Image Credit: Follow The Leader by KaCey97007. Licensed through Creative Commons on flickr.com

If you’ve read my previous articles (How to Follow-Up in particular), you’ve seen the OvernightPR way to follow up on your press release. I’ve said this before a few times, but I’ll mention it here again: your press release is a tool for you to use to get PR coverage, not and end-goal of your PR efforts. In order to maximize your return on the investment of writing a release (or paying a writer to do it for you) and distributing it, you need to have your all your ducks in a row.

I’ve given dozens of tips away on how to line those little guys up to make sure that you don’t miss your opportunity with your press release, but I’ve also received a few requests from readers of past articles asking how exactly they should phrase their follow-up email. That’s largely a matter of personal taste, but I’ll share with you my template that I use when I’m doing follow-up emails.

The Template:

Subject Line: Pitch based upon your recent article [[HEADLINE / NAME]] or
Subject Line: Your recent article [[HEADLINE / NAME]] gave me the idea for this PR pitch or
Subject Line: I saw your article [[HEADLINE / NAME]] and thought that I’d pitch this idea by you

[[JOURNALIST NAME]],

I’ve been reading [[COLUMN, PUBLICATION, BLOG, ETC]] for a while because you write a lot about [[MY INDUSTRY, MY COMPANY, ETC]]  and your recent article [[HEADLINE / NAME]] sparked an idea for a press release that I’ve distributed about [[MY COMPANY, NEW TOPIC, WHATEVER]].  Your [[ARTICLE/ POST]] discussed [[IDEA, TREND, LEGISLATION, NEW PRODUCT, MARKET CHANGE, ETC]], and [[MY COMPANY /  ORGANIZATION]] is [[DOING SOMETHING SIMILAR, TAKING THE TREND FUTHER, BUCKING THE TREND]].

In case you’re interested in hearing my story–and maybe writing about it, too!–I’m including the first bit of my new release below. If you want to know more about [[MY COMPANY / ORGANIZATION/ THIS NEWS]], go to [[LINK]] or [[EMAIL / CALL / WRITE / SEND SMOKE SIGNAL]] and I’ll be happy to help.

Thanks for your time!

[[INCLUDE HEADLINE OF RELEASE AND FIRST PARAGRAPH, WITH A CLEAR LINK TO THE REST OF IT]]

[[CLOSING SALUTATION OR NOTE & CONTACT INFO]]

Using the Template:

As I said, this template is largely a matter of personal taste and circumstance. Unsurprisingly, there’s not a lot of text that I keep unchanged from follow-up to follow-up. That takes a decent amount of time, but it’s the only reliable way I’ve found of getting a release some attention. Do note: if you *haven’t* been reading that journalists’ column or blog and try to fake it in the letter, you will probably get caught out. They get a lot of pitches every day, and the main chance you have of standing out is to write a pitch that is truthfully related to what they write about.

Don’t try any linguistic gymnastics to explain how your story is related to a recent article. If you can’t pitch your release to a partricular blogger / journalist, let it slide. There will be other chances.

E*Releases.com states (and they’re not the first) that you can either look at your release as a shotgun or a rifle. I think that news releases are of more value to the company that they are released in behalf of when they’re targeted. Just blazing away at every journalist in sight gets you on black lists or–worse yet–mentioned somewhere like the Bad Pitch Blog.

There’s enough spam out there. You don’t need to add to it.

So what do you think of the template?  Got any questions? Leave a comment and let’s chat!

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 second of 6 tips to help you get the most out of your follow-up (read the first here).

Make a List: of the people who write about your industry or business.

Image Credit: To Do List by °Florian. Licensed through Creative Commons 2.0

Who talks about your industry? Your company? Keep track of blogs, journalists and commenters who seem especially influential or knowledgeable. They’ll come in handy later. Don’t get creepy about it, but take notice of what they’re talking about.

Unless you work in an incredibly niche market, you should be able to find at least a half a dozen good writers who cover your industry or something that is close enough to it that they might be interested in what it is you do. (If there *aren’t* a half-dozen people who write about your industry, then you definitely should take advantage of tip 7 on my list of making the most of your release, which will admittedly not appear for a few days.).

If your writer is a blogger, then subscribe to his or her blog. If your writer is solely a traditional journalist, buy his or her magazine or newspaper (or read it in your local library if your budget is too shoestring to afford a magazine subscription) and take notes.

The complication for many people is not going to be finding writers who cover their industry, but rather  how to determine which of the dozens of writers they find is “influential.” A blogger’s influence is relatively easy to discover through a combination of Technorati and Yahoo.  Look the blogger up on Technorati and see how the site ranks your blogger’s “authority.”  The helpful people at Technorati have devoted a lot of time and effort to making algorithms that search out inboud links, trackbacks, and other arcane signals that a blogger is an “authority” who influences the market. The closer the number is to 1, the more “authority” that blog has, so you’ll want to keep tabs on people with lower numbers.

If your resource isn’t a blogger, or if your target niche is small enough that Technoarti isn’t doing a good job accurately judging the authority of a writer, Yahoo! can provide you with a quick and dirty look at how well regarded someone is on the Internet, using that most precious resource: the inbound link. Type in a search on Yahoo! for the website that you want to evaluate with the following language:

linkdomain:yourdomain.com – site:yourdomain.com

By way of example, this would be the search for http://overnightpr.com:

linkdomain:overnightpr.com – site:overnightpr.com

When I wrote this article, Yahoo gives me credit for 11 links that point back to my main address of overnightpr.com–all of them from other pages on my site. Since I’ve just started this site, that makes sense, but there will soon be more. In this sace, the higher the number, the more authority the writer has.

With a combination of these two tools, you should be able to get a relatively objective measure of how well your writer is regarded by the marketplace in general.So once you’ve found your influential writer or reporter, read what he or she has to say, and then make a point of posting thoughtful commentary on his or her blog, if there is one  Post comments about the article on some other industry blog if you absolutely have to. If you regularly post good comments and provoke discussion, you’ll get noticed by the article’s author. As someone who wrote and maintained a corporate blog for over a year, take my word for it: I knew my 10 best commenters pretty well.

If you find any stories that you think may be interesting to the influential writers in your industry, pass them. Don’t spam them with things that you’ve found, of course, or you’ll irritate them more than you’ll advance your cause.

Keep tabs on what these influential writers routinely cover and what they usually don’t. This will be handy for you when you get ready to pitch your story to them. I use a spreadsheet when I’m reading up on people in an industry for a client, because it’s easier for me to keep track of details that way.

Once you’ve got that list and you know who you want to write about, you’re ready for the next item on Trevor’s 7 Tips for Making the Most of Your Release. But that post waits until Monday to get put up–sorry–so you’ll have to wait until then.

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 first of 7 tips to help you get the most out of your follow-up.

1: Listen: Find out who’s talking about your field now.

Image Credit: "Listen" by ky_olsen. Licensed through Creative Commons 2.0

Google has an incredible tool called “Google Alerts.” (http://www.google.com/alerts) If you are a web-savvy businessman or businesswoman, you will come to love it. Basically, you tell Google what you want to know about. Then, on a weekly, daily, or “as it happens” basis, Google will let you know when its search engine encounters a new web page with the terms that you’re interested in. Include your company name in these alerts, as well as some terms that are common in your business. “OvernightPR, Fast Press Release, Social Media News Release, and Fast PR” are some of my Google Alerts.

Be careful not to enter too many terms, or you’ll quickly find that Google will overwhelm you with dozens of alerts a day. The goal is to stay on top of trending news and what people are saying about you, not get so many emails that you just wash your hands of the whole affair.

You will likely find people talking about your industry, at least, if not your business in particular. So talk back. The new Internet is all about the dialogue, so spend an hour or so a day (but really no more!) keeping your name and your business name out there. As you post on blogs or forums, keep in mind that the Internet never forgets. Never post anything public or private that you wouldn’t want a potential client, customer, or business partner to read in a week, a month, or a year from now.

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.