How to Draft Powerful Press Releases For Online Publishing
Press releases can help drive targeted traffic to your website almost instantaneously. But you need to know how to use them correctly. Otherwise, it’s just a waste of time and resources. Here is how you can maximize the results of your press releases.
A good press release, when properly drafted, can help attract the right target audience. Here are some tips on how you can create an effective press release.
Tip 1: Use keyword based headlines for your press releases.
Traditional press releases don’t care about keywords. That is because the releases are meant for the print medium. In a newspaper, a news agent would be more concerned about the news angle.
Press releases on the Internet are quite different. Sure, a headline with a great news angle will help attract more eyeballs. But on the Internet, having a news angle just isn’t enough. Your headlines must contain popular keywords that you know your target visitors will use.
For example, let’s say you want to issue a press release about a new piece of treadmill equipment. This new treadmill has got a new motor that is so quiet that you won’t even notice that it’s running. Unfortunately, the new motor has got a name that nobody knows about (yet). It’s called “kazoom motor”.
Since no one has heard about “kazoom motor” yet, it’s unlikely that they will use these words when searching for information on treadmill motors.
Here are two headline options:
(A) New Kazoom Motor – Quietest Motor in the Market
(B) Quietest Treadmill Motor Tested to Run Silently in Home Treadmills
Which headline do you think is a better headline? Option (B) would be the better headline because your press release will be more likely to show up when visitors use keywords such as “quietest treadmill”, “silent treadmills” or “quiet home treadmills”.
Your primary goal is to attract targeted traffic. You achieve that by using keyword based headlines. If your press release doesn’t show up in the search results for those keywords, it doesn’t matter how you write the press release. Nobody is going to read it.
Tip 2: Use a brief but powerful summary for your press release.
This is of utmost importance – never attempt to write a lengthy summary for your press release. On the Internet, most readers just scan the content. If you have a lengthy summary, you end up chasing away the readers.
The best summary has at most two to three short sentences. Here is the difficult part. Within those two to three sentences, you must sum up what your press release is about. One way to do that is to just focus on one issue.
For instance, your press release body may contain three or four important points. Of those points, pick the most important one and use that as your key message. The job of the summary is simple – to get the key message across. If it fails to accomplish that, you may have just lost a potential customer.
Tip 3: Keep your press release body short.
Sometimes, in the course of my work, I encounter clients asking for lengthy press releases. I try my best to give them what they want, but I also try to give them the correct advice.
My advice to them is that having a lengthy press release may not be the best thing to do. Figures from my web stats software tell me that most visitors spend less than a minute on a web page. In other words, 90% of your readers won’t read the entire press release. You are much better off with a short and concise press release. The ideal word count is about five hundred words, which takes about a minute to read. Anything more than that, your press release is too lengthy.
I know that it’s kind of counterintuitive. After all, how can shorter be better? But it’s true. You want your press releases to be effective. That means you are shooting for measurable results. The results have, time and again, proven that a shorter press release works better.
Five hundred words will allow you to explore just three to four ideas within the press release body. So pick your ideas very carefully. To make sure that you convey your messages clearly, you may wish to employ sub-headers. Bold the sub-headers for a clearer presentation style. When visitors scan your press release, the bold texts will be more likely to catch their attention.
Tip 4: Remember those anchor texts!
A press release can get you valuable back links from many well respected authority sites. These are websites that have been around for years, and many of them have high page rank.
Sure, you may be after the initial traffic rush, which will last for about two weeks or so. But what happens after the initial surge of traffic? Well, you can always rely on organic search traffic.
Like articles, press releases also remain online indefinitely. Since you are allowed to choose your desired anchor texts when you issue paid press releases, why not do some off-site SEO in the process?
Choose your anchor texts wisely and reap the SEO benefits that come with the back links. The links will help boost your search engine rankings. When that happens, you will be receiving organic search traffic. Organic search traffic will become your source of long term traffic.
As you can see, drafting a press release for online publishing can be very different from drafting a release for print publishing. That is because the Internet is a completely different medium, so it requires a very different approach. Keep the above tips in mind and profit from your next press release!
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Web Developers Wanted
Location: Chennai (Permanent Resident of Chennai Preferred)
Having secured a wealth of exciting new clients in the past few weeks and months, we’re continually looking to expand our development teams therefore have a need for experienced web developers.
You must have excellent working experience of XHTML, CSS and Javascript as well developing dynamic database driven websites using languages such as PHP and MySQL.
Our ideal candidate is someone who:
- has spent time developing their own personal sites or contributed to open-source projects.
- has a genuine passion for the web and the technologies around it
- is highly motivated, a quick learner and have an attention for detail
- can work well as part of a team
- is always striving to do things better
Salary dependent on experience:
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By Anitha
15 customer service mistakes to avoid
Here is a list of 15 customer service mistakes to avoid. The list includes inattentiveness, automated call answering, multiple transfers, and lying. It’s a useful checklist for an audit of your organization’s customer service reality.
- Inattentiveness.
- Automated Call Answering.
- Multiple Transfers.
- Failing to Listen.
- Losing Control.
- Over-promising/Under-delivering.
- Being Unreachable.
- Lying.
- Excessive Gum Chewing.
- Lack of Communication.
- Reprimanding Employees in Customer Presence.
- Untrained Staff.
- Failing to Talk to Customers.
- Mispronunciation of Names.
- Failing to Acknowledge Repeat Customers.
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By Anitha
What is Google Chrome OS? Video :)
By Anitha
5 Powerful tips to get more exposure!
John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing provides five powerful tips about how to get more love from bloggers, tweeters, and fans. My experience is that most companies seeking this love don’t do any of these five things. Ergo, if you did them, you’d be amazed at how well they work.
Big and Beautiful Website Footer Designs
To get the attention of visitors some sites take their footers to the extreme and make them so big you can’t help but give them a second look. As I recall, website footers use to never really be this interesting.
Here we present 24 big and beautiful website footer designs. Some of these are the biggest footers you have probably ever seen and some are just a bit larger than average. Having larger footers allows you to take more information and helpful resources that would normally clutter a websites are and displays it in a clean and interesting manner. Whoever says big is not beautiful obviously got it wrong.
Improving website performance with Page Speed
It is often possible to make the contents of a web page take fewer bytes without changing the appearance or function of the page. Reducing the number of bytes a client has to download makes the page load faster. In this tutorial we look at three ways to reduce the size of web content. We also explain how to use Page Speed to help make resources smaller.
Page Speed is a Firefox extension that evaluates web pages and gives suggestions on how to improve them. Instructions for installing Page Speed are available athttp://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/download.html. I chose Page Speed because I am familiar with it. YSlow is a similar tool which also gives excellent advice to make your web pages faster.
Compress images
Image files are often created with extra information embedded in the file. For example, JPEG files written by many image programs include the name of the program that wrote them. PNG images can often be made smaller by changing the way the image is encoded. These transformations are lossless. That is, the compressed image looks identical to the uncompressed image, but uses fewer bytes.
The Page Speed rule “Optimize images” tries to losslessly compress all images in a page. When it succeeds, it shows the compressed versions. To use the minimized version of an image, in the Page Speed panel, click the link to the compressed version, save it, and use it instead of the original image
Minify JavaScript
Removing comments and white space from large JavaScript files can make them substantially smaller, without changing their functionality.
The Page Speed rule “Minify JavaScript” runs all JavaScript on a page through a JavaScript minimizer. If this generates a smaller file, Page Speed displays a link to that file. To use the minified JavaScript, click the link, save the minified file, and change your HTML to refer to the minified file.
You will want to keep the original JavaScript file around in case you want to change it in the future. Minified JavaScript is much harder to read and modify. If you modify your JavaScript frequently, a command line JavaScript minimizer that runs as part of your build process might be more convenient than Page Speed. JSMIN, available at http://www.crockford.com/javascript/jsmin.html, is such a program.
Remove unused CSS
CSS files contain rules that apply style attributes to elements in a web page. If a rule does not apply to any element in a page, removing it will result in fewer bytes being sent to the client, with no change in the appearance of the web page. However, because external style sheets may be included by more than one page, you must be careful to only remove rules that no page uses. The Page Speed rule “Remove unused CSS” can tell you which rules are not used in a given page. By running Page Speed on all pages that use an external stylesheet file, you can determine which rules are not used and remove them.
More ways to make your pages faster
The three suggestions above are a small sample of the issues Page Speed can detect and recommend fixes for. Page Speed and YSlow both rank their suggestions, so that you know which changes to your page are most likely to have a large impact. Running these tools on your page periodically and fixing issues they find will give your users faster pages.
To learn more, see Page Speed – Minimize payload size,
Thank you Google!
‘Go’ A New Programming Language
Have you heard about Go?
Google released a new, experimental systems programming language today. It is open source and Google is excited about sharing it with the development community.
Go is a great language for systems programming with support for multi-processing, a fresh and lightweight take on object-oriented design, plus some cool features like true closures and reflection.
For more information, check out the Google Open Source blog.
Handle criticism in the office… How to?
How to handle criticism in the office:
Disparaging remarks from a workplace superior can feel like a sucker punch to the ego and how you handle the criticism can determine if a pink slip or a promotion is in your future. First, the basics: chair throwing, name calling and boss wedgies are all total no-no’s (unless you work for the WWE). Rather than throw a tantrum, career consultants recommend avoiding the common knee-jerk reaction of defending yourself and instead fully process the criticism being tossed your way.
So, how can you reach a happy medium between punching the HR in the face and staying tight-lipped? Here’s a quick step-by-step:
- Take in the information and assess the facts.
- Learn more by asking questions.
- Offer a thanks for the feedback.
- Tell your boss how you will resolve the issues raised.
- Schedule a follow-up meeting.
If you want to know more, including how to handle the dreaded performance review, cruise on over to the full article.
Is Color Next Limited Resource?
As a designer, it is important to be aware of the trending colors, and how they are being applied in products and work produced today. What really isn’t being discussed by the design world at large though are the limitations being set on color. Color is as free for us to use as the air we breathe… or is it?
The color palette is shrinking. It could affect the foundation of design for everything from websites to fashion. The fate of businesses and billions of dollars ride on choosing the right one. We’ll take a look at how color is becoming the next limited resource.
Limit: One Spectrum per World
Color is limited by what our eyes can see. It’s the visible light spectrum (wavelengths of light) our eyes can detect.
On one end of the spectrum lies red (longer wavelengths) and on the other blue (shorter wavelengths); everything in between those are the colors we find in nature.
The visible spectrum.
Although this spectrum we have available is limited, we still do have a lot of choice when it comes to color. We attempt to reproduce this spectrum in printing, monitors, paintings, and so on. The difference in the way a monitor displays color versus a printed brochure is a world away and more technical than most people would want to worry themselves with.
One company is responsible for connecting this vast chasm of color. Pantone.
Color by Any Other Name Would Be Pantone
If there is anyone that could say they own color, it would be Pantone. They have a monopoly on it in the truest sense. Every color you have ever seen used has been indexed and named by Pantone.
What Pantone has done is not a bad thing; in fact, it has done the world (especially designers) a favor. They have taken color from a chaotic Tower of Babel scenario with everyone talking about colors in very different ways and brought us all on to the same page. Literally. Their paint chip and fabric swatch books sit on the desks of designers everywhere.
Pantone’s system allows for a design agency in Chicago to make sure the color they specified for a brand is printed accurately in a magazine by publication in Europe, and looks the same in television spot being created by a firm in Los Angeles.
As J.C. Herz of Wired put it, “If color is a language, Pantone is the Oxford English Dictionary.”
The Battle for Color
For companies, color has become one of the most important identifiers. More often than not, colors are how you recognize and associate products to that brand.
Marketing research has found 80% of visual information is related to color. It’s not just a green, a red, a blue, or a magenta. It’s “Starbucks Green”, “Coke Red”, “Gap Blue”, and “T-Mobile Magenta.”
Separating colors from their brands is close to impossible.
The inseparable color and brand association (above) have become a legal reality. Brands are putting a stake in the spectrum and claiming that color for their own use. An infographic of what this looks like was in Wired magazine in June of 2003.
Wired infographic showing the “color location” of the world’s biggest brands.
T-Mobile owns the color Magenta
The most interesting and polemic story of a brand buying and claiming a color space is with T-Mobile (Deutsche Telekom). They have trademarked the color magenta.
Yes, T-Mobile owns the rights to magenta.
They have been enforcing this over the years suing companies like a book-on-demand publisher, and most recently, in the blog Engadget Mobile.
To clarify, companies like T-mobile can only trademark in the industry sector that they are registered in. So T-Mobile has trademarked the color magenta in telecommunications. The blog COLOURLovers says that this means, “you just can’t use the color magenta around anything to do with phones, digital media… oh andjust about anything on the internet.”
What’s in a name?
In addition to a trademarked color, some companies are also trademarking the actual name of the color.
The insulation company Owens–Corning, known for their The Pink Panther commercials, have registered the term “PINK” (in capital letters only) in reference to its insulation.
UPS is one of the best-known companies of the world, shipping us our goods ordered from across the world to our doorstep. They trademarked the slogan “What canBrown do for you?”
The Europe-based mobile network operator and internet service provider, Orange, uses the color Orange both in its logo and as the trademarked company name.
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