Punchy Press Releases
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Yes, I’ve written a few press releases in my day. I’ve published a few, too, back in my editor days, but I love what they can do for your business in terms of getting traffic. If you haven’t written one, they aren’t terribly difficult, either.
First and foremost, you need a good hook.
That’s exactly like a headline. So, if you’re good at writing headlines, you have half the battle nailed.
I like to tie my headlines in to something that people might currently be searching for. So, I cruise the headlines in the news. Of course, you have to tie your headline to the body of the press release or it won’t work.
I go to places like Google News and Excite or Yahoo to find the choice headlines, and the trick is to find something people are searching for. Right now, it could be Obama, Batman, or there’s always the fuel crisis.
Just be very careful how you do it or the release won’t be approved. If you can work a legitimate tie-in, though, you’ll be cool. Like, if you’re talking about Batman, you’d better have a gothic product or something superhero-like. I think that would be kind of hard.
Last year, when we were launching The ListBuilding Club, I did one for Tellman that said he was opening the club with more tricks than Harry Potter, which was out at the time, and then went on to say that Tellman’s not a magician, but he has more marketing tricks than a tutor at Hogwart’s. All worked out, you see?
Anyway, that’s my tip for the day. Have fun coming up with cool ways to get people interested. They may not even know that they want to know about your cool news, but well… when they get there, they just might be highly interested, eh? Get as many people reading your releases as you can.
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Tags: batman, harry potter, press releases, Tellman Knudson, the listbuilding club
July 23rd, 2008 at 11:12 pm
I love your advice about tying in to hot topics and current news. And your Batman and Harry Potter examples are terrific.
As a publicity expert, I get more questions about press releases than any other publicity topic. I created a free tutorial called “89 ways to write powerful press releases.” It walks you step by step through the entire process. (I am a former newspaper editor.) We devote an entire week to SEO, another entire week to headlines, and it’s a very long course. But if you stick with it, you’ll end up knowing more about how to write and distribute press releases than most professional PR people.
You can opt into the course at http://www.PublicityHound.com/pressreleasetips/art.htm