Why You Need a Year-End Press Release—Now

Whatever your business is, it’s time to start working on a year-end press release to be distributed in mid- to late December.

Think you don’t have anything to say? Think again.

Newspapers, radio and television stations, and bloggers are all doing stories on the economy in late December and early January. Experts with views on national and global outlooks are plentiful. Experts on the economy in your community or your industry tend to be few and far between. They aren’t listed in the telephone directory – or almost any other directory – either, making it hard for reporters to identify them.

You are, however, an expert on how your business is doing. Here are just a few ideas to get you thinking about possible press releases:

• · Do you sell office supplies? How has the past year year been, and what are you expecting for next year? You have valid personal observations on what you are seeing in your business.
• · Do you repair appliances or cars or just about anything else? Are more people keeping their older appliances longer? Or are more people likely to buy a new appliance rather than make major repairs?
• · Are you a medical professional? Are your patients having to make larger out-of-pocket payments as their employers cut back on health insurance? Are you seeing more patients who no longer have group policies? How is this impacting you – and them?
• · What products and services to you offer? Which ones are showing sales increases and why?

In other words, if you are in business and you have customers, you are doing something of interest to the community. It’s a good time to share your story.

Why Write a Press Release When Reporters Will Be There?

Why write a press release when you know reporters will be at an event, anyway?

That’s question I often hear. The answer is this: It can be even more important to have a written press release when you know reporters will be present.

It’s very hard for a reporter (or anyone else) to listen to a speech, much less a panel discussion or question-and-answer session with multiple speakers, and take notes with 100 percent accuracy.

If you put the important facts in writing, you know the reporter will have an accurate record of any numbers and your most important comments. If the reporter is called away to another breaking story before it’s your turn to speak, the reporter will at least know what you had to say.

Issuing a press release, of course, in no way obligates a reporter to use it. The media gets to decide what is published and what is left out.

Good reporters want to get the facts right. A well-written press release makes it easy for them to do so. The easier you make it for a reporter to cover you accurately, the more likely it is to happen.

What are the best practices for writing a SEO-friendly press release?

I use a service from Newsforce, available through Business Wire (www.businesswire.com), the electronic press distribution service now owned by Warren Buffet. It costs $20 a press release, and it’s worth every penny in the amount of time saved versus using the “free” services that I have explored. In addition, Business Wire and Newsforce assign staff members to keep up with what is going on in search engine optimization. It’s much more cost-effective that trying to develop the expertise myself.

This is a short explanation of what I think works best. First, write a press release as if you were writing it exclusively for humans, keeping keywords in the back of your mind. Then go to the $20 online tool. Enter the keywords, or the terms on which you think people would be searching. The tool then comes back with an analysis of the number of searches on these words in the past month and suggests other keywords as well. Once you have selected the keywords, it tells you how many times each keyword needs to be used in the headline, in the first 100 words and in the body of the press release.

It’s up to the user, of course, to make certain the press release still makes sense to humans as well as to search engines. (I have to brag a little here. The first time I used this process for one client, he said it was a wonderful tool because the press release still read just as well as it did before optimization. I told him those compliments should be directed at me, not the computerized tool. ☺)

For those who are not familiar with search engine optimization, this is a process that makes your press release more likely to show up on Google and other Internet searches. It’s a critical part of public relations today.

Thanks to Sun Valley Online’s Dave Chase for this question.