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5 Tips for Writing Online Press Releases

The first thing you need to do when writing a press release to help drive targeted traffic to your website is to put away your advertising glasses and put on your journalism cap. If your release sounds like advertising, it will not be read by many people and will be accepted by even fewer distributors. You must sound like an objective third party as you write and it needs to sound like you have nothing to gain from the people who choose to visit your website.

A second tip as you write press releases is that you should tell an interesting story. It is a bad idea to go on blabbing about the features of the product or service on the website you are promoting. That just does not qualify as interesting news. What does qualify is a success story! Telling how a real person had a real problem that your product or service solved is very interesting and is way better than any ad you could buy.

The third tip I want to share is that you should use statistics in your release as much as possible. Keep it simple unless you plan to submit it to a technical journal but showing real numbers does a lot to back up your claims and win you credibility. Compare two example headlines for a moment. The first one says "Lives saved in burning building" to "47 lives saved in burning building". It is obvious that the second is much more interesting as the number allows people to understand the scope of the event in much greater detail.

Tip number four is that there is a right way to slip a little advertising into your press release. This sounds like I am doubling back on myself but here is what I mean. Do not include promotional language in the main of the press release, but do include it as quoting an expert on the subject. Quoting somebody else does nothing to hurt your reputation as a writer and if the quote is relevant then it deserves to be included. Quote yourself if you have to but include quotes as the subtle way of getting a little advertising into your press releases.

The fifth and final tip I want to share with you is that when you write press releases online, usually the company will want to charge you to include clickable links with keywords embedded. You can save money by giving up the keywords in your clickable link and simply state somewhere in the body of the release the full URL of the website you are promoting. This will often (although not always) get your link clickable on the publication pages without having to pay. You sacrifice the benefits of having keyword backlinks for your SEO purposes, but if your budget is tight then this is an excellent workaround.

There are plenty of places to submit for free such as ArriveNet, I-NewsWire, Free-Press-Release, and OpenPr. Do some searching on your own for publications that are specific to your niche and you can submit there. You should avoid getting your hopes up with this method but persistence will get you one or two chances, which you can later refer to for credibility purposes. This will enhance your website conversion ratio dramatically and you will start attracting links and traffic you never even tried to target!

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