A press release is defined as a way of getting publicity without paying anything. As a business, you’re always on a lookout for the quickest and easiest way to get to your target audience. It is also one of the surest ways to do just that. If it is well written with no contextual errors, and if it tells a good story about you or your business, you can expect a pretty big number of published articles from highly respectable media outlets. Having your business and all its products promoted without you paying a single dollar on paid opportunities typically means you’ll get buyers pretty quickly. Now that’s taking advantage of something free!
Furthermore, if you were to compare unpaid to paid articles, advertisements via social media, or even email campaigns, you’re not as likely to get to a wider audience with the latter. This means they are quite efficient! They don’t always have to promote or recommend you and your product, but if they do, they have a massively positive effect on your sales, as a single article simply drives prospects into reaching out to you about that product everyone suddenly likes.
Now back to reality. Most releases are just not that great in terms of quality. This means most writers people hire never accomplish the perfect unpaid pitch. Why? Because first of all, nobody wants to waste time reading them when even the title is misleading, and this especially goes for the reporters who you reached out to. His or her secretary will just dump it. This order of events makes your business look clueless.
How do you come up with a great press release? Consider the following: “Product X, version 5.0 triples the functionality, while providing a scalable, yet fast and highly robust solution that’s perfect for acquiring and retaining your customers.”
This doesn’t tell anything to an editor. This section and the words in it simply fail at making an unimportant thing seem important. If you’re at 5.0 of a product nobody cares about, it’s probably not important at all.
Having read this, take a closer look at the five most basic rules that will help your press release catch attention:
1. Consider it your tool for sales. With such a mindset, you will get a message across to all potential customers through an article posted on the Internet. If you’re in luck, the publication will get a boosted authority and credibility via the website and/or the reporter who published it.
2. Come up with a story worth sharing. Think about ways to make your content go viral. To make sure your story goes haywire over the Internet, you want to reach out to the news reporters in such a manner that you convince them your message is worthy of being published. Basically speaking, you want to make an impact straight away to the entire readership.
3. Write it as if a reporter himself was paid to do it instead. The best ones get published (or queued for publishing) immediately, with little to no edits.
4. Find reliable and good quotes. If you’re the CEO of your own business, or even if you’re not, put something memorable and personal into your press release if you can. A good quote can make the reader treasure and remember its impact, thus leaving a great first impression of your business.
5. Personally contact the reporters who you think will surely cover the story. This includes doing some research, as far as their individual writing style goes. Reach out to them with content that’s personalized just for them.
For those who find all these tips and tricks a bit too difficult to handle, there are ways to spend some cash on a paid press release, and numerous media outlets offer that. Any good reporter can and will turn your business into a story people will love reading, while making sure it doesn’t appeal as a fake and paid article. A good story has higher chances of it being picked up by the crowd and shared all over the Internet. If you are looking for online classes on how to craft a press relese, please click here to Join Today.