Every new website and business needs publicity to be noticed and to help it thrive and press releases serve that purpose just as much in the 21st century as they did 100 years ago.
When Ivy Lee, the father of modern PR, invented press releases for Pennsylvania Railroad, a client of his at the time, little could he have known the revolution in communication that would subsequently take place.
Telephones came and were widely taken up by the public and then came fax machines and emails and all the time the press release was still used and accepted as the best means of reaching out to the media.
What defines the media is ever changing and now includes the multitudes of online writers.
There are still many full-time employed journalists writing for regional and national newspapers as well as trade and niche journals, but their numbers are dwindling year-on-year.
The era of “dead trees” journalism will never end – there will always be printed publications; but at the moment it is certainly taking a battering from the new media on the World Wide Web.
Blogging, also called citizen journalism, has become a phenomenal success and widely undertaken by thousands if not millions of writers.
Clearly, it would be a huge boon for your business or website if you can effectively reach this mass of online writers as they don't just reflect public opinion, but help shape it to.
There are a number of free press release sites in existence and to get the best out of submitting an item to these services it is best to take note of some guidelines.
The first part of any press release is, of course, the title. Here you need to make sure it is factual and to the point and preferably add your keyword(s) if you can. For those not familiar with keywords, these are what you expect people to use in search engines. For instance, if you have a shoe shop website you'll be aware that “shoe shop uk” and “shoe shop com” are common terms used by the public to find information.
The actual style of the title must be dull and factual - “Google prefers this boring headline on Tuesday November 29, 2009”. Don't create abstract headlines because you think it will stand out from the crowd. It won't. People are looking for facts. Try these formats:
[Product] will be launched by [company name] on [date]
On [date] [company name] will launch the new [product] to [short description of product in a few words]
The headline is the most important part of an online press release because that is often all the reader will see as they scan down a page.
If you can suck a reader into your item just through the headline alone then you have jumped the first hurdle.
The second most important part of an online press release is the summary. Usually no more than 300 characters this should repeat the information as laid out in the title but padded out with more detail.
After the title the summary is the next item that the reader will see and often as part of a long list of other press release titles and summaries all vying for attention.
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The main body of text itself shouldn't be no more than three or four paragraphs simply because 79 percent of internet users scan rather read the content on a page. So the less text the better. Keep all information to the minimum.
Finally, always add contact information which mainly means a contact name, email, website and phone number but also a postal address too. People tend to fell comfortable with an actual postal address instead of just email details.
So hopefully this will give you a starting point to think about how to layout a press release for the free press release distribution sites on the World Wide Web.
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