How to write an effective press release

The Press Release as a strategy for organic Search Engine Marketing

The Press Release is the most effective means of generating one-way, incoming links to your site with the least amount of effort. Done correctly, the press release is a powerful marketing tool that speaks both to a visitor audience and to search engines. Done incorrectly, the Press Release can become a nightmare for your company that will never seem to disappear from the web.

Like most forms of writing, the Press Release has a structure and a purpose. There are many things that it is NOT: It is not an advertisement, not a soapbox, not a forum for your philosophy on business and politics and humanity. A Press Release is not the place to do the unabashed sales pitch, and to break these rules means that your Press Release will either never be picked up by media channels, or will cause harm to your company image.

The purpose of the Press Release is to inform the world about information that is newsworthy. Your concern may be for the visitors and the search engines, but your real audience is the news media and you have to write to them. In all cases, the content should answer to the 'W' questions: Who, what, where, when.

Not everything is newsworthy, no matter how excited you may be about the 'news'. Launching your online store is not news. Imagine if the New York Times stocked its business pages with articles about 'new online stores'. Everybody would stop reading it. If you can't answer honestly why anybody would care -- why YOU would care if the news was about some other company -- then don't release it.

Stick to the facts. ALWAYS tell the truth. Don't fluff. Don't add your opinion: nobody cares and nobody believes your opinion isn't formed without ulterior motives. Tone it down: most people don't want to hear Napoleon Hill and Tom Sellers and the language of motivation and sales pitches. Nobody likes hype. People can spot the techniques of a salesperson from a mile away and journalists can smell it with their eyes closed: it smells bad.

Make your press release relevant to the time it is being released. Tie it into current events. At the time of this writing, the world is going through a credit crunch. If your business is buying property, then talking about your news as it relates to alleviating the pressures of that credit crunch is timely and relevant.

Does your press release illustrate? It goes back to the age-old advice, "show it, don't say it." If you can use real life examples to illustrate your point and to show results, the communication of your news is that much more powerful.

Use an active rather than a passive voice. Actions should happen to the object of a sentence and not the subject: "I was run over by a car" is a weak sentence. "A car ran over me" is a strong sentence because it's the car that was doing the running. Also, don't be afraid to use strong verbs. "He was less than entirely happy" is weak. "He was angry" is stronger. "Red-faced, he threw his cup across the room when he heard the news" shows his anger without having to spell it out.

Don't bad-mouth the competition. Don't bad-mouth people. Don't put other companies down in the name of competition. Don't be negative.

I'm going to save the best advice for last: If you don't write well, don't hang the reputation of your company on your writing. Hire a copy writer. Once you release bad writing to the web, it becomes a permanent reflection on your business and nearly impossible to remove. There is no 'undo' button to the web.

Rasa Design Studio offers copywriting as a service for our clients. Our writers are writers and not designers or programmers or secretaries. Most of them are published in print and all of them are trained to write Search Engine Friendly copy.