If you are in business for yourself online, it is especially important that you understand the concept of social proof.  When you are an online business, most visitors to your websites see you as as unknown entitiy, hiding behnd the anonymity of the internet, which makes them anxious. What if they give you their hard earned money and you vanish? They want reassurance. They want to know that you are a real, legitimate, established business.

How can you give them this reassurance that you’re real and legit? 

One way to do it is by using what is called "social proof". Social proof is a concept first championed by persuasion master Robert Cialdini, and it basically just means that people tend to do what other people are doing. So if a lot of people are buying something, other people will be likely to buy it. If people see two restaurants, one with an empty parking lot, one with a full parking lot, they are much more likely to go to the restaurant with the full parking lot. People follow the herd. They figure that if other people like something, use something, trust something, et cetera, it must be legit.

Customer testimonials are one way to provide social proof. If you go to the home page of my site, www.thepressreleasesite.com, you will see that I have testimonials high up on the home page – along with a picture of myself, which is another way to reassure potential website customers that you are real.

Along with those customer testimonials you should use press releases. This doesn’t mean that you have to conduct an expensive publicity campaign. You can write your own press releases or hire someone to do it for you, send them out to a few press release distribution sites (good free ones are free-press-release.com, bignews.biz, prlog.com – and put them on the Media Room page on your website.

When people search for your company,  one of the things that they will find onine is your press release.

Even if your press release is not picked up by mainstream media, you have created your own online publicity campaign. You have instantly created the image of a much bigger company, an established company that’s so important that they have their own media room, and that has press releases about their success all over the web.

Along with a well designed website with customer testimonials, this provides the kind of social proof that makes people more likely to trust your company when they are looking to do business with someone.

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 My goal is to help my clients. Most of the time, I do this by writing press releases and doing social media marketing with the goal of promoting their website all over the internets, and making sure that their website is fueled by that all important Google Juice.

However every once in a while this is NOT a good idea. And if I think so, I will tell my client so. Politely, of course.

Here’s when you don’t want to send out your press release:

• When your website is not up and running yet and just has a "coming soon" placeholder on it.
• When your website is butt-ugly and has text running over itself and practically screams "My business is doing so badly I can’t afford a web designer!"
• When your website copy  is riddled with spelling and grammatical errors.
• When people who arrive at your website don’t know what to do or where to go. Your website should be well laid out and designed to encourage people to take a specific action – sign up for a newsletter, buy your products, buy your services, contact you for more information…if they just show up, read, and go away forever because you haven’t at least presented them the option to stay in touch or purchase…than you’ve wasted your press release. 

So in other words – don’t go out and get traffic and send it to your website if your website isn’t ready for it. I’m not saying your website needs to be PERFECT – God knows mine isn’t – but it at least needs to be professional looking and needs to present people with a way to get in touch or buy from you or take some other desired action. 

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I’m going to keep this post short and sweet – just the way a press release should be.  

Fairly often, when my clients send me a proposed press release that they want rewritten, they are so excited about their business/new idea/upcoming event/announcement that they cram about 20 different ideas into their press release. This makes it not only too long, it makes it confusing.

What they’ve got there is about 20 press releases in one. All of that greats info in their proposed press releases may well be newsworthy – just not all at once.

When you write a press release, decide what you are announcing. One main news announcement per press release is all you get.

Otherwise, if your press release is even accepted by news outlets, you will leave your readers confused and they will tend to move on without taking action or visiting your website.

So in the first couple of paragraphs you announce your news. Then you have a quote from someone from your company, perhaps you, talking about your news and why it’s great, helpful, different, unique,  what it will do for people, why you’re holding this contest/created this new line of videos/wrote this book/giving a seminar, or whatever your news is.

Then, possibly another paragraph or two giving more details about your news, and then a paragraph or two about you and your background and your company. 

Then, a brief "call to action" –  a sentence saying something like, "Those seeking more information may visit www.(whateveryourwebsite is. Dot com.)"

Also, keep it to 400-500 words or less. Readers these days are busy and have short attention spans. 

Voila. Instant press release. Focused, non-confusing. There you go! 

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 A lot of my clients come to me asking me to rewrite a press release that they’ve written – they’ve paid good money to PRWeb or PRNewswire to distribute the press release, but when they submitted it, it was rejected.

Here’s the number one reason why:

It’s not bad grammer, it’s not lack of pertinent information, it’s not excessive length.

The reason for rejection that PRWeb and PRNewswire has given to my clients is that their press release sounds too much like an advertisement.

You need to write your press release as if it’s a news story, not a promotion. 

One big red flag: Using the word "you." As in, "You may have been wondering if now’s the right time to invest in foreclosure property". Never do that.

Instead "According to foreclosure expert Joe Smith, with recent interest rate cuts and real estate prices reaching rock bottom from their peak in 2005, now is an ideal time to invest in forecosure property. That’s why he has  released his new foreclosure investment coaching program…" etc.   

(P.S. – I personally am not saying that’s true – I think real estate prices will fall more. But what do I know.) 

So grab your newspaper and read through some news stories to get the flavor of how news is written, right before you write your press release, and make sure that you write in a "news announcement" style, not a "buy my stuff now or you’ll miss the bargain/opportunity/sale of a lifetime!" style. 

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Here is the standard information that I need to write a press release, and then I also like to speak to the client to get an idea of what news angle we will be emphasizing – sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes we need to find or create one:

Your contact information – the press release sites require this:

Contact person’s name, title, email address, and telephone number
Company name
Company URL
Company physical address

Your keywords

A one paragraph bio about you and/or your company – things that you could include:
Where you’re located, what you do, what makes you and/or your company special and unique in your field, awards or honors that you’ve won, achievements, (have you helped clients create successful businesses? Have you trained hundreds of dogs? Worked with hundreds of clients to successfully achieve their weight loss/fitness goals?), your experience in your field, your educational background, etc.

News: What are you announcing? Types of news announcements: a new product, service, partnership, webinar or teleseminar coming up, book launch, movie release, ebook, an award won, your comments on a new study that is relevant to your business (a dermatologist commenting on a new medical study which has statistics about skin cancer, etc.)

A couple of quotes from you:

What is it that makes your news special, new? What’s in it for the reader? Why did you create this new product/write this new ebook/create this series of videos, or why are you holding this teleseminar or webinar, etc.?

For instance, Jackie Silver wrote a book called Aging Backwards –

"Everyone wants to stay young. I’m here to help make it easier," said Silver, whose book is available at Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com and on her Web site, http://agingbackwards.com/.

or Adryenn Ashley,  who was holding a bootcamp called Monetizing Your Passion:

 "Monetizing Your Passion is a training system designed to build credibility for your business and brand you as the expert in your field and transform your knowledge into products that can be sold worldwide,” according to Ashley.
 
"I often hear prospective clients say, ‘I’m not an expert!’ and I always ask ‘Would you say that to your customers?’  Everyone has expertise in their field and our proven techniques not only find that talent, but effectively showcase it the world."
 

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Your headline is one of the most important parts of your press release, because if the headline is boring, or vague and confusing, people have no reason to read any further.

Your headline needs to convey excitement and immediacy and immediately draw people into your press release. It needs to contain a strong action verb and it must sum up, in a dozen words or so, what your press release is all about.

And it needs to read like a headline on a newspaper story. 

"Award-winning Reporter Launches New Press Release Writing Service", for example.  Or "Personal Trainer Releases New Series of Flat-Abs-Now Videos", or "New Study Reveals Link Between Vaccines And Autism".  

One of the best ways to get an idea of what press release headlines should look like is to go to www.prweb.com and look through the headlines of the latest press releases they have posted.

Here are a list of action verbs to use in your press release headline: 

Announces

Appoints

Unveils

Reveals

Presents

Launches 

Promotes

Hosts

Upgrades

Expands

Provides

Introduces

Debuts

Offers

Improves

Selects

Reports

Supports

Joins Forces With

Unveils

Names

Is Recognized For

Invited To

Prevents (illness, major disaster, etc.) 

Recognizes

Awards

Is Presented With

Opens

Features

Reports

Honors

Visits

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What do press releases and article marketing have in common? 

For those not familiar – article marketing is  a term for using articles to drive traffic to a website, and hopefully, of course, sales. The way that you do this is to write short, informative articles and submit them to article directories like Ezinearticles.com and Goarticles.com and Associatedcontent.com.  The article directories allow you to include a "resource box" or "author bio", and in that resource box you include a link to your website. Most article directories do not pay you (Associated Content pays a small amount if they accept your articles – generally a few dollars per article).

However,  having your article appear on an article marketing directory is helpful in several ways. First of all, every article that is accepted represents a backlink from a high pagerank site. Secondly, when the article appears on the home page of the article directory, it sends traffic to your website from people browsing the article directory. And thirdly, the articles appear in the search engines, linking to your site, and the more articles that you have out there, the more chances are that people will find them, read them, and click through to your site.

These days, press releases can be used in a way very similar to article directories.

The difference: a press release is a news announcement of some sort. Launch of a new product, an upcoming webinar or teleseminar, a merger, winning of an award, etc. An article is a short informative piece, which conveys information that doesn’t necessarily have any news value. It’s used to showcase your expertise in a particular area. (For instance, if you are a dog trainer selling dog training products, or even promoting dog training affiliate products, you could write articles about how to housebreak a puppy or how to crate train a dog, and put them on article directories which link back to your site.)

The similarities: if you submit your press releases to online press release distribution sites, those press releases, like the articles, first send you an initial burst of traffic when they run on the site’s home page, and then they continue to send traffic because they stay in the search engine listings and people find them days, weeks, months, even years later.  Both press releases and articles are used to stake out your place on the internet, to grab more prime pieces of virtual real estate. Both give you credibility and visibility, as well as traffic and backlinks. 

So which should you use? Both, of course. The more articles and press releases that you have linking to your site, the more visible your site is in the search engines and the more people will be able to find you. 

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The fact that you’re on a tight budget should not stop you from creating your own publicity campaign for your business, product and services. These days it is easy and cheap to be your own publicist; all you need to invest is a little time. 

Here are seven essential tools for your publicity campaign toolkit:

1.) A  webpage which advertises your products and services. Even if it’s a free blogspot blog, you need to grab yourself a piece of online real estate and show everyone what you’ve got. Every website should include testimonials, an "About Me" or "About Us" page, a "Contact Us"  Page, and an "Our Products" or "Our Services", and, if appropriate, samples of your work. (You don’t have testimonials because you’re a brand new business? Do some work for free in exchange for testimonials.)

2.) A "Media Room" or "press room" page on your website. So you’ve never been written up in the press? No big deal. Hire a press release writer – ahem, I’m available – or go to PRWeb and see how they’re written, and then write a press release about your business, and put that press release in the "Media Room" or "Press" page. Write a new press release and add it to this page every time you hire someone, form a merger, release a new product or service, offer a holiday special, win an award, attend a conference, etc. Consider sending the press releases out to free press release distribution sites, or www.webwire.com for $19.95, or www/PRWeb.com for $80.

3.) A Twitter account, Facebook account, and Linkedin account, all linking to your website, with your company bio on each site. Visit those sites regularly and participate in the communities. The payback is HUGE. 

4.) A signature line in your emails that helps spread your message. Set up your emails so that your name, email address, website URL, and links to your Twitter, Facebook, & Linkedin accounts, are in the signature line of each email that you send out, along with a one line summary of your USP.  Mine is "We Broadcast Your Message To the World." 

5.) Other people’s blogs! Use them to grab some link love, traffic, and free publicity. How? Simple.  Find the popular blogs in your field and offer to write blog posts for them in your area of expertise. This gives you backlinks, traffic, and conveys credibility.

6.) An online and offline press kit with a photograph of yourself and/or your product,  a one-page bio of yourself, and a page about your services/product/company. When I say "offline", I mean a printed version, ready to mail or hand to a reporter or editor.

7.) A list of media who might be interested in writing about you. Contact them, find out what reporter or editor you should submit press releases to, or pitch stories to, and regularly follow up with them with timely story ideas. Odds are good that if you are polite, persistant and professional and are pitching good stories, sooner or later someone in the mainstream media will feature you. 

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 When you are writing a press release,  it’s easy to get so caught up in finding a news hook and crafting a well written release that you forget about keyword research.

That would be a mistake.

Writing press releases these days is like writing articles for ezinearticles – it gains you valuable virtual real estate and backlinks, as well as traffic. It gets you out there where your potential customers are searching for answers – and you want to be in front of as many of those customers as possible.

So it is important to expand your thinking beyond the old fashioned "I’ll write a press release and fax it to tons of newsrooms and maybe someone will pick it up" approach.

Whether or not your aim is to be picked up by mainstream media, it is important that you take full advantage of  the power of press releases, and get the best possible search engine ranking for your PR, by using appropriate keywords in your headline and in the body of your text.

When I write press releases for clients I ask them what keywords they want me to target. Some provide a list, some ask me to do the keyword research for them.

You want a keyword or keyword phrase that is getting a decent amount of searches. Here’s an example; avoid foreclosure is getting 880 monthly searches. Avoid foreclosures is getting 6600.  That one little letter,  s, makes all the difference in the number of people searching for your press release. The more people that are searching for your phrase, the more people are going to come across your press release. And you wouldn’t know this without doing your keyword research. 

I use the Google Adwords external tool to find out approximate monthly search volume; it’s free.  Wordtracker has a free version of its service as well. 

You want to use the keyword in your headline, in the first paragraph, and maybe once more in the body of the press releases.  Don’t overdo it; the search engines see that as keyword stuffing and may not rank your press release as highly because of it. 

So just remember, the next time that you write a press release, doing your keyword research can make the difference between a press release that is barely visible and one that drives tons of traffic for you. It’s worth the few minutes that you spend researching your keywords. 

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