Journalism’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’ Helps You and Your Clients

I was collaborating with a designer friend a couple of weeks back on a Web site for a small, but ambitious, client. The client’s primary interest was presenting his business in the shiniest possible way–no surprise there. But I raised the point with him that although we could build an awesome-looking and functional site for him, there was a lot more to think about than the site’s look and feel.

Content matters, as we all know. My point with this client was that he needed to put more info on his site than his marketing info and his service’s unique selling points or USPs. My primary objective was to convince him that his site must have quality content and in sufficient quantity to attract visitors and push up his search engine rankings. I’m not talking here about the usual SEO kinds of like tweaking tags and other things, although that was part of the discussion.

I could tell he was worried. He didn’t have much content to post other than his USP stuff and he didn’t have the budget to do anything fancy like paying us to produce how-to guides and e-newsletters. I proposed that he at least let us set up a press section for his site and for me to write a few succinct press releases for the news section. I also said I would distribute his releases through a few free release distribution sites. He went for it.

No matter how many times I have this conversation, it surprises me just how little most business people know about public relations and why PR is a primo way to catch the attention of consumers, customers, journalists, bloggers and other people who might be interest in their companies.

Increasingly, ordinary folks (not journalists, in other words) are turning to press releases as a source of information. Press releases can be packed with juicy keywords and attract a lot of attention from humans and arachnids alike. Press releases can be cheap to produce. Journalists especially have to do more with less these days, so they’re more inclined to cut and paste material from press releases for their stories, helping you get the word out and boosting your search engine visibilty even more.

A lot of bang for the next to nothing

Perhaps most important for nearly every client, is that press releases provide a bigger bang for the buck than pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

The average cost for a top keyword can easily exceed $3.50 per click. The costs are actually higher considering that 15% to 30% of all click throughs may be fraudulent.

Based on a daily budget of $50 and an average cost per click of $1.50, a marketer would received 33 click throughs to its Web site.

The cost per view (CPV) of a press releases on the other hand, is much lower and yields far greater results because press releases commonly get hundreds to thousands of views.

CPV is the amount paid to distribute a press release divided by the number of times it’s viewed. If you disseminated a press release for $49 and it received a 1000 views in the first few weeks (which is typical), your CPV would be $.05.

Last, press releases will drive traffic from search engines long after it’s distributed whereas traffic frrom PPC ads stop when the money runs out.

If you need any more convincing about the value of press releases, how does this quote from an article in the famed Columbia Journalism Review strike you?

A dirty little secret of journalism has always been the degree to which some reporters rely on press releases and public relations offices as sources for stories. But recent newsroom cutbacks and increased pressure to churn out online news have given publicity operations even greater prominence in science coverage.

“What is distressing to me is that the number of science reporters and the variety of reporting is going down. What does come out is more and more the direct product of PR shops,” said Charles Petit, a veteran science reporter and media critic, who has run MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Tracker since 2006.

The CJR article’s goes on to say reporters are increasingly lifting entire sections of press releases–word for word– and without attribution to their sources. The article is specific to science journalism but I’m positive that the article’s thrust applies to all areas of journalism because the root causes (cutbacks and requiring journalists to write for a variety of media) are the same.

Increasingly, however, institutional news offices from universities, government research agencies, and corporations are putting out large press packages that provide well-written press releases, graphics, and even video in a form that can be used directly by news outlets that are hungry for stories but lack the resources, time, and/or experience to do more thorough reporting.

What does that mean to you Mr. and Ms. Press Release Writer? It’s all about:

–Making sure what you have to say is truly newsworthy
–Placing your keywords and phrases in the right places to boost the odds of journalists finding your press releases with organic searches
–Crafting well-written, to-the-point press releases that get your news across as quickly as possible
–Using press release distribution services–paid and free–to get your releases in front of journalists
–Creating a newsroom on your site that is journalist friendly.
–Putting your media on YouTube and other high-traffic sites.

Not to worry. I’m going to cover all those things in subsequent posts. Meanwhile, your takeway is that press releases pack a powerful punch: They increase traffic to your and your clients’ sites. Getting your news into the hands of journalists and bloggers not only means wider distribution of news about your company and its products and services but also a level of credibility with readers that you can’t match on your own.

If you don’t do it for yourself, do it for your customers.