Writing a press release is an art form and that is why many PR professionals charge over $100 and often over $500 to write a 300 – 500 word press release. Here, we will go through, step by step, what PR experts such as myself do, to help get the most publicity for our clients.
As far as basic formatting is concerned, one should make sure that they start their press release in this format, "City, State, Date – Start Press Release Here". Three pound signs (###) should be included at the end of the press release to mark that the press release is over. The length of the press release is also a major factor that should be carefully considered. In this case, shorter is not always worse and a concise 200 word press release that includes all of the required information would be sufficient and in often cases, more likely to be picked up than a long press release that is stretched out and restates the same information in different words over and over again. If there is a major newsbreak with the company, then the press release should be somewhere between 300-500 words long. You do not want to write a press release that reaches or exceeds 700 or more words because at this rate you are going to far in depth and while that is good for informational articles, a writer for a major news company gets hundreds of press releases daily and if you are lucky enough for a major media company to even look at your press release and consider it for an article, you do not want to go on and on and stretch the press release out as much as possible because that greatly reduces the chances of that writer choosing your press release for a story.
As far as the content of the press release is concerned, you should have 5-7 paragraphs in your press release. The first paragraph should be short and include basic information such as the "who, what, where, when, and why". The last paragraph should contain information about the company, similar to what would be written on an "About Us" web page. For the bulk of the content of the press release, you should include at least one or two quotes and two to four paragraphs about the newsworthy event and include all information you would want presented in an article about your press release.
In future articles, we will write, post, and analyze good press releases to give you an example of what a quality press release looks like.
Falco Pangkey is the owner and writer of http://www.Freepublicity.eu. He writes about getting online and offline Free Publicity. To view more work by Falco, you can visit Public relations articles |
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