The press release is a mysterious thing. You may have been told how important it is to write and distribute press releases, but you may not be doing it or you may be doing it for the wrong reasons.

There are two reasons to write and distribute press releases. One of them is to get the attention of the media. But the other reason is potentially more important. That is to get more links to your website. I will explain how and why you should do press releases, and then I will tell you how to do them properly.

It has long been assumed that newspaper editors and television reporters scour the newswires looking for stories. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that most editors just don’t have time to hunt for stories. Many stories that people take for news are actually little more than self-promotion.

Most editors could care less that your company has released a new product. I know it may be important to you, but that doesn’t make it important to the rest of the world. The trick is to write a press release that provides a ready-made story for writers and reporters. Writers are people too, and they are very busy. If you make their lives easier by providing content, you have a better chance of being targeted for a story.

For example, when I wrote a press release for DealofDay.com and the great holiday deals that consumers could find on the site, I didn’t promote the features of the site. Instead, I penned a “Top Twelve Tips for Holiday Shopping Online” article brought to you by DealofDay.com. This provided writers with useful information they could easily republish as part of an article.

It’s okay to tout your products or services from time to time, but be sure to give editors something they can use.

I distribute dozens of press releases each year, but it’s most frequently NOT in hopes of media coverage. While it never hurts if your story does get picked up, I recommend doing press releases for the search engine juice you can generate. If you use press release services like PRWeb.com and ExpertClick.com, you can submit press releases with keyword links embedded in your release. Since these services distribute your release to Google News, Yahoo! News and a number of other web-based services, your keywords provide inbound links to your site.

We know that the search engines give priority to keywords that link from authority sites, and the engines themselves are the primary authority sites. Therefore, it makes sense to use press releases to get more inbound links to your pages. It can only help you when people search for one of your keywords.

As an experiment, many of the news releases I put out over the past couple of years have included my name as CEO of my company. In the releases, I hyperlinked my first name to point to JoelComm.com. If you Google “Joel,” you will find that I frequently appear in the top twenty of the search results, if not the top ten. With over 74 million references to “Joel” on Google, this proves that keyword linking within press releases is very effective!

So now you have a two-fold plan for using press releases effectively. Give editors something to write about and develop a linking strategy that brings you more traffic. Now THAT is newsworthy!

0 Shares