Let’s say you’re the owner of a landscaping business. Or you’re a florist. Or the owner of a cleaning service. And you have dozens of landscapers, florists and cleaning services competing for customers. You think there’s nothing exceptional about you. After all, all landscapers landscape. All florists sell flowers. All cleaning services clean.
There’s nothing special about me, you think, certainly nothing a reporter would find interesting.
And that’s where you’re wrong. Because all you need is to think just a bit differently than your competitors.
For example, let’s say it’s summer. That means flea and tick season. As a professional housecleaner, you know how to keep fleas at bay indoors, but do your customers?
So you could write a release that goes something like this:
Have fleas jumped from Fluffy or Fido and infested your carpet? There’s a simple way to keep them at bay, says Jane Doe, owner of Jane’s Super Clean, a Your Town housecleaning service: vacuum regularly.
“Your first line of attack is to use a flea bomb. Then you should vacuum all the rugs and carpets in your house several times a week,” Doe said.
Doe’s company has been offering cleaning services since 1999 and knows a thing or 10 about keeping homes clean and pest free during the summer.
Then add a list of 10 summer (or anytime) cleaning tips to the release. Finally, if you’re offering a special flea-ridding service (you’ll come in and vaccum a homeowner’s house or apartment three times a week at a reduce/volume rate), be sure to mention it in the release.
By writing a release that gives a helpful hint, strategy or fact that is of use to an editor’s or reporter’s readers, you’ve just made your business newsworthy.
Writing Press Releases for the Web
June 13, 2007
Joan Stewart of The Publicity Hound writes at her blog that the traditional journalism style of writing a press release — inverted pryramid (most important/newsworthy aspect of the release first), the who what, where, when and how, etc. — doesn’t work for the Internet.
In fact, Stewart states that there’s a new way to write and distribute press releases — methods that will get journalists AND “the people who are in a position to buy your products and services” to read your release.
Publicity is great no matter how you get it. Leaving out the middle man — in this case, a journalist — to let your potential customers know of your products is a savvy way to go.
Stewart is offering a new, free tutorial e-course on writing press releases. I’ve signed up for it and today’s lesson — the first in a series of 89 — has me wishing tomorrow were already here.
