1. A press release is a written content. It’s basically a news story about your company, event, product and service written in third person perspective.
Photo Courtesy of: Pinterest
Its primary goal is to entice a group of journalists and bloggers to write more articles about your story.
2. The style of writing follows an inverted pyramid. It’s limited to answering the questions what, who, why, when, where and how. You’re also allowed to insert “comments” from an interview.
3. Your tone should be professional from the title until the concluding paragraph.
Take time to say what you want but make sure you express these ideas concisely. The required length of a news story is one page. A two-page story is the maximum but more than that, it’s already an article.
4. Make it a habit to write and rewrite your headline. A headline should be written in simple present tense, which summarizes the content of the story in 15 words or less.
It’s a smart strategy to add a sub-heading to expand the main idea. Effective subheading only gives support, so keep it to one line.
5. Lead refers to an opening paragraph, which is written in 50 words or less.
It needs to contain the most specific details of the story such as statistics, date of an event and complete name of a person involved in the story.
6. There are different ways to write an opening paragraph. One, it summarizes one major angle of the story such as what or who.
Two, it reveals the key facts right away. You’re going to get rid of buzzwords such as innovate, unique, leading provider, pleased to, new and improved.
These buzzwords make a weaker story. Journalists read and heard it a million times.
7. The subsequent paragraphs support your introduction. It expands the idea of what, when, who, where, why and how. Comments from a reliable source are inserted too.
See to it each paragraph only contains one or two sentences. Each sentence contains no jargon slang words.
8. The concluding paragraph serves as your call-to-action. It convinces your readers to either call or write you back.
9. Insert a colored photo at the beginning of the story. A quality photo of the right size grabs more attention.
10. Thoroughly re-check your spelling, grammar, punctuation and facts. Consider using tools such as Plagium and Grammarly.
11. Think of your targeted audience when editing your story. Will they love the angle?
Sometimes, you’re required to put an extra punch in one angle or two. How will you re-angle the story if it’s necessary?
12. Decide where to submit your story. Are you going to target the local press? specialist press? consumer press? national press? Or, will you send different stories to different press publications?
Remember: A press release is a news. It’s your announcement and it’s your responsibility to choose the right group of journalists.
13. If you’re going to e-mail the story to a press distribution, hypnotize the journalists with an irresistible subject line.
A subject line easily attracts attention if it contains ten words or less. It either asks a question or offers a realistic solution to a problem. For example: How to Market Your Visual Content in 3 Easy Steps
14. Consider using a paid press release distribution. This service allows you to register an account, write the story in a word processor and publish it in a number of news publications.
Make sure you choose the right syndication tool. The service needs to distribute news in selected but quality sites, which rank high in search engines.
15. Track your performance. Make it a point to check how many people click and read your press release. Paid distribution tools provide detailed analytics.
In press media, consider asking the total number of news publications. Find the exact link of your story, compile it in a spreadsheet and connect each to your own analytics.
* * *
Leads Ahoy provides services in reputation management, search engine optimization, list building and geo-targeted lead generation. http://leadsahoy.com/
Leads Ahoy 
2 comments