Press Release Recipe Guidance Notes
Key tips for using Press Release Recipe effectively
For an example of a press release.click the above link and create your own press release if you haven’t done so already. Keep all your responses concise,relevant and to the point:-
- For paragraph 1 you need to think of key phrases which will answer the key questions like Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? You will be able to sort them out into a proper sentence later on the receiving page but you will have the essential ingredients by then.
- After the first paragraph you need to expand the story by really hammering home the major benefits that this event or product will have for your target audience.
- The best way to proceed is to do a test first of all, see how the software works. If you need help writing a press release, we do offer a writing service. But do persevere with this system. Don’t give up after one attempt. There is a reason why press releases cost so much when written by professionals. But this software will give you a great chance of writing at least a few yourself.
The image below shows how your press release might look once you have completed the forms in Press Release Recipe. My sister Linda Thompson kindly tested the site for me and you can see here what resulted. The important thing to note here is that the press release is not the finished article. It still needs a bit of work on the first parapgraph to make it fit for publication.
Editing your Crucial First Paragraph in Press Release Recipe
You will see in the text highlighted here that it doesn’t make sense. BUT what is important is that it WILL make sense once these key phrases have been put into order. Let’s look at the phrases which have been separated by the tilda |. Depending on the emphasis we want to place on Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How? we could rewrite it as:-
CPA + PR = PR4?
For those of you not au fait with CPA, it stands for Cost Per Action. Basically if an affiliate sends traffic to an established offer through say a trial or sales promotion, the affiliate receives credit for that action.But how does this all relate to public relations?
Well firstly we need to distinguish the difference between page rank and public relations. Unfortunately the two abbreviations are linked but are different functions. Today I am talking about public relations primarily but good public relations does affect page rank.
Back to CPA then. If you are promoting a product, there are many tools that you can use. Press releases is one of them. Now, I have been sending out press releases since time immemorial, mainly tio newspapers, magazines and radio stations.
I must admit to having been rather cynical about how online PR can help affiliate marketing. After all, it’s not you that has created the product. It’s someone else’s. However the trick is to drive traffic to your websites.
Finding a new story is absolutely essential to this process. Basically no new story, no coverage. many CPA networks all very strict about what you can send out about their products. So firstly don’t make the mistake of sending press releases that have not been approved by your CPA network.
You have two options open to you. Firstly if you feel that there is a strong story related to the product in question, run your idea past your CPA representative. Remember that they are interested in shifting goods too. So they would be happy to work with you on any additional promotion that you can offer. There might be some benefits for example that you have experienced as a result of using the product. E.g. if you have been applying a skin care product and the results are impressive, then you could generate a human interest story as a result of that positive experience of the product.
What do we mean by human interest story? Journalists and readers alike prefer pieces of editorial which they can empathise with. You have seen the weight loss editorials- yesterday I was 20 stone and a virtual recluse, and now I am belle of the ball at 10 stone. that’s a very simple yet effective way of creating that instant relationship with the reader.
Distribution is as equally important is writing a press release. As usual in Internet marketing there are free options and paid for options. Over 40 press release sites with fairly high Google ranking exist. Other Internet marketers have demonstrated through forums that these sites can work if you do have a strong story to sell. No change there then. Simply having a press release online or offline is not a guarantee that it will be read. In addition, they have reported -and this is borne out by my own experience-that some press releases have a longer shelf life than others. Broadly, the stronger the story the longer it will stay in the in the top 10 of the search engines. Why? Because people are reading it and readability means link juice.
Sites like PR Newsire, PR Web and PR Leap are expensive and yet they can afford to be. Each of those sites are highly ranked by Google. So the $149 a throw might not be such a large price to pay if resulting sales can justify the expenditure. This is of course the perennial question in any form of affiliate marketing. If the product is being sold at $29.95, then the simple math would indicate that you would need to sell seven units to make it worth your while, using a paid press release site. My advice would be to begin with the free sites and if these are providing good rankings, stick with them.
In this brief article on how public relations affects SEO, it is not possible to cover all angles but I hope that this has given you a taster of what you can achieve by relating public relations with affiliate marketing.
CB Predators Review
You just won't
It’s not often I have occasion to “slag off” a product. In PR terms it’s called “Black PR” and it’s a practice I have avoided over the years. But let me express my frustration on my own blog about timewasters who promise that you will get rich in 18 clicks.
There’s nothing wrong with making a claim of this nature but if it can’t be backed up, the Goodwill Gasometer plunges. So why am I breaking my rule?
Like thousands of others, I signed up for a “not to be missed opportunity” at CB Predators. The basis of the offer is this. it’s an affiliate scheme involving Internet marketing, weight loss, anti-ageing type products. You are offered these products around a month before the official launch so that you can gain a head start on other affiliates. The biggest selling point for me was that it was offering a review site template which could easily be optimised.
However these templates simply did not work. After numerous tickets to the so-called technical support department, and waiting ten days for any response whatsoever, I finally gave up. But this was not before I visited some forums to find out what other people were experiencing. I found, to my amazement, the others were describing a mirror image of my own situation.
Rather than whinge until I’m blue in the face, my point is more about customer confidence than anything else. Here you are reading and negative review about product, whereas their sales strategy is built upon the notion of building a series of positive review sites. How ironic!
So what is the moral of the story? Public relations is about building sustained relationships between stakeholders in your business. Customers are a major stakeholder for obvious reasons. Many of the successful internet marketers who offer similar types of product take the trouble to over deliver on their promises. There is no doubt that Chris and Jerome are successful Internet marketers using other products and strategies, but they have so much to learn about ensuring that customers like me and countless others not left to struggle on their own with a defective product.
I can honestly say with hand on heart that if I had put my customers through this frustrating treadmill, I would have given the product away free. I would not be able to sleep nights in the knowledge that my reputation has been tarnished as a result of poor communication. Avoid CB Predators like the plague.
PR is good for SEO but it’s got to be handled well
Over the last couple of years, public relations has become a very important online tool. Alongside article writing and increasingly video marketing Internet marketers have begun to take public relations far more seriously as a method of ensuring that they or their clients’ sites reached the top of the main search engines.
The biggest danger is that inexperienced marketers might think that the tried and trusted techniques used for search engine optimisation are appropriate for PR. Firstly it must be remembered that there is a broker in between the writer and the person you’re trying to influence to buy. That broker is a journalist and journalists have a certain way of writing and interpreting data.
The web is legion with articles on how to write a press release, but writing one and having read to totally different things. Even online, journalists have to wade through quite a few e-mails and press releases on sites like PR newswire PR leap in order to get to yours. Why would they want to? What is so special about your product they would want to read about, let alone write about?
And it’s not just about online press releases. With the final growth of the Internet, it is easy to forget that newspapers, radio stations, TV channels didn’t simply disappear. In fact these traditional forms of media fighting back. As far as small businesses and non-profit making organisations are concerned, this huge sector should not be ignored. If a story is a compelling one, there is every chance that your product or service will make the pages and programs of this traditional type of media.
The point is that there are no corners to be cut. There are no easy ways to persuade journalists. Yes you can pay PR Newswire $149 to distribute a news release, but that’s not to say that it is necessarily going to get you to the top 10 of Google as a result of the payment. It doesn’t work like that. Certainly sites like PR Newswire, PR Leap and many of the free sites have a decent ranking in Google, but you’re wasting your money if you fail a) to come up with a compelling story can b) you fail to optimise the keywords within press release.
The trick is to box clever. When selecting stories for possible publication, it is often the more quirky stories that journalists looking for. To use that adage about the stake and the sizzle, journalists not so much looking for stories about what you do, it’s the effect of what you do on their readers. For example, if you have a choice between two stories, warm publicising a $1.2 million extension to your building and another about a product you really you releasing to help decrease eyestrain, I know which one I would choose. The first is pure bragging, and the second fulfils a need. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that journalists will necessarily be interested in how you spend your money.
Where possible, and with the advent of online press release sites, this has become little more difficult, it is best to chat to journalists first. Or at least e-mail them before you send. Clearly if you’re using a distribution service, this isn’t always possible. You will gain better results, if you get to know the journalists that are operating in your market either locally, nationally or internationally. That way, you will build up a two-way relationship with the reporter or editor so that coverage is more sustained over a period of time.
It’s really a case of mix-and-match all horses for courses. If done correctly, public relations can increase your presence in the market place and subsequent articles will show you how.
Kodak zi8 vs Flip Mino
Has The Kodak Zi8 Stolen the HD “point and shoot” Crown from Flip?
Both camcorders, the Kodak Zi8 and the Flip Mino, have been meticulously designed to garner the advancing market of easy to use and exceptionally portable camcorders with built in abilities that make sharing the videos on the computer and loading them up to the popular social networking sites markedly easy. Let’s do a quick digital video camera review of these two products.
Flip and Kodak are both justifiably proud of their own product lines, and make it easy to find lots of information online. Of course, one of the most influential attributes to everyone is the cost, and you will see that they at exactly the same price point, $100 or around £75-£90. So far they’re even.
One noticable characteristic between these two is that the Kodak Zi8 HD
Kodak zi8 has the edge on memory and sound upgrade
However, and this is substantial the Kodak depends on the use of SD/SDHC memory cards to generate it’s storage capabilities. The Flip Mino leaves you no room for upgrade. The Kodak zi8 digital video camera can manage up to a 32 GB card for those who want to go all out. What does that mean? Up to ten hours of video recording ! That’s a huge plus for Kodak.
One of the things that is similar between them is they both have a very handy built in USB swing-out arm, so you don’t need camera specific cables. You can just pull out the arm and plug it directly into your computer and start sharing. Down with cable clutter! A tie.
Both come with video and picture editing software, but only the Zi8 has HD capable video recording, and a HDMI output on the camera itself to affix directly to your HDTV for immediate review. Kodak wins.
The capability to add an external sound mic also tips the balance in the favour of the zi8. If you want to do a swift interview and don’t want to travel heavy, the ability to clip an external mic or even hook up a beachteck adapter is a generous addition to the electronics for a camera of this price range.
But beyond this, it largely isn’t much of a competition. The Flip Mino, and even it’s big brother the FlipHD, which costs significantly more, can’t compare to the benefits and quality of the Kodak. For the same price, you get a much augmented view screen, built-in image balance, full blown 1080 pixel HD video, and the reliability that comes with the Kodak name.
Kodak zi8 vs Flip: The Verdict
Final result: the race between these two products is not remotely close at present– the Kodak Zi8 HD
The Five Minute PR Plan Part Two
by Keith Thompson MA, CMIPR, PG Cert
My name’s Keith Thompson and a warm welcome to my blog regarding PR tips at Effective Media. In the first article we looked at how businesses should look at PR as something they do already and simply need to focus it a bit more. So let’s first look at the benefits of this.
- Firstly being media savvy doesn’t just affect sales, it can also have an impact and branding and reputation both offline and online.
- Secondly search engines like press releases, video content and also photographs (properly tagged) too
So we’ve already ticked two major boxes here and we’re still not causing any great hole in the working day. So far all I have proposed is that you find and add one journalist per day, one from a local paper, one from a trade mag and so on for the next couple of weeks so that you build a database of contacts.
Now all we need to do is learn how to write a press release and here it is:-
Type 1: Paper press releases to be released physically by fax or snail mail.
1) Don’t for get your logo at the top. Sounds like an obvious one that doesn’t it? Well not really. It’s amazing how many companies still send news releases out without one.
2) Keep your language simple and to the point without being flowery. Don’t use five words when one will do e.g. “It is possible for customers to” “they can”
3) Beginners should use the three paragraph format on one side of A4 although there are longer versions. Let’s stick to the three paragraph version in this article.
4) Formatting: News Release at the top. To the left indicate when the press release is available from (avoid embargos like the plague). 1.5 space the text and single space the “Note to Editors” Include your immediate contact details here. Leave wide margins for notes.
5) Headline should be boldened, relevant and keyword biased. Attempts to be witty wil almost certainly be met with yawns. They do the jokes! “You can get slim by thinking about it says psychologist.”
6) First paragraph: Tell the whole story and nothing but the story. Who? What? When? Where? Which? Why? e.g. “You can put on muscle tone just by thinking about exercise according to a report by a top psychologist, Dr Tim Jones at a conference in New York today.
7) Second paragraph reinforces the story and might include a quote e.g. “Dr. Jones was speaking at the International Psychology Conference where he delivered his findings from experiments on 26 office workers.”
Third paragraph will be a call to action or invitation (this is your chance to sell your location) e.g. ” Dr Jones has his own webinar on the subject and wil be inviting readers to ask him questions this Wednesday at www.drtimjonesinc.com….”
9) End the press release with ENDS so that you don’t run the risk of any of your private contact details being published to the world.
10) Include a “note to editors” if you are inviting them to a photocall or other press event online or locally. perhaps you might wish to inform them that there are photographs available. Don’t forget to proofread and grammar check. Sometimes crucial phone numbers and website addresses can be typed in wrongly.
Type 2: email
As above except:-
4) Use normal text based emails single spaced. If you want to use HTML, check with the publisher first. In fact you should never spam editors with unsolicited emails anyway. You wil soon find out how they want your email by having a conversation with them preferably by phone or at least an advance email. Mass submitter software is not recommended for press releases.
If you are still nervous about writing your own press releases or content, we do offer a copywriting service here at Effective Media and Effective Publicity which is cheaper than you think. Please feel free to contact me for details at keith@effective-media.co.uk If not read on and we can see if we can provide the knowledge and skills you need to follow the Five Minute PR Plan.
In part three I will show you to shoot a video news release and also compose a picture which will dramatically enhance both the quantity and quality of coverage you receive both online and offline. Picture stories rule. find out why in the next installment.
‘The Article Profit Formula’ by John Taylor PhD
Review of The Article Profit Formula by John Taylor PhD
Terms of reference: The author is not an affiliate of this product
The offer: John Taylor is offering a $17 re-launch via certain forums but this is likely to increase to $27. It consists of a download of the book plus four writing bonuses which are referred to as a surprise bonus after purchase.
Target audience: Anyone with an interest on making money via the highly effective but equally misunderstood concept of article marketing.
Review: The ebook arrived promptly through 7 Day Deals and I was able to access the product immediately. 30 minutes later I understood the concept and felt that the $17 was money well spent. Compared to a $17 I might have spent in a bookshop – which is not a bad way of assessing an ebook’s added value- I felt that I learned more in the 12 pages offered than much of the time I have spent ploughing through the endless debates about article spinning. On that vexed subject, and without giving the content away, John Taylor is not advocating the concept of spinning. Content is most definitely king but it’s king at vital areas of the internet and at logical stages.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the reviewer will be following the route of righteousness over the next couple of weeks. So check back for updates. But suffice to say that the formula led me to a sigh of relief that quality and not quantity will discern the wheat from the chaff in the coming months when article sites and big G clean up the spun copy. No disrespect to those who spin where it makes money, but it’s of benefit to all of us if informative and well researched copy can win over in the longer term.
Bottom Line: I thought I could write an article or two but I have never really known how to make it widely accessbile to my target audience. John’s book is an informative, concise read which has that wondrous ‘Eureka!’ feel to it. The best methods are usually the simplest ones and The Article Profit Formula fits into that category. Thanks for telling us like it is, Dr. Taylor.
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