Daryl's Six Tips: Writing Press Releases

Here’s my Six Tips for writing press releases and press release distribution. Writing releases may seem daunting, but just give it a go:

1. Speak to your colleagues (or client if you are a PR consultant) and find out what they are up to – don’t just speak to your main contact, speak to his or her colleagues
2. A good news story is ‘unexpected’. If a story is a bit ‘so what’, look for a more unexpected angle
3. Put the best bit of the story in the headline and at the top of the body text. Include relevant detail further down and insert a couple of ‘colourful’ quotes. Use short sentences
4. Become familiar with your client’s keywords and phrases – get these from their SEO (search engine optimisation) agency if they have one – and ensure relevant ones are in each release
5. Post the release to an online press release wire, ensuring main keywords are linked to relevant client website pages, and send directly by email to key press and social media
6. Including pictures can attract more interest, but do not send attachments – release text should always go in the body of an email. And remember to include your contact details!

My Six Tips pages are quick guides to getting better media coverage. For more detailed advice, check out my whitepaper Press release writing and distribution - a step-by-step guide for small and medium businesses.

Comments

[Daryl Willcox]

A clarification on how search-optimising press releases works.

It's not about making the release come up on search engine results, it's about boosting the search engine results of the page the release points to.

The ranking of a particular page on a search engine depends a lot on the number and quality of links to it. Social networking sites, blogs and newspapers do very well because they are content-rich and people link to them.

Corporate sites will not automatically appear on searches as they are generally low on content and have relatively few inward links.

Text linking in press releases is just one SEO technique to increase inward links. It's quite possible the corporate pages you see on search results have been optimised through press releases in conjunction with other SEO techniques.

Good SEO is about doing lots of little things right. The really interesting thing is that most of these little things cross over into the domain of PR.

Oh yes, and search-optimising a press release you were going to post to a wire anyway should cost you nothing.

[Shabra Dowson]

One of the little things it's important to get right is to phrase suggestions positively. It is better to say "Remember your contact details!" If you use the word 'forget' then that is what may well happen.