List Building: Meet The Press

Have you often wondered how cool some marketers are that they have press releases written about them? Well, that's not how it happens. If you have a new product, you change your website, or if you're just offering a new free report on your list building page, press releases are the way to go, and... you can easily write them yourself. They can really help you get your list building efforts pumped up, if you know how to write them.

Just be sure that you're writing important news items. Sales letters are out, and if you write about non-important things too often, you probably won't get that many people to read. It's a bit like crying, "Wolf!" when there's no wolf for 100 miles. Be sure to give people news of interesting information and to make it incomplete so that they crave more. You'll see them visiting your list building page in droves and many of those visitors will sign up for your list.

As with any sales letter or email, your headline is the most important part of any press release. The best way to approach it is by tying it in to something in current events. Here's one we did recently: "While Johnny Depp Smashes the Box Office, Knudson Hits Home with Quality Information." We tried one with George W. Bush at the G8, but guess who pulled better? Johnny. He got more than 1,000 full page reads in under 48 hours. That's great exposure!

But you can draw people in even further with your sub-headline. This should be just a teaser about the subject in the release: "On June 5, 2007, Tellman Knudson, CEO of Overcome Everything, Inc., kicked off his phenomenal executive series, The Ultra Marketing Marathon. In the first of seven webinars, marketing mega-star Russell Brunson laid out his secret system of generating unstoppable cash through affiliate marketing." This should be in italics.

In the body of your release, you'll need to give information, but make it incomplete, as I mentioned, so that you get people to visit your website to see what the release is really all about. To prepare yourself for writing, be sure to read a few newspaper stories or go to the press release sites and read a few of the most popular ones. Then, start writing and remember to use a quote or two. Newspapers often take those quotes and use them verbatim in their news stories, so if you want to be written about, be sure to include quotes. Don't forget the URL, either. Use it about twice. More than that could be construed as spamming and your release could be denied.

After the body should be the "about" paragraph. This tells the reader a little about your company. Remember, as with the body, give them the 5Ws--who, what, when, where, and why. You should be able to complete this in just a few sentences. Be sure that you use no more than one paragraph.

Even more important than the about paragraph is the contact information that follows it. Be sure to give a person's name who can be reached to provide more information or to arrange an interview. Give a telephone number, too, and at the end of that type in ###, which is newspaperese for "the end."

You still aren't finished, though. Now, that you've finished the main body of the release, write a short paragraph to summarize it. This will appear on most release sites as the listing, under your headline, so make it sing. Make people want to read the release, and come to your list building page so you can get their information.

Now that you've finished and made the release as good as it can be, go to the press release sites, like PRWeb, PRLeap, and others and upload it. Approval usually takes about a day, so if you want the release to come out the same day as the product you're offering for list building purposes keep that in mind. Writing press releases can be a very powerful way to get traffic coming to your list building page for many days. Try one and see if it doesn't work for you.

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