The Secret to Getting People to Your Web Site: Publicity

by Daniel Janal

I'll let you in on a secret. If you want people to visit your Web site, don't invest all your time in search engines. Spend a few hours writing a press release instead.

• Power of the press: The impact of a well-done press release can exceed a banner ad any day—and you can do it yourself. Find out how in my four-part series.
• What is a press release? It's a tool to convince reporters to tell their readers about you.
• When to write a press release: When you have news, and only when you have news. So what is news, you say. Check out my list of what makes news.
• The battle plan: What are you trying to accomplish for your company and what do you want readers to do when they've finished reading? Don't send 'em packing; send them to a specific page on your Web site.
• Next time: Before we learn how to write a professional press release, let's do a little homework.

All major newspapers write articles about new Web sites, redesigned Web sites, and Web sites offering new content or great promotions. We're talking about USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, as well as hundreds of local newspapers and thousands of trade publications.

The combined reach of all of those publications is in the hundreds of millions. Any site that is reviewed in a publication carries its implied endorsement. You can't buy that kind of credibility with an advertisement or a search engine placement. That's why you simply can't afford to overlook this marketing tactic.

I'm willing to say that the marketing impact of a press release could outdistance that of a search engine or a banner ad.

You could pay thousands of dollars to a public relations agency to write and distribute a press release. Or, you could try to do it yourself. As a former daily newspaper reporter, PR executive, and writer of PR books, I'm going to show you how to do it yourself in a four-part series of articles in eFuse.com. The articles are:

1. What is a press release and why you should write one.
2. How to write a press release that looks and sounds professional.
3. How to distribute the press release to the media and your biggest supporters.
4. How to find out where your article has been printed.

Ready? Let's go.

What is a press release?

A press release is a two-page document (make that 500 words, no cheating with smaller typeface or narrow margins!) that tells reporters what is new at your company that their readers would want to know about. In the traditional world, the press release is printed on paper and mailed, faxed, or given to reporters at a press conference or other face-to-face meetings. In the cyberworld, press releases are e-mailed to reporters and posted to company Web sites as well.

A press release has its own look and feel that must be followed, or reporters will know the company that sent it just doesn't have a clue about professional standards. Since reporters get far more releases than they can ever print, these unprofessional releases will be tossed first—regardless of content. We'll talk more about the style elements in the second installment of this series.

When should you write a press release?

When you have news, and only when you have news.

Some companies make the mistake of writing a press release every week—whether there is any compelling news or not. This is a problem because you will waste your time, energy, and money on a marketing tool that will wind up in a reporter's wastebasket.

Reporters only print what they think will interest their readers. They do not have the slightest interest in writing an article to make you happy or make you look good to your boss and your shareholders. In fact, one of my good friends, Peggy Watt, an editor at PC World, showed me a pitch letter a PR person sent with a press release saying, "please print this press release, or I'll get fired." Watt didn't print the press release. We don't know what happened to the poor PR person.

What is news?

Many things, including:

• Product: A new product or service or an upgrade to an existing product
• Corporate: Strategic alliances, venture funding, mergers, acquisitions
• Personnel: Hiring and dismissals on an executive level (for a trade publication), lower levels as well for a local newspaper
• Milestones: 1 millionth customer or 1,000^th sale
• Financial: Earnings, projections, actual figures
• News: Response to current headlines, trends
• Human interest: Case studies, "best practices" (proven solutions)
• Contests and promotions: Announcement of the event and names of winners
• Seasonal: News tied into a seasonal event, such as Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, or graduation and others
• Web site: A new Web site, a redesigned Web site, new content, or a new promotion

You can see the press wants to cover many topics. You only need to find news at your company, make it interesting, and tell reporters.

For example, a few weeks ago, eFuse.com editor Daniel Will-Harris wrote a letter to his subscribers announcing the company would create a time capsule in honor of the millennium and fill it with subscribers' Web sites. It was a cool idea and he decided it should get the attention of the press, as well as his newsletter readers.

He had a clear goal in mind: increase the number of visitors to the eFuse.com site and grow the number of subscribers.

This was a good subject for a press release because of its timeliness and uniqueness. He tied the time capsule into the millennium madness that many newspapers were writing about and while the results weren't the cover of Time Magazine (an expectation a lot of people mistakenly have), it did serve to help spread awareness of eFuse.com.

Creating your battle plan

As you sit down to write the release, you must think about what you are trying to accomplish for your company. The results can be as varied as increasing traffic to your Web site, selling products at your Web site, or increasing brand-name recognition for your company.

Next, you need to create the back end to the press release campaign. That is, what message do you want the readers of the press release to see so you can reach your goal? In other words, you want your readers to take some form of action. If you want them to buy a product, you need to create copy that talks about the product's features and benefits, as well as a strong offer to convince them to buy the product. If you want them to enter a contest, you need to have a page that talks about how to enter and the mechanism that tracks entries.

I can't stress this point enough. Writing a press release and sending it out without having a plan is a waste of money. Since the Web is so much more versatile than any other media, you must decide where to send readers and tell them what you want them to do.

More often than not, you don't want them to go to the front page. That's because you don't want to confuse them with a dozen links off of the home page. They might get distracted by all of the messages there and leave the site without registering or buying. If that happens, you've lost.

Instead of sending readers to the home page, send them to a page created solely for this promotion. For example, if I were writing a press release about a contest that I wanted people to enter, I would send readers directly to a page that talks about the contest.

The same is true if I were doing any other target marketing, such as sending people directly to the recruiting page to apply for a job, to a specific new product page to buy the latest gizmo, or to the financial relations section if I had sent out a press release on an earnings report.

When would I send people to the home page? Whenever I wanted people to get a good overview of the company, its products, and its people (if I were promoting a professional services firm such as lawyers or accountants). So if I issue a press release with my Top 10 Predictions for E-Commerce, I want people to go to the front page so they could learn more about my services as a speaker, consultant, and writer. I'd let them decide which avenue to pursue.

Complete URLs

To make this tactic work, you must put the complete URL in the press release. For example, if I want to increase the number of subscribers to my free e-marketing newsletters, I would include the link: http://www.janal.com/articles.html . If I want to direct meeting planners to my credentials as a speaker in the hopes they would hire me for their next convention, I would use http://www.janal.com/speaking.html. That way, the audience goes directly to information that meets its needs—and mine.

There's also a trick that sometimes works to help you track visitors. Web browsers ignore question marks in URLs, but your tracking software may not. So if you included a URL that said http://www.efuse.com?time , your Web tracking software might be able to track that separately from http://www.efuse.com even though it's the same place. Some Web tracking software will do this, some won't, so check and see if yours does. If it does, it's a fast, easy way to let you track results without having to make a separate page.

You might be wondering how people can remember those long URLs. They don't have to if the media outlet is online. Then link is embedded into the on-line text. All they have to do is click on the link to be transported to the correct page. It is actually very simple. You've probably done this a hundred times without realizing it whenever you click on banner ads that use this tactic. There's no reason we can't use the same device in publicity. Many print ads have longer URLS now, as well. So people are beginning to accept these longer URLs. It is hopeful that reporters writing about your site will use the correct, longer form URL to draw people directly to the correct page.

That said—the shorter and simpler you can make your promotional url, the better. And if it's longer, make sure it's logical, and easy to type. It's too easy to make mistakes on URLs that contain a numbers, so try to stick to text that people can easily remember and type.

One word of warning—sometimes long links get broken up by e-mail software and then do not work correctly because only part of them is translated into a working link. So if you have a long link, test it with several e-mail programs first, or see if there's any way to make it shorter.

Tip: When including a URL in any kind of e-mail, make sure to format it with http:// first. While some e-mail software will turn plain www.eFuse.com into a link, others won't. But almost all e-mail software turns anything starting with http:// into a link, so make sure to include it.

So, let's do a little homework

Step 1. What's news at your company? Look at the list in this article.

Step 2. Where do you want the press release to send readers on your Web site? Create a URL address.

Step 3. What materials do you need to write or create to make this happen? Create the list of deliverables. You can write them later.

In the next installment of this series, you'll learn how to write and design a professional press release.

About the author

Speaker, author, and consultant Daniel Janal's new book is called Dan Janal's Guide to Marketing on the Internet: Getting People to Visit, Buy and Become Customers for Life. He also has written How to Publicize High Tech Products and Services and Publicity Builder (a book with software). He can be reached at dan@janal.com or www.janal.com.

Illustrations: www smoke signals by Jonathan Evans, Artville