The words “Press Release” and the thought of how to write a press release seem to scare most people to death. On top of that not many people take the time to even think of writing their own Press Release. I hope this article will help clear up some of the mysteries surrounding this simple but highly effective form of marketing.

The first thing you have to remember is that a Press Release is a “news”item. It needs to “inform” people, NOT sell them something. For example, you are reading this article because you want to learn something that will BENEFIT YOU. You aren’t reading it just so you can buy something else.

If money is the driving force in your business – you won’t go too far. Your main goals should be in pleasing customers, providing them with a high-quality product and more than their money’s worth. The trick is to do all this while still making money. People don’t care what mountains you had to climb, what seas you had to cross or what tribe of people you had to learn the ways of just to find a secret formula. Instead – they want to know WHAT the secret formula is.

The sales circulars you print and mail sell your product. A Press Release informs others about your product. Instead of your main objective being to sell the product and have the customer send in an order immediately, a Press Release informs the customer exactly how your product will benefit their lives. This must be conveyed in the form of a “newsworthy” Press Release. 

If you have a sales circular to sell a product, you can easily turn it into a Press Release without much difficulty. It’s just a new marketing angle of presenting your product to the public. The following is an example of a typical Press Release for publishing services: 

“So many people are entering the mail order market these days, but so many of them are getting ripped-off by a bunch of hype. People are promised untold riches in a short period of time. The hype ads play with their emotions by making them believe it’s so easy to make money through the mail. It’s sad.

However, a new book has just been released to help solve these problems for the average person. For the first time in history – a REAL directory has been compiled listing the ACTUAL name and addresses of 179 honest and trustworthy mail order folks. People can write DIRECTLY to these people and receive FREE information to get them started in their own business now!

 It’s unbelievable. Without trying to sell you anything else, you can get this book for only $4.95 – a price anyone can afford. Meet the real mail order dealers who care about their products and wants to help you get started doing what they are doing.

 Only available from ILIM Publishing, PO Box 123, ILIM City 123987.”

 As you can see, this is a short but sweet Press Release – however, you should be able to see the “newsworthiness” in it. Its main focus is on the fact that most people get ripped-off when they start their first mail order business. The solution to this problem is a new directory that is available for the first time in history. The sell is slowly led into because the reader will naturally want to get their hands on this one. It doesn’t ask for money it only tells the reader how to get a copy if they want one.

Here’s a great test for a real press release. Since your final sales pitch is included in the last paragraph – read the Press Release aloud. Would it still be worth reading WITHOUT your sales pitch? If so, it’s probably a Press Release.

Press Releases come in many forms depending to the product you are writing about. However, the basic rule of thumb still applies. If you’ve never written one before – it may be a little difficult or daunting to start but don’t worry, it really is quite straightforward: Grab the latest daily newspaper and read some of their informational articles. Notice how each article is written and pattern yours after the same format. After you do a few of them – you’ll get the hang of the style and will be able to write them quite easily.

When your Press Release is written to your satisfaction and you come to submitting it to a publisher, the standard format is double-spaced and not longer than two pages. Be sure and put your name, address/web address and page number at the top of each page. Write the note: “For Immediate Release.”  at the top. If you are only sending the press release to one publication – tell them it’s a “first run.”

When submitting Press Releases online, the major PR sites, such as PRNewswire and PRWeb, charge from $80 to around $400 per Press Release, depending on where it is published and what level of journalists and other influential people are exposed to it. However, there are many sites that will publish for free. I particularly like EzineArticles’ sister site http://pressexposure.com – where you can submit easily, quickly and for free. Check out a recent iLearnIM press release on Armand Morin’s Big Seminar, for a ‘live’ example.

Here’s a great way to create lots of backlinks to your website, to help with search engine optimisation (SEO) that I learnt from Mark Vurnum, multi-millionaire Internet Marketer who has thousands of blogs!

1. Go to www.Technorati.com, the blog search engine. 

2. Type in ‘internet marketing’ in the ‘Search the blogoshere…’ box

3. Click to go into the first blog site (i.e. the websites that are listed)

4. Scan to check that you are able to add a comment to articles, if not, exit site. 5. If able to add a comment, find a good article/post to comment on – no need to be too choosey here, usually first one will do.

6. Find a hook in the article that you can comment about.

7. In the website field add your website URL, with the http://, eg  ‘http://www.iLearnInternetMarketing.com’

8. Click to add a comment.

9. In the ‘name’ field, enter your keyword, eg ‘Learn Internet Marketing’ – this is very important, don’t use a person’s name, you are keyword optimising here.

10. If required to put an e-mail address, enter ‘comments@yoursite.com’ – this must be valid, so set up am new e-mail address if necessary. 

11. In the comments field, enter the following: – Comment on how great/thought provoking/interesting you thought the article was. Then add 5 or 6 lines, referring to something in the post/article. Then pose a question to finish, ‘does anyone know…’, ‘who else thinks…’, ‘does anyone agree?’ ‘do you have any other sites?’ etc. Finally, add your URL, eg http://www.iLearnInternetMarketing.com (NB, it’s probably best to copy your URL as correctly formatted to clipboard so can paste easily over and over again when doing this marketing exercise.

12. Submit the comment and make sure it appears or says ‘awaiting consideration’ NB Some sites will not allow you to put a URL in the main body and will not post the comment with it in, in this case resubmit the comment without the URL. Conversely, some sites have no website field, in which case, ensure the URL is in the comment body.

13. Click back to Technorati and repeat the process, systematically going down the list of sites.

When your website is ranked well in the most popular search engines, you get more visitors clicking on your site. The more visitors you get the more business you get. Did you know that about 20 percent to 80 percent of your visitors will find your web site through the search engines.

Studies show that most people do not look past the fourth page of results. There was a time when you could use free submission services that would submit your website to search engines and directories. At one time, that would actually get you ranked OK. Nowadays, that won’t do anything for you. You want to get ranked at LEAST on the first page of Google and Yahoo. The better option would be to get ranked in the top 3 listings of both Google and Yahoo. This isn’t easy.

All search engines spider or crawl the Web and automatically index your web site based on their own secretive algorithms, which are constantly changing. How do you get ranked well. You can use pay-per-click, which is where you bid for top ranking positions under keywords of your choice. Just make sure that the bids you make are not more than what each customer is worth to you in your site. For ex, if your maximum bid per click is $10.00 and it takes 100 visitors to make a sale, you are probably going to lose money.

To get high ranked, you need to have a website with fresh content, that has well-crafted and interwoven keywords and meta data and good links to other sites with high page ranking. You could have an rss feed in your site so that the content is fresh (although it is considered duplicate content and won’t in itself rank well) and new articles are submitted to keep the customers interested and the search engines satisfied.

Search engines are looking for fresh information, good linking, and relevance. Keep these points in mind and set forth with that high ranked site.

The currency of SEO is relevancy – for example your keyword in your domain name and relavant good content and BACKLINKS – lots of them.

This will be discussed further in posts under ‘SEO’ and ‘Keywords’ categories.