Do-It-Yourself PR: Submit the Press Release

So you have the timely, relevant, well-written, factual press release written about your newsworthy business announcement.

Now what?

If you’re a natural networking pro, you already have established relationships with editors, journalists, bloggers, and other influencers to whom you can send a personalized note with the attached press release.

But if you’re like the rest of us overworked, understaffed and overwhelmed small business owners, you don’t.

First things first: decide if your news is of interest to a primarily local audience, or if it might be relevant to a broad, national conversation.

Unless you have a celebrity endorsement to announce, you’ve added a national expert to your board of directors, or your business has just made a breakthrough into a trend or channel that’s part of a national or industry conversation, you probably just want to reach those media in your city, state or region.

Quick Internet searches will turn up the websites for your local newspapers and media outlets. Nearly every single newspaper, magazine, TV or radio station you want to contact will have a link on their site with instructions for how to send news releases. So just follow the instructions. Really. It won’t take more than a few hours for the computer-user who’s comfortable with the Internet.

If your news has a wider reach, you want to enlist the assistance of a newswire to distribute your announcement.

Internet-based newswires usually have a per-submission fee, and the size of the fee depends on a number of factors:

• which wires will be reached


• how targeted it will be (industry-specific, for example)


• whether you add on various other services such as search engine optimization of your news release, embedded links back to your website, video, photos, etc.

The two most reputable and effective online fee-for-submission services that have been recommended to me are PRWeb.com and PRNewswire.com.

There are some free press release submission sites that will blast your post all across the Internet, too. Posting your news release via these portals will get your name “out there,” but the likelihood of getting any relevant traffic is slim. Personally, I believe you can even damage your reputation using these kinds of services because you place your content (and business and brand) alongside a teeming cesspool of poorly written, amateurish crap. To see what I mean, just visit any of the following free press release sites and look at what’s posted.

www.free-press-release.com
www.1888pressrelease.com
www.24-7pressrelease.com
www.express-press-release.net
www.prbuzz.com

For a more extensive list, along with an experienced PR gal’s blunt perspective about what you can and cannot expect from free services, visit Naked PR’s “Big List of Free Press Release Distribution Sites.”

She also has a fantastic post called “Effective Free Press Release Distribution in 5 Easy Steps” that has basically the same information that I just wrote above, with some added detail and curse words.

Regardless of how you proceed with distributing your press release, don’t overlook the value of having a well-written, relevant news release in the first place! Even paying a $350 submission fee to get your announcement to The Associated Press wire isn’t going to do you any good if the material isn’t newsworthy, timely or fact-based.