How To Create A Modern Press Release

Press Releases on Steroids!

Press releases are rarely sent by facsimile these days. When a press release is posted online, it’s immediately available and has all the capabilities of a regular web page. Use the benefits of hypertext to your advantage, and include as much supporting material as possible:

• Hyperlinks: Link key phrases and calls to action to appropriate landing pages on your web site. This will allow your customers to place an order or sign up if interested, and it’s also excellent for search engines. These links to your web site will appear everywhere the press release is published, which, if you use a newswire, could be a lot of places. Those incoming links will help you rank on search engines for the phrases that are hyperlinked.
• Photos: Adding photos can make an ordinary press release stand out from the crowd. If you’re advertising a new product, make sure to include a product photograph. If you hired a new employee, make sure their photograph is included.
• Audio: Consider adding audio clips of interviews, podcast excerpts, or quotes featured in the press release.
• Video: When appropriate, videos can add an extra dimension never before available in press releases. Videos of product reviews, demonstrations, or interviews are excellent additions to a press release.
• Social Media Facilities: Adding buttons to post the item to popular social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, and Technorati can help publicize the press release. As people use social media to bookmark or share your release, it will be exposed to their friends, helping the news spread even further.

How Long Should My Press Release Be?

Before you concern yourself with length, you should focus on content. Your press release should adequately cover the topic you’re writing about. You should only be concerned with whether your press release is long enough after you’ve covered all the details. Once you’ve done that, it’s time to review the length of your press release.

Your press release should be relatively short at 400–500 words. If it’s much longer, you risk losing your audience’s attention. Any shorter, and your story might be too short to cover all the important details. Also, remember that journalists and bloggers searching for information to write about want enough information to decide whether to cover the story, without being required to read a novel.

Once you’ve written your release, if you find that it’s less than 400 words, consider adding a quote or more supporting information. Did you answer the important facts: the who, what, when, where, why, and how? If your release is longer than 600 words, review the release to see if you can make your message more concise. Remove any fluff and technical jargon that’s unnecessary. As William Strunk, Jr. explains in The Elements of Style:

Stand Out from the Crowd

With so many press releases sent out every day, you need to stand out to be noticed. The first step is to follow the advice above in creating a compelling, well-formatted press release and submitting it where it can gain the widest exposure. But that’s still a bit limited. How can you almost guarantee your press release will be written about in a blog, web site, or newspaper?

Make It Easy

Make it easy for publishers, bloggers, and journalists to publish your story by doing some of their work for them. Provide them with a media kit—a package of information about your company or organization. Media kits often contain:

• high-resolution logo in multiple formats
• a company profile and history
• executive biographies with head shots
• product or service information with product photos

Be sure to include multiple formats for all graphics. Include print-quality and web-quality graphics for use in multiple media formats. Providing a vector version of your logo, such as the Encapsulated PostScript Format (EPS), will ensure that the publisher can display your logo correctly regardless of what size it’s rendered.

Be Available

Even with a well-crafted press release, a journalist may need to ask you a question, or may want to interview you or key staff at your company for their story. Be sure to include a media contact, and include multiple ways to reach them. At a minimum, you should include your:

• office phone number
• mobile phone number
• email address

Distribute Press Releases

Do you still use a fax machine? In the old days, you would fax your press release to journalists. You might send a release to five or ten journalists that specialized in your niche, hoping one would pick up the story. The press release would go out on the wire, meaning it was sent by telegraph, or later by fax. They still call it a newswire, but sending press releases in the 21st century requires far fewer trees.

There are several ways to send your press release, but the most popular are email (directly to journalists), online newswire, and company web site uploads. We’ll discuss each in a little more detail.

Emailing Journalists Directly

Email can be very effective at targeting your press release to specific bloggers or journalists. By emailing them individually, you increase the chance they’ll actually read your release.

Your email’s subject line should be short and informative. Condense your press release headline into five to ten words and engage the reader with the most important information from your press release.

When emailing a blogger or journalist, address them and their publication by name in the body or title of the email. For instance, your introduction might read “Press Release for Michael Arrington, TechCrunch.” Personally addressing the recipient will show them that you didn’t just spray your press release at a few hundred (or thousand) email addresses.

Want to go the extra mile? Include a short, personal introduction and explanation of why the story is a good fit for their publication. Was there a similar product or service covered by the publication in the past? A short introduction can lend a personal touch to your email, but keep it short. And avoid presuming to know what they’ll like or want to publish.

With the volume of computer viruses these days, unwanted email attachments are rarely opened. Instead, paste the text of your press release directly into the email. If they are interested in your story, they will respond asking for supporting documents, such as photos and videos. Make sure to list any supporting information available, such as quotes, photos, videos, or a PDF release. Also, if you’ve uploaded the entire press release to your web site, be sure to include a link at the bottom of your email.

Using an Online Newswire

Online newswires are the newest and most effective way to have your press release read by interested journalists, publishers, bloggers, and customers. Newswires have been around for ages, but their press releases were only available to journalists or companies that subscribed to them. Today, newswires publish press releases on their web sites, and submit them to services such as Google News and Yahoo, making them instantly available to your customers who are searching the Internet.

Newswires also offer direct distribution to journalists and publications looking for your news. By offering RSS—Really Simple Syndication—feeds for specific searches and industries, publishers can subscribe to receive new press releases automatically as they become available. RSS feeds are a standardized format for received updates from a web site or news source. To view updates, you can use an RSS reader, such as Google Reader, or your email client.

Posting to Your Web Site

In addition to emailing your press release or using online newswires, you should post your press releases to your company web site. It adds relevant content to your web site and will often help your site appear higher in search engines before other sources, cutting out the middleman.

Press releases are often posted to a media or press section of a company’s web site. Make sure that your press releases are easy to find, especially from your homepage.