Yesterday Mike Volpe over at HubSpot ran another great webinar, this one on Press Releases. I am impressed with how much focused content he provided. I learned a lot. Here are the points that I noted. I use PR, press release and news release pretty interchangeably here.
He began by establishing the benefit of a news release and provided some facts based on heat maps and comparing organic with pay-per-click (PPC) traffic from search engine result pages and on and off page search engine optimization (SEO).
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75% of clicks come from organic results
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25% of clicks come from pay-per-click ads
Apparently more highly educated folks use the organic listings more, while those with less education use PPC comparatively more.
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A Phd uses PPC only 1% of the time
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A high school educated visitor will use PPC 50% of the time
The next battery of stats were about on page and off page search engine optimization.
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25% of SEO is on page – title, copy, H1,2,3 and meta data
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75% of SEO is off page – links
Links to your web site were described as having three importance factors, from good to best.
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a link
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a link with the specific anchor text of your choice
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a link with the specific anchor text of your choice on a trusted web site
News Releases include links and are a great way to distribute them to trusted sites.
The overall goals for news releases are:
Build improved ranking for your site in the search engines Increase your site’s find ability through distributed content Gain press coverage
Content suggestions
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Make it interesting, about your industry
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Trends, survey data, case studies
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300 to 1,000 words in length
Style tips
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Spell out abbreviations, it’s better for the search engines
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Type out full names more than once in a release, same reason
Key Word notes
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1-2 key words per release is sufficient
Love Links
Text of the link, Anchor text of the link, Page title of web site linked to, and the the on page text should all use the same keywords. This shows relevance.
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Place your link in the first 250 words. Some services will truncate the article at that point.
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Include one link that is the full URL.
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Link to your properties, not to others so much
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Link to interior pages of your site that focus on the same subject.
Your Boiler Plate
This is the text about your company at the bottom of the release. It should be key word rich and include a few links.
Post the news release
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Post the release on your blog or site
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Submit it to your RSS feed
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Tag your release on social tag sites
Distribution of your press release
Choose a wire service that allows links with anchor text. If you need multimedia support, look for one that supports that.
Send your release to only one service, not many. Remember that you get what you pay for. Some agencies are free and others are expensive.
Distribution is offered by these services, among many more;
www.marketwire.com
www.prweb.com
www.prnewswire.com – Steve did not recommend using their regular service at all.
Frequency
Remember that the release is intended to reach prospects and not the media. Some may choose to send them out as often as four times per month. Consider your audience and competition before deciding when not send out a release. A bad time to send a release may be a time when there is also less competition, like at Christmas time.
Measure
Before and after review your and track your
- Google page rank
- key word ranking in the search engine results
- the number of links to your domain name
- review the quality of those that are linking to you
- review the anchor text of the inbound links to your site
- the number of visitors
- the number of leads you get or conversions (downloads, signups etc.)
Focus future PR efforts on the media that brings the best results.
Social Media News Release
www.shiftcomm.com has a template for social media news releases. Consider embracing social media and multimedia press releases.
www.pr-squared.com has further resources.
Add your press release to your Facebook news feed
Write a Press / News Release Today about
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A story around the founder
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Staff you are proud of
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Customer utilizing your produce service in a unique way
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Results of a survey or poll
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Awards
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Unique story angle on something familiar
Visit this link to see the entire presentation on in-bound marketing press releases. Mike remained on topic and provided a lot of value in this webinar. Since we are both in the Boston area, I look forward to thanking him in person one day.
What tips might you add to this? What have you found successful? Please leave a comment below and click the green button to share this post.