hook” the attention of readers. You need it to be active in tone, not passive (”Danny kicked the ball” vs. “The ball was kicked by Danny”). Focus in the story needs to be on your special news and on your business, not on anything else. And don’t use exclamation points or flowery language to make your dull news seem exciting - this never works. Just stick with the facts, and if the facts aren’t compelling by themselves, change what you’re doing until they are.
Once your press release is done, who do you send it to? That, fortunately, is the easy part. There are dozens of services like PRWeb you can submit them to; for a reasonable fee, they will send out your press release to hundreds or thousands of media outlets. You should also publish your press release at your own website, treating it and subsequent press releases as the core of a press kit.
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