Leveraging Online Press Releases: Press for Pennies

Company achieved a milestone? Launching a new product? Uncovered interesting statistics from a survey?

These are great reasons to create and distribute an online press release and increase your online presence and drive traffic to your website.

Press releases are effective vehicles for creating buzz and assisting in your SEO (search engine optimization) efforts through syndication back links -- that is, links from other blogs and websites that picked up your release and republished it.

There are many free press distribution services on the World Wide Web to help get your word out. But there's a criteria to be followed if you want your release to get snatched up by media, bloggers and online news aggregators like Google News and Yahoo News.

Here are five easy ways to leverage online press release...

1. Although most free PR distribution services have a release template that you can upload your release through (as well as keyword selection tool), consider using a standard PR template as a guide. This will help ensure your release is constructed as a legitimate press release. Here's a great one I use: http://www.press-release-writing.com/press-release-template.htm.

2. It's important to make sure your press release is newsworthy, written well, and has value-oriented information. It shouldn't be self-serving (i.e. blatantly promoting yourself or your website) and is editorial in nature. It should also have a strong, keyword-rich headline, subhead, and lead (introductory paragraph). Since search engine spiders scan pages from top to bottom, your top 10 keywords, as far as density, should also be heaviest from top of the document to the bottom. Some helpful keyword search tools include: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/, http://www.google.com/sktool/, or https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal . These will help you identify keywords that have good search volume and fits your target audience.

3. Another PR basic but often gets overlooked is to make sure your release in written in the third-person and you include 1-3 quotes about the main person the release is built around. Don't forget to use spell check and proof your release. If there are spelling or grammatical errors, it will ruin your credibility. Remember to include only one or two links to your website at the bottom of the release, such as, "to read the full article or schedule interviews, contact at (add your web address)."

4. Recycle your enewsletter content through press releases. Take editorial content and repurpose it to be exciting, newsworthy, and consumer driven. You can often use the same copy with minor edits for flow and format.

5. If you use a PR Distribution service like PRWeb or Business Wire (for a nominal fee), in addition to online media your release will also be available to traditional media which includes major national and regional print publications. However, there's plenty of effective, free online services that I like to us such as www.PRlog.org, www.free-press-release.com, and www.i-newswire.com.

So don’t overlook the power of the press release. As I always say, if you’re a strategic and creative thinker, you’ll be able to increase your business objectives for practically pennies!~