Online Press Releases are as Easy as 1, 2, 3
In college, I really liked writing press releases and I was good at them. But now, I love writing online press releases. I’m not sure if this is a quality of every Internet Marketing Consultant, but it’s true for me. They just make sense and they work. I graduated from college in 2005 with a degree in public relations. I could write press releases with the best of them. But what I wasn’t taught was anything about online press releases, because the online world as we knew it then didn’t use them, at least not the way we do now. Heck, Facebook was barely an idea yet. Sure, there were online news distribution sites, but online press releases are a relatively new concept, and a simple one at that. You find your news. You share your news on the web. Then you track it to see its value.
In the world of internet marketing you are competing with the loads of other information sources at your fingertips. By typing a few words into a search bar you’re provided with a long list of links, content, images, and discussions. The job of an online press release is to help get you noticed, and get you noticed by the right people. That’s why it’s important to write for two audiences: the people searching for your businesses products or services and the search engines that find your content to bring to those people. An online press release can help you do both through a three step process.
1. Find Your News.
Just like in traditional media, an online press release is used to announce something about your business. All companies have news, sometimes they just have to dig a little bit or get creative to find it. It can be anything really. For example:
- Winning an award
- Sponsoring a fundraiser
- Launching a new product
- Promoting an employee
- Hiring a new employee
- Representing a new client
- Reaching a milestone
All of the above topics can be used to reach your ultimate goal of increasing your online visibility, but how do you increase visibility? You share it with others.
2. Share your news on the web.
Remember when you would get your news out by pitching the media? Now, sharing is done by using a PR distribution site like PR Web, PR Newswire or PR Buzz, just to name a few. Distribution sites help to make sure your press release is optimized to appear in organic search results. Then it’s sent to major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, as well as to thousands of journalists and bloggers. It’s also distributed to hundreds of online outlets such as digg, topix or the Associated Press. Although these distribution sites do require a financial commitment, but there are different packages available to meet your company’s needs and they are definitely worth the investment. There are free distribution sites out there too, but they don’t always give you the tracking ability, and it’s important to have a way to measure your results.
3. Track your news.
Remember when press releases used to be tracked by news clippings? Now, your news is measured using different online tactics. This is an incredibly valuable feature that online distribution sites offer because it allows you to track your release online using different measures of success.
- You can see how many times your release is read each day. This will help you know what’s grabbing people’s attention.
- You can find out the total number of headline impressions your release gets each day. Impressions show up on websites, Javascript and RSS feeds.
- You can see different traffic sources to help you understand where people are finding your news and which keywords are attracting them.
Millions of people are searching online everyday. Any good Internet Marketing Consultant will tell you that being consistent and being relevant with online press releases will help you generate publicity fast, help you get found by the people that matter, and get you found easier.
Are online press releases part of your internet marketing strategy?
