About 30 seconds. That’s how long it takes for a reader or journalist to decide if your press release is worth their time. And that’s of course an average! In other cases they get bored after 15 seconds. Unfortunately, it’s often not about the quality of the story you’re sending over email or publishing online. It is more often about the information overload we have to deal with everyday.

Hundreds and hundreds or emails, articles and newsletters are received by journalists, employees and business owners every day. For the unlucky ones, it’s thousands, including the 20-30% of it that’s spam managing to trick their filters. Getting 30 seconds of someone’s time is a privilege and you need to make the best out of it. If you succeed, they they will spend an additional minute on your news release and maybe decide to write about it or buy your product.

What can you do? Use the same visual tricks that online article writers and bloggers use to make sure their pieces are easy to scan and allow readers to get the important information fast out of 500 words. Here are a few tricks you can use:

• make sure your headline is not only catchy,but also informative
• have a clearly marked summary
• make sure your first paragraph contains all the important information
• use bold formatting to highlight important ideas in the press release
• use lists when possible – to list benefits, for example

Granted, some services for online press release distribution like PRWeb don’t allow you to format that much. But you can do it in the version you post on your website and in the emails you send to the press.

Remember, in the age of online reading, most of us don’t read every word of an article. Or if we do, we don’t do it the first time around. We first scan the article to get its juice and if it’s interesting enough, we read it all. It’s the same for potential clients, business partners or the press.

Guest post by Derek Vaughan

Having been involved with PR since the days before new media, I have made numerous adjustments to my PR strategies to maximize the impact of my news releases in the digital era. Unfortunately, I have also seen many ”old school” agencies and PR experts who have overlooked these critical elements of the modern digital news release. Here’s a bit of what I believe they may be missing.

1. Using keywords in the headline

To anyone who’s ever used Google news or a blog post to gain website traffic, the need to have well targeted keywords in your titles is obvious. Search engines (including specialty search like Google News) automatically look through online content and begin with the headline or title of a piece to determine the overall category for the content and the search terms that may trigger that content to appear.

In the past, old school writers preferred the pithy and ironic headline that elicited a chuckle and showed a command of language and ”turn of phrase”. This headline from The Sun is a perfect example of that old school cleverness. Playing off the broadway song from the musical ‘West Side Story’, the story referenced the October 2006, decision by North Korea to conduct a nuclear test. It’s a great pun, but in today’s digital media world the headline lacks certain keywords that would let it rise in the search results for a targeted keyword like: ‘nuclear testing’.

In a modern best practice for PR professionals, one ought to do a bit of research into the search terms that resonate with audiences and include those search terms in the headlines, title and body of the release.

1a. Research your keywords prior to release

As a corollary to including keywords as mentioned above, one ought to research those keywords for maximum impact. Here’s one way to do that – use Google Trends. You can locate Google Trends at: http://google.com/trends. So what is Google Trends and how does it work? Here is how Google describes the service:

”Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results – our Search Volume Index graph. Located beneath the Search Volume Index graph is our News reference volume graph. This graph shows you the number of times your topic appeared in Google News stories. When Google Trends detects a spike in the volume of news stories for a particular search term, it labels the graph and displays the headline of an automatically selected Google News story written near the time of that spike.”

So you can see at a glance the number of searches conducted for keywords you may be considering for your headline, and also get a quick view of how many other Google News stories are referencing that same keyword topic.

2. Include links with anchor text in the release

One of the prime benefits in the digital age of writing up a press release is to get links back to your website. Without getting into a deep philosophical discussion on search engine optimization, suffice it to say that links back to your website are good for search rankings. Even better are links that contain the phrases of the terms you are interested in targeting. For example, a link like: http://wordsofabrokenmirror.com is fine – but more impactful is a link like: PR and Marketing Expertise. The second link goes to exactly the same page, but contains the types of keywords that matter for the site. In any modern release, one should use this anchor text for links pointing off the release. Not every online press release service offers this feature. Shop around a bit and you’ll find that the most professional and up-to-date news release services accommodate the use of anchor text. A final note – be sure to use links sparingly in the body of the release and also include anchor text links in your ‘About’ section or footer.

3. Post the release on your own website

Getting a release out on the news wire or emailing it to targeted editorial contacts is great. However, don’t forget to create a ‘Press Releases’ section on your website as well. Then post each release into your press release area each time a release goes out. This builds credibility as your number of press releases increases, and also gives you a version of your press release that you can link to on outside sources, or within you blog as described below.

4. Promote the press release using social media, blogs and your own website

Often an old school PR master will send a release out via the wire services and call it a day. The modern digital PR professional knows that promoting the release via social media, blogs and your own website are also important final steps in the PR process. There are many great resources that can help you come up to speed on using social media to promote your site and releases, but I recommend at least creating a Twitter account for your site and promoting the press release there.

Daniel Foster, co-founder of Manchester dedicated server firm 34SP.com explains the benefits of using Twitter to promote internal press releases:

”Since we have used Twitter to promote our press releases we gain two valuable things. First, our followers on Twitter are alerted to the release and can then read the release, and if they choose – pass the item on to others via a re-tweet. Second, as Google now displays tweets as part of their search listings, we get another mention on Google for the release. This combination drives additional traffic to our site.”

You can also consider submission to social sites like digg.com if they are applicable to the site content. Also, if you have a blog on your website (I recommend that as well) you should craft a brief post outlining the highlights of the release and linking to the release page within your site. This further solidifies the relevance for search engines and creates yet another reference within the search engines on the subject matter which will potentially drive more visitors to your website.

While there are many great public relations professionals out there today, make sure you are challenging them with doing everything necessary to ensure the success of your digital press releases.

About the author

Derek Vaughan is a web hosting industry veteran, marketing consultant and writer. He has architected the marketing growth of several prominent web hosting success stories leading to acquisition
including Affinity Internet, Inc., Aplus.Net and HostMySite.com. Prior to his entry into the web hosting industry, Derek was responsible for online marketing at The Walt Disney Company where he marketed ecommerce for the ESPN.com and NASCAR.com brands. Derek received his M.B.A. from Vanderbilt University and currently serves on the HostingCon Advisory Board.

If you’ve been in the PR field for a few days, you have heard at least one journalist complaining about bad press releases saying nothing and being sent to them in an attempt to get their attention. There are quite a few articles about effective press release writing complete with ebooks and hardcover books to help you get the hang of this important task: crafting a news release that works.

No wonder there have been some harsh reactions to the latest New York Times press release that says (almost) nothing new. After bragging on a few paragraphs about how their business section is the greatest they finally throw in some bits of info about a new column being launched.

I for one cannot imagine why you need a press release to announce the world how cool your paper is. Who are you sending the release to? Would you actually expect other newspapers to say how much cooler you are? Are you trying to impress young business people looking for info and mentors? Or are you trying to get some more ads on you website and in your print version and writing a release to convince companies they should do whatever to get some editorial or advertising coverage? Whatever the reason, it still is a bit lame. It’s still pseudo-news, it’s still time wasted saying nothing…

The fact it comes from the New York Times is even worse. You’d expect more for them! If they wanted to send such a material out, they could have done so to a business newsletter list. Add a list of top 10 reasons to advertise/invest in getting editorial coverage in the New York Times and throw in a discount for orders placed in the next few days and that’s still a way better idea than the said press release.

Head over to the PR Newser website and read the entire release text (if you have the patience) and the statement of NY Times’ PR reps explaining why they have issued the release and let me know what you think about this entire affair!

Yes, it’s true, there are hundreds and hundreds of press releases sent out every day. Yes, some of them will be picked up, some won’t. Yes, some of them are boring and some aren’t. I am all for making things differently, try something new, but that does not mean you should change what’s already working.

There’s a reason why press releases are built they way the are. You know, most important information in the first part of the release? Or the inverted pyramid model? And it’s simple. Whoever you send it to, journalists, bloggers, customers or partners, you want them to know what’s new and cool fast. No one has the time and the patience to dig the information out of paragraphs and paragraphs of metaphors and pompous word twists.

I’ve recently come across a few releases where only the very patient managed, after a few tries, to find out 1. what the release was about and 2. what was important and what was just nonsense. If you’re message is hidden and readers have to go through time-wasting quests to discover it, you have failed!

I know all about the overused phrases, but if you want to write a press release that works, try making your message simple, clear and fun! Then send it to people who are actually interested in what you have to say. I think you have a better chance like that, as opposed to hiding it between long sentences that took you hours to come up with and that need a detailed commentary to be understood.

Photo credit.

A lot of PR agencies or corporate PR departments still believe spam is the way to go. They have built or bought quite a data base over the years, they keep expanding it and then shoot an email to everyone on the list. While they might have had some common ground when starting to develop the data base, over time names and emails just keep being added without any further checks. Who cares if you’re interested, we’ll email you anyway.

I am not talking about asking for permission, or allowing people to unsubscribe, I’m talking about at least making sure they are remotely interested in what they’ll receive. For example, why would I be interested in a debate held in Beverly Hills between a Rabbi and some woman I know nothing about on dating in a material world and if money can or cannot buy love?

If you’re gonna spam, at least be wiser than the average spammer! You should be able to at least do that if you’ve ever read anything, even a tiny article on PR and/or marketing. If you’re going to take your chance and spam, at least make sure people won’t delete your email because they simply don’t care!

I’d advise you to refrain from spam alltogether. Sure, contact someone to introduce yourself and ask for their permission to send press releases. But don’t start out with an attached PR and a one-liner asking them to call you for details!