How Not To Use Press Releases To Get Links

Posted in Link Building |

My advice to those thinking of issuing a press release to help build links:

Don’t bother.

I should qualify that statement. I’m not saying press releases are a bad idea (they’re not), and I’m not saying that they can’t drive attention and links (they can) but the trick is not to do it like I did it: half-arsed.

As part of the promotion plan for this site, I issued a press release. I used the PRWeb service. The process is easy enough - you pick the service level required - I chose the social media visibility package for $120 - write the release, hit the button, and hope it gets picked up by some news site somewhere, hopefully a major one.

The hard part, of course, is writing the release.

Now, the inherent problem with press releases is that 99.999% of them aren’t worth reading. Who really cares if "Gordon No-name has been promoted to Vice President in charge of the drain cleaning division at Noname Drains Inc"? Nobody. It’s certainly not going to be repeated in the New York Times. Dave Barry once joked that if you want something to remain a secret, issue a press release about it. You’re guaranteed to be ignored.

So the real challenge with a press release is to be interesting.

This is where I screwed up. I did write an interesting, inflammatory, attention-grabbing press release that contained all the buzzwords to ensure it would come up in news searches for my industry - "search engine!" "Google!" "Google!" (again) - however the press release got knocked back, because it was too "editorial". Perhaps that’s PR-speak for "interesting". Or "potentially libelous"…

Anyway, this knock-back occurred towards the end of the day, and being impatient, as many of us are at the end of a long work day, I just wanted to get something out. So I ended up modifying the release to this.

Which, I’m sure you’ll agree - is a piece of crap. Needless to say, it got me less traffic than a reciprocal link farm.

So, don’t make the same mistake I did. Press releases do work extremely well for some people, but there’s an art to it. Make sure you get your pitch right. Stay focused on exactly who the audience is, and why they would pick your story up, else you’ll end up $120 out of pocket, and out of the spotlight.

Here’s a few very good resources I really should have remembered to read first.

Next time…