Month: June 2009

The New PR: Five Steps to a Press Release that Really Sells

Posted on by The Writers For Hire, Inc.

I recently attended a webinar featuring David Meerman Scott, author of the WebInkNow blog and World Wide Rave, the latest book on creating effective social media content that works.

During the webinar, an interesting question popped up in the Q&A section: What’s the purpose of a press release – and how can it be used effectively?

Scott suggested taking a new approach: instead of writing press releases that target media, why not target your buyers, the people that really matter to your bottom line? Journalists don’t sit around, waiting for your press release to float across their desks before they decide what they want to write about. If they want to write about you, they’ll search you out.

Reaching out to journalists is important, but it’s not as important as reaching your clients. So here’s where we get into the new PR: instead of using your press release to grab the attention of journalists – who may or may not care about you – why not use your press release to sell? I’ve put together five steps here to target your press releases to potential clients and journalists alike:


1. Put it in the correct form. There’s a right way and a wrong way to write press releases. All of them need a title, a date, a city, and valid contact information (that’s an email address and a phone number).

2. Get rid of the nonsense. Remember, you’re writing for potential buyers, not necessarily “the media.” Use language that your target audience would use to describe your business or product. For example, do you know a whole lot of people who would describe Coca Cola as a “purveyor of artificially sweetened beverages”? Probably not — Coca Cola is a soft drink company. Forget fancy words like “integral solutions.” Speak the language your buyers speak. Once you think you’ve got that down, check out David Meerman Scott’s top 25 gobbledygook press release phrases. If you have any in your press release, delete them – pronto.

3. Optimize your press release. This goes hand-in-hand with No. 2. Make sure your press release is keyword rich, with phrases that can be easily searched on Google (you’ll want keyword-rich content for step No. 5 – read on). To get the best optimization on your press release, try to include at least two or three relevant links to different websites, either in the body or at the bottom of your press release. For example, if you write a press release about an award your company just won, include links to the website of the institution that gave you the award. These links are important to search engines, placing your press release higher in rankings. But only include links to quality, authoritative sites; linking to spammy sites will hurt your search engine ranking.

4. Put your press release to the test. Check out this awesome tool, courtesy of David Meerman Scott: The Gobbledygook Grader. All you need to do is cut and paste your press release, and the Gobbledygook Grader will automatically put your press release to the test, giving it a grade between 1 and 100. It automatically checks for any nonsense, filler phrases you may have missed, as well as making sure your press release is fully optimized.

5. Get it out on the web. Use a trusted press release distribution site, like PRWeb. This is important, because once your press release is on a distribution site, it’s guaranteed to hit Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. That means anyone who types in a keyword – a potential buyer or client – can access your press release. And the information there might just catch their attention, and then they’ll pass is on to a friend … and eventually you could have a viral press release, or a phone ringing off the hook with new clients.

And you know what? Journalists use search engines too – so using a distribution site is sure to get you the largest cross section of attention for your press release.

Questions? I’m always here to help!

Why Website Designers Don’t Need Differentiators

Posted on by The Writers For Hire, Inc.

Or…How to Write Great Website Copy for Your Design Agency

This blog post was spurred by an answer I recently posted on LinkedIn to a website design agency. They were in the process of redesigning their website, and they wanted tips on what to do with their copy. This specific design agency was struggling a little because they kept falling into flowery high-handed words and phrases that ended up translating into…well, nothing.

Anyway, we’ve worked with well over a dozen design agencies over the years, as well as written copy for a few, so I started thinking about what I look for in a design agency, and I came up with a list of five criteria for my perfect website design agency website…

1. First, I always look at the design agency’s own design first. I’m one of those people on the side of less Flash. Although design websites are one of the few types (along with artists and musicians) that can get away with a really Flash-heavy website, I still don’t necessarily recommend it. Flash headers can fun, but if you design the whole website in Flash, it can often get cumbersome for people to navigate quickly to the information they want.

Oh, and please remember that most people do not have their screen resolution at like 1 million X 1 million pixels. I know designers love to have the biggest monitors and work on these ultra high resolutions – they should! That’s their job. But the rest of the world really does work on something less than a big-screen TV. So, please remember to check and see if your website has a horizontal scroll bar.

2. Next, I go to the portfolio. To me, this is the most important piece on a web agency’s website. I really recommend breaking your portfolio down by industry or some other groupings that make sense for you, like “social media sites,” “personal sites,” “B2B sites,” etc. And I suggest using some nice simple thumbnails that I can click on with a clear descriptive link.

3. Next, I’ll search for very, very specific information. So I suggest listing, very specifically, what capabilities you have. Use lots of bullets and choose clear, boring headers like “online shopping carts” rather than something like “actionable purchasing services.” You really don’t have to get all froo-froo with fancy sounding words. Clear and concise will get you farther than creative and murky. Depending on my client, I’ll want to know items such as:

a. Can you design social media sites?

b. What programming and technical capabilities, specifically, do you have? (Will you just hook up a contact form, or will you write custom code, integrate databases, and provide full hosting for a million-subscriber dating site?) If you have a lot of technical nitty-gritty stuff, then break up your services into clear sub pages.

c. What size websites are you used to dealing with? Do you design mostly brochure type websites? Or can you migrate massive amounts of data, efficiently, from a website such as Investopedia or Microsoft?

“”

4. If I discover that you have the capabilities that I’m looking for, I’ll go through a few final criteria. Does the company look and feel approachable? Sometimes designers tend to be image-conscious. Who can blame them—that’s what they do, right? But sometimes they take that to such an extreme that their websites end up losing that personable edge that is able to make a sincere connection with the audience.

Don’t be afraid to put some real pictures of you and your staff up there – I know you may cringe at the thought, but the fact is, people want to connect with other people, not just with really awesome graphics. Along the same lines, testimonials are a great way to show that you’ve connected with your past clients, and that you could do the same for your new ones.

Finally, be yourself. Have a personality in your copy – and don’t make one up. If you’re funny, it’s OK to be humorous. If you’re kind of a geek, that’s OK too. Use some colloquialisms that you use in your unique speech. Let some of your company culture show through. Be who you are, and you’ll attract more clients who are the right match for you.

5. Finally, I’ll go to the contact page. If the website design agency site doesn’t have a real phone number, I’ll go someplace else. It’s very important to me that I know that I have a designer who will answer his or her phone. Sometimes my clients really start pushing on me for stuff, and I need to know that the designer will be around if I need something.

So…interestingly enough, there are only a couple of items on here that have much to do with copy. That’s not an oversight. I’m probably going to get yelled at here, but it’s my opinion that unlike other industries where my first advice is always: make sure you have a value proposition, a USP, a clear benefit that you can’t get somewhere else, etc., website designers don’t actually need this.

OK, so let me defend that statement before I get every copywriter out there up in arms: First, website designers are in a singularly unique position on the web in that they are selling what you are looking at. So, if you’ve already got the client in your “shop,” there isn’t such a pressing need for a USP. The potential clients are already there touching the wares and trying the product – so designers are one step closer than the rest of us to that potential sale.

Second, most website design agencies don’t have a fundamentally different service than most others. If they do, great, then by all means, have it up there as the first sentence. But for the most part, designers don’t, and trying to force them to have one ends up the equivalent of trying force a square peg into a round hole. For the most part, a website designer’s real differentiators come in the form of the items that are listed here:

a) their portfolio
b) their specific capabilities
c) their personality
d) their customer service

Or, I should say, it comes in the form of the unique mixture of these that the client is looking for. If a client can…

a) find a design similar to the one he is looking for,
b) discover that, yes, you have the specific technical qualifications he was looking for,
c) get the feeling that he’ll enjoy working with you, and
d) be assured that you will take care of him, personally,

… then, you are different than the other designers he or she has been considering. Because you (and probably only you), has that unique mixture of these qualities that makes you the right match for the client.

By the way, we’re always looking for great website designers to partner up with. So, if you’d like to be on our radar for some mutual outsourcing, email me at: [email protected].

How Tweaking Your Copy in a Recession Can Help You Keep Customers

Posted on by The Writers For Hire, Inc.

If you’re not already a regular reader of Copyblogger, you should be: Their writers offer a varied approach to copywriting for almost any genre you can think of. I was looking through their archives when I stumbled on a really, really interesting post by Barry A. Densa about attracting and keeping customers in any economy.

Densa points out the still-hard-to-swallow reality of our current economy: if your business specializes in discounted or low-ticket items, you’re probably doing fine. But for everyone else, the economy is really threatening the viability of business. So, how do you find new customers, and keep the ones you have?
Continue reading “How Tweaking Your Copy in a Recession Can Help You Keep Customers”

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