The Power of the Online Press Release

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love .com

The Internet is a marvellous place to be a press release. If you’re a good press release you’ll be linked to and distributed far and wide with potentially millions of people reading you. Oh, the people and places you will see and how far your story will spread.

There are newsfeeds out there for even the smallest of sectors which are dedicated to highlighting/linking to relevant news stories. But it needs to be relevant and ideally it needs to be news. There are two main starting points for thinking of a good press release;

• What is new with your company?
• How does your company relate to current affairs

At KPI we have had great success with a press release we sent out containing recommendations on how the launch of Google+ would affect search results. At the time of writing, three months later, a quick search for that press release’s title shows 377,000 results on Google.

It doesn’t have to be a news story, it could be seasonal. How does your company/product relate to Christmas/the New Year/Valentine’s Day/summer holidays/the new school year?

Once you have an idea for a press release that people will actually want to read, you’re going to have to make sure that it gets read. Allow us to guide you passed a few of the pitfalls and explain how you can maximise the potential of your work…

Length

Press releases which are to be distributed online should be no shorter than 300 words. This ensures the piece is long enough for search engines such as Google to get an idea of its subject and relevance. There is no upper word limit, although the old maxim of reduce, reduce, reduce comes into play; no piece of writing should be longer than it needs to be to get all the facts across.

Adding Colour

As with standard press releases, quotes and pictures help make the online press release more interesting. Pictures in particular give an enormous boost to the authority of your press release as far as the search engines are concerned. It’s relatively easy for someone to put out 300 words on a given subject, but spammers won’t bother to source and supply relevant images.

Title

When we submit a press release to online directories, it’s only the beginning of the journey. From there, the release will hopefully be linked to, shared, re-Tweeted, etc across a variety of sites and domains. As a result, when you search for your press release again a few weeks or months later, most of the results that Google returns will only be cut down versions, extracts and/or mentions of the title. There is, however, great citation value to having your company name repeated a thousand or more times across the Internet, particularly if it is alongside a related keyword.

For example, if you run Gummy Bear Jelly Moulds, are targeting the keyword “children’s jelly moulds” and are putting out a press release about your new range of products, then “Gummy Bear Release New Range of Children’s Jelly Moulds” would be the perfect title. If Google finds this title on 1,000+ pages, it not only tells the search engine that Gummy Bear make children’s jelly moulds, but also that it is a reputable source of such products (as evidenced by the sheer number of people referring to the press release). The generation of this citation value is the principal concern of using online press releases in this manner.

Links

Some press release directories will allow us to include links in our press releases and a
backlink from a reputable directory is a wonderful boost for your site’s authority. It’s therefore worth including a couple of links to relevant pages on your site in your press release. The first should link to the home page and the second to some other relevant page on your site. These can be included as hyperlinks within the main body of the article.

Your Details

You are going to have to include certain details with your press release in order to get the best return from it. Most important are your company name, address, telephone number and email address, the keywords of the press release, and the name of a contact at the company.

The inclusion of an email address is important (see: Confirmation), though, as is sadly inevitable with any email address put out on the Internet, it will catch some spam. You may wish to set up a dedicated email address for handling press releases, e.g. press@gummybear.com.

Submission

Once the press release is submitted to KPI we will review it and get back to you with any thoughts or ideas we might have on how the piece can be improved, though we will always seek your approval for any rewrites. KPI will continue to monitor the press release following its submission and get back in touch in 2-3 weeks with an idea of how it is performing.

Confirmation

At KPI we are constantly updating our list of reputable and effective press release directories and will handle the submission process for you. As the press release contains an email address for your company you will probably receive emails from some of the sites asking you to confirm the submission of your press release; this is so the directories can make sure the press release and the email address it contains are genuine.

And there you have it. Some big points, some small, but all relevant and all important. There is no substitute for knowing your audience and understanding what it is they want to read, but hopefully this little guide has given you a better idea of how to achieve that. Now, more than ever, search engine optimisation is all about building a better brand: it’s what we’re seeing here and it’s what Google are telling us (at least, when they’re not off fighting expeditionary wars in social media).

Have a good idea, write a great press release and send it out to all the best places. The Internet’s hungry for news and you’ll be rewarded for feeding it.