Small business blogger Anita Campbell provides some critical links and important points in this post about the role of the press release for entreprenuers. According to Anita:
For small businesses the new press releases can be a valuable vehicle. You write and distribute a press release using one of several online free or inexpensive news distribution services for small businesses. If you do it right, by optimizing the release for search engine purposes using keywords, and typically paying a reasonable upgrade fee between $30 and a few hundred dollars, you get:(1) a keyword-optimized Web page that links back to your site,
(2) your release gets included in Google News and Yahoo News,
(3) journalists may notice your company indirectly, through seeing it in Google News or elsewhere online.
Anita also provides links to a couple of free posting services that allow you to put up your news release. One of these, PRWeb was just recently acquired by a “pay” service, so I’m not sure how much longer it will be around.
The problem with all the hoopla surrounding this kind of “free” PR and the importance of having your news release indext by search engines is that the list of journalists who use Google, Yahoo! or some other search engine to get their story ideas is very, very short.
This is not to say that posting your release and making it available to the world through search engine optimization is a bad idea. To the contrary, it should be one of many tactics corporate communicators should pursue. But if you want real media coverage, writing your release and then pitching it to a well-defined and limited number of reporters and editors is still your best bet for big coverage that will generate significant buzz.
Technorati Tags: PR, Public Relations, News Release Writing, SEO Optimization, Publicity, Free Publicity, Anita Cambell, Small Business Marketing
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