You know that your new venture is amazing, and that when customers see it they are going to love it. You have a product or service that speaks for itself, or you have an idea that people will not fail to get on board with when they know about it – it is just the ‘getting people to know about it’ part that is troubling you. A press release may seem like a fairly old school way to go about getting your news out there, but actually, in the modern Web 2.0 age, it is more important than ever. Here we look at why:
Bloggers Are the News Bringers of Our Age
One of the original reasons press releases were invented is that they allowed journalists to find things that companies were doing, and, if they were interesting, maybe cover them in their columns. In the digital age, journalists have essentially been replaced by bloggers. There are blogs to fill every conceivable niche, which deal with all kinds of matters. New products, services, and businesses have plenty of room for coverage on blogs. If you launch a new app you developed, then there are lots of blogs about apps who may want to talk about it. If you launch a new restaurant in your city, bloggers writing about the local scene may be very interested in covering it. With press releases, you can give them the info they need to do that.
Positioning
You really want people to be able to discover the news you have put in your press release about the new promotion your business is running, or the new service that you are making available to people in your city. You have engaged a professional press release writing company and got some great copy, but what do you do next to get it seen by the bloggers and journalists you have in mind? If you can isolate specific blogs or publications you’d like to target, you can send them your press release as an email, but if you want it to be stored in a repository where bloggers can simply find it when they are looking for a topic to cover, you can consider a network like Submit Press Release 123, which many journalists and bloggers visit and will be able to find your news on.
Gratitude
Once people start writing about your business, it is a good move to express some gratitude to the writers and websites talking about you. This can be done in comments. It also allows you to engage with the people reading about you on these sites and begin to turn them into proper customers.
Press releases in the past were something sent to newspapers, but in the modern, self publishing age, there is even more potential. Lots of people write about subjects and are read by exactly the kind of people you want to attract, so make sure they know to write about your enterprise with a well-written, well-placed press release!
Image credit: Flickr/Loco Steve