Press releases can be a free way to promote your business and to get press coverage.  But that’s not the only reason to write a press release. Actually, the old practice of writing a press release and sending it out to EVERY reporter in America is quickly becoming the LEAST important reason to write one.  Currently, most reporter’s public E-mail addresses could be better referred to as ‘”spam ovens”- They direct the thousands of unsolicited press releases they get daily and search their E-mail box when they are looking for a release about a story they are writing anyway.  So unless your release is particularly topical, don’t count on it ever being read.

So, if you aren’t writing a press release for the media, who are you writing it for?  You should be writing it for the “public” in public relations.  Increasingly, press releases you release online are picked up by Google, which aggregates the information and lets you talk about you- just do it in a reporter’s “factual” manner, rather than a salesman’s elevator pitch.

A website with some great sample press releases to emulate is:
PR Newswire’s PR Toolkit

You will soon notice in reading the good and the great press releases that great press releases almost never feature the story of the business, they feature the story that the business just happens to play a part in.  So NEVER make the story only about your business.  Talk more about how your business is changing your community, region, country or world, and less about how great your customer service is.  For example: A good press release would talk about how your self-storage company is organizing a coat drive for underprivileged people, and spend less time (none is fine) about why people might want to store their coat at the self storage facility instead.

There is an established format for writing a press release, and a great tool for that is John Jantch’s  Instant Press Release writer. It will get all the formatting and structure down for you automatically.

Now that you have your press release written, we need folks who are looking for it to receive it.

If you think your press release is very topical and has broad importance, you might still want to release a mass press release to the media- PRWeb.com is a good premium solution for doing so.  But I would only suggest doing so if you think that at least 50 reporters around the country are likely to search their in-boxes for your exact topic.  Ergo, I don’t suggest this for economic reasons for most press releases.

In general, you are best off finding the local reporters who cover a beat similar to yours and Mailing (yes, no E- I mean postal) them an individualized pitch letter on why your news is “news-worthy.”  Try to make it as relevant to the reporter as possible, and a useful best practice is to ghost write the story for them.  Make sure your letter has a link to the electronic version of your press release, and try to E-mail them the letter a day after you Postal mail the story pitch.  In your pitch, do remember that most journalists don’t care one bit about your business, so do NOT make that your primary pitch.

As for releasing your press release to Google:  PRLog is a free site worth using, though there are many other free and nearly free sites that Google scans.

More great information:
Read David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Public Relations E-Book

Randy Aimone is a Duct Tape Marketing Coach in the Hudson Valley region of New York, You can visit his web site at www.AimOneMarketing.com, E-mail him at Randy@AimOneMarketing.com, and follow his tweets @RandyAimone. His marketing specialization includes technology firms and businesses with fewer than 10 employees.