Why You Should Be Using Press Releases

Why Are Press Releases on the Rise? A press release is a short, compelling news story written by public relations professionals and sent to targeted members of the media. The goal of a press release is to pique the interest of a journalist or publication so that they publish the press release on their news outlet to garner the attention of readers who hopefully convert to consumers for our case.

Due to the digital age we are in, consumers want to get their information instantly and this puts pressure on media companies to try and output as much material as possible. This often causes them to heavily rely on the use of press releases in order to create their stories. So press releases if properly completed from beginning to end, and pushed to the right outlets via a media company that has access to a Tier-1 network can be viewed by potentially millions of people. This is the ultimate mutual win-win.

Although many in the industry will avoid advocating the connection press releases to SEO rank, or outright deny it, press releases are an extremely powerful component to increase a person, business or organization’s rank on all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing). The higher your rank, the more often the search engine is likely to return your website and information as the answer to a query or search. The more often your site is returned as a recommended answer to the search, the more likely someone will click on your site and be exposed to your business. More clicks to your site this way (organically), thereby increase your rank even more.

A press release should be considered a very powerful public relations and branding tactic, not a complete strategy. Press releases can do some real heavy lifting in getting you indexed permanently all over the internet, and that is the bottom line goal of every SEO or public relations firm, and should be your grand obsession.

Over the process of a year, if a company, especially a start-up contracts the right media company to syndicate three to four press releases, the total number of news networks and professional blog mentions can easily exceed a thousand to several thousand places of authority where your business is mentioned. This is actually a conservative estimate given all the results that we actually get to see. That gets Googles attention, and don’t let anyone tell you differently. The proof is in the syndication, SEO rank and backlink clicks.

Also, don’t turn your nose up to blogs. People are still slow to understand how important they already are, and what their rapid evolution ultimately is going to usher in. They are the future of your newspapers and magazines! According to Pew Research, 81% of Americans get some or all of their news though websites, apps, social platforms and blogs.

When is the last time you saw someone holding up an old-school newspaper catching up on the latest scores or current events? According to The Guardian, also a news blog, The Huffington Post is the most read blog in the country with – and pay attention to this number – 110 MILLION unique visitors per month (Last updated by Alexa | May 1, 2017). Blogs are the news.

Consider the Press Release One of Your New Best Friends One of the press release’s strongest assets is the ability to get people to rally around what the story is and what your organization is trying to tell the world. If you want to get someone’s opinion on what’s being told externally, give them a press release to review.

If your company is closer to the startup stage than where Apple is today, issuing a press release through a top digital branding service like MaxGroup Media is a great way to go to get SEO presence and to show your company’s momentum. There are a lot of press releases that are put out that are of marginal news value to be clear, but they still serve a significant purpose of showing that a company has a lot of activity going on, is passionate about what they do and are committed to a steady drumbeat toward their objectives.

Now I shall intentionally repeat myself: A press release should be considered a very powerful public relations tactic, not a complete strategy. You want to get word out there and get visitors to your site so they become aware of you and do business with you. Done brilliantly, by a company that knows how, that takes a complete game plan including an updated mobile-optimized website with great content and keywords in all the right places. A blog on your site is worth gold to Google if you fill it with 2 to 4 entries a month of authentic, original and compelling content.

Email capture, newsletters sent monthly or weekly, providing real value before you ask someone to buy what you’re selling is how business is done today. Getting you properly listed and staying updated on the top 40 to 50 citation sites (like Yelp, Manta, Google Maps, etc.) is mandatory. Resources like EBooks, whitepapers, guides and other ‘freebies’ are things that an internet ferret like me loves!

Press releases fill a void nothing else can because they are absorbed by the internet as news – timely, relevant, important, informative, valuable, credible, and impacting people’s lives – NEWS! And, press releases are indexed (stored on the web) forever.

What is interesting and compelling news about your brand, stored on thousands of media outlets including ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CW, and Google News itself in perpetuity over the many years I assume you intend to be in business WORTH to you? If you aren’t getting this by now, I can already make a prediction about the future of your business.

What do all of these actionable items have in common? They all build authority, credibility and trust for you and your brand. And that is what gets people to want to do business with you. The old tactics of the art of the deal where you ‘get people to buy from you,’ are simply not going to work with today’s more educated, savvy and relationship oriented masses.

You better be the real deal, and better be ready to be authentic and open because today’s consumers, whether simple retail or more complex B2B transactions demand that you establish a relationship with your audience, much the way I am doing my best with you in this post.

Regardless of whether or not you do business with my company, I have delivered genuine value to you by educating you and lifting your knowledge base up. I have attempted to demonstrate that I am willing to be open and vulnerable with you. People today don’t want to be your customer anymore; they want to be in partnership with businesses that share their values and that they feel good about. Think ‘social consciousness,’ because yes, that is a ‘thing’.

Why Can’t I Just Use a ‘Free’ Press Release Company? You can. Go right ahead and do that. But as the saying goes, “you get what you pay for”. (Shameless Plug: Read Mark Skovron’s article called, “Why Free Press Releases Are So Damned Expensive”.)

Free press release companies do not have the network that MaxGroup Media pays hefty fees to be a part of. Instead, they have built an excel spread sheet that has a couple hundred email addresses that read as: editor@ABC.com. Such emails, all professional editors will tell you, are automatically put into a spam folder by most news networks.

The company handling your press release should be able to send your release to the journalist or editor by name because of established relationships, networks and credibility with them. The company should use a ‘Tier-1 newswire,’ (free press services do not), should not charge for extra words, or URL backlinks, images, photos, or video as “Free Press Release’ services do. Also, I hope you have a gift for writing and are very familiar with all of the guidelines of the Associated Press for press releases so that it even makes it to a journalist’s desk if you are going to use free press release services, or even 99% of paid services.

You can order a copy of the Associated Press Stylebook, spiral bound edition that is best for reading and annotating and weighs in at 600+ pages. The ISBN number is 978-0-917-36061-9 and is a bargain at only $20.95 because it is a non-profit item. The Stylebook of the Associated Press is the gold standard for news writing.

With The AP Stylebook in hand, you can learn how to write and edit with the clarity and professionalism for which they are famous. Fully revised and updated, this new edition contains more than 3,000 A to Z entries—including more than 200 new ones—detailing the AP’s rules on grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, abbreviation, and word and numeral usage.

You’ll need to be up to speed on all of it, or your ‘free press release’ will only be published on spam sites which will make Google penalize your site faster than you can say “what did I do wrong?”

You Should Sense By Now I Am Going to Promote MaxGroup Media Press releases aren’t free at MaxGroup Media, and they aren’t the only thing we do. But we do them flawlessly written by a content writer with a Master’s degree who will take your information and turn it into a compelling news story worthy of the most well-known outlets picking it up and publishing it. We will build in the right amount of SEO keywords, photos, backlinks (to your site) and how to contact you.

MaxGroup Media will guarantee that you will be published at a minimum by ABC, CBS, NBC, CW and Google News as well. We’ll supply you with a report that will list every major news outlet that published you and a link to your actual story (press release) on their outlet.

Additionally, if we created your website, we will publish, and if we didn’t create your site, we will provide you with the code, for the famous “As Seen On,…logos,” and link each of them to the appropriate news outlet which we will host permanently. What would THAT be worth to your business? Talk about bragging rights! Impress your customers and employees by printing one in color, and put that framed copy in your office.

How can we possibly guarantee that? Our distribution is significantly larger than our competitors, and we are able to publish you at 25% of the cost of the competition! We invested heavily to make certain that our distribution network is the biggest, and that the most influential news sites were included. We established the highest form of relationships with the most extensive network of 500+ news outlets and 100,000+ bloggers so that we can do the job better than anyone in our marketing space.

“Relationships and access to journalists via the media company’s network will always be where a press release succeeds or fails. It’s this relationship and expertise that makes a great publicist or media company invaluable. It’s also where free press release websites will always fail.”

-Mark Skovron, Ph.D. | MaxGroup Media, Editor in Chief

You can obtain more information on our press release service by going to our Press Release FAQ on our website. You are welcomed to contact us at any time by emailing: Support@MaxGroupMedia.com or by calling us at: (888) 670-7771.

Let us prove to you that we are the company that you will want to be in partnership with. And thank you for reading our post!

“MaxGroup Media Press Releases Generate Buzz Online…Forever!”