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How to Determine if your Press Release is Newsworthy
0 Comments | Posted by Naomi in How to Search Engine Optimize a Press Release, How to Write a Press Release, How to Write an Online Press Release, PR techniques
After writing and editing your press release, it is important to make sure you do everything possible for it to take off. Writers should check that the press release contains important keywords for SEO purposes. Once you use a press release distribution company to distribute the release to the right media outlets, the process of waiting begins.
Depending on the topic of your press release, reporters may or may not be clamoring to interview you or even, to write an article about it.
A press release that contains all the right components to be effective and noticed online is great, but if it isn’t newsworthy, it serves no purpose to a client or the company.
Smaller businesses have a better chance of being covered if they can “piggyback” off of a recent news story relevant to their topic. Bigger companies such as Yahoo! or Google usually don’t have an issue with getting a press release covered because they’ve been around long enough to be news due to their name.
There are three ways to determine if a press release is newsworthy:
- timeliness
- relevance
- news readiness
If you are relating a press release to a news story, make sure that the topic is still in the news and not stale. For example, don’t write a press release in December about hurricane season when the season has clearly passed. Also, it’s important to make sure that your topic is relevant to the news story you’re relating it to. A press release on a 5K run wouldn’t relate to a story about a woman dealing with a flesh eating virus.
It’s important to note that journalists have deadlines, and if your press release is something that interests them, be sure that the release is written from a journalistic point of view. It needs to include the “5 W’s” of journalism – Who, What, Where, Why, and When – so he or she can write it quickly and without hassle.
Remember that just because you have an online press release, it doesn’t mean the topic is necessarily appropriate for email distributions to journalists.
