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Make the Most of Your Release: Intro

If you’ve read any of my articles, you know that I’m fond of lists. On the heels of my last article about how to follow up on your release (See “Trevor’s 7 Rules of PR Pitching”), here’s the intro article to my list of 6 tips to help you get the most out of your follow-up.

The reason for paying a service like Marketwire or PRWeb to distribute your press release for you is that they can get your story in front of people who you can’t—at least, not without difficulty. Depending on how much you pay, you can get your story released over the AP Wire and Reuters. This gives you an channel to communicate with that ties directly to reporters all across the globe, which is a great way to make sure your story is covered, right? Write a press release that’s full of good content, has clear links back to the source for the content, and you shouldn’t have any problem getting covered by the media, right? Sadly, not as much as you probably hoped.

It’s called the “Tragedy of the Commons.” If you make a resource freely available, it will become so overused that it will become useless. Now, press releases aren’t worthless—they’re not free, for one thing—but the ease with which anyone can release something across the wire means that there’s a lot of content that’s arriving on reporters’ desks every day, and almost all of it is content that reporter doesn’t care about. It can be lot of work for a reporter to filter the dross out and find the content that might interest them. Reporters are busy folks. Since looking through hundreds of press releases is yet another task that they’re burdened with in their increasingly crowded days, you can imagine how much attention is given to most of the releases that cross the wire.

“But wait a minute,” I can hear you saying. “OvernightPR writes press releases for a living!” Am I saying that they’re worthless and won’t get you covered in the news?

No. I’m not.

Aside from shooting my business model in the foot if I said that, I also know from experience that press releases can get you coverage in national media if you view them as a tool to help you get attention and not an end goal. Further, even if you don’t get picked up by the Wall Street Journal or The View, there are powerful, trackable benefits to a press release besides attracting the attention of a major news outlet.

But if you want to make the most use of those benefits, you need to understand what I just said: press releases are a tool that you use as part of getting your story noticed. They won’t do it all by themselves unless you’re lucky. Think of your press release as a pry bar that you can use to open a box that’s nailed shut: it’s designed for that job, and it does it well, but that doesn’t mean that opening up the box still doesn’t take effort.

With that knowledge in mind, I’ve come up with a few (okay, 7) tips that will help you get your story out.

These tips are ideally something that you do before you put out a press release. If you haven’t already done these, though, and want a release out now, don’t worry. Do them as you can, and you’ll find that you increase the power and return of not just your releases, but almost all of your PR and marketing.