Catching readers-with-online-content

When you want information on something -- anything -- what do you do? Start scrolling through a news website to look for it,
or type a search into Google? If you chose the second option, you’re like most people. It’s common sense, and everyone’s getting
better at it.
But, as a marketer or PR pro, how are you going to get people to read your news? Media pitching still has its place, but there’s
another way.
Get online and put your news right in front of people – and help them find it and share it. You don’t need to be a programmer or IT
expert. You have access to all the resources you need.
You can take a piece of news and turn it into a content series that gets people interested, boosts your search rankings, and gives
your story a life of its own through social media.
Vocus teamed up with Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, to bring you this three-stage guide on how to do it.
Reel Them In
About Lee Odden
When Vocus decided to publish this guide, it was natural that we went to
Lee Odden (@leeodden) to tap his knowledge – after all, his agency is where companies
go when they need to perform better online.
Odden is the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, a pioneering Internet marketing
agency that helps companies improve customer relationships and increase online sales
with integrated search, social media and content marketing services.
As a consultant, Odden has worked with Fortune 50 companies like HP and McKesson
as well as trusted marketing industry brands including PRWeb, Marketo and StrongMail.
Among other accomplishments, he edits the 45,000-subscriber Online Marketing Blog
and has been cited by The Economist, DM News and U.S. News & World Report for
his digital marketing expertise.
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Reel Them In
Table of Contents
1: Capturing readers with online press releases
Targeting your press release for readers’ needs, optimizing with keywords, and making the most of links
and media.
2: Increasing interest with blogging
Building interest and turning up the volume with blogging – and how to get it right.
3: Building buzz and links with social media
Using social media to build links, suggestions to get started, growing your social networks, promoting
traffic with simple assets – and going viral.
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Getting started: introducing the
online press release
The first step of the process is the online press release. It’s a press
release in digital form, which serves more purposes and works
harder than its traditional equivalent, the media release.
On one level, it works in a similar way. It distributes your news
to journalists and bloggers who, by subscribing, opt into receiving
news relevant to their industry or region. However, it also does
much more. It’s usually hosted on a central website and distributed
to partners like news websites, giving your news an independent
presence on the Web. In a way, it’s like having a miniature, one-
page website for your story.
Added benefit #1: the public
As well as going to journalists and bloggers, online press releases
also bypass the media and get straight to consumers – because
they get picked up by the search engines that people use every
day. Someone, somewhere, is searching for information about your
industry or field right now. That’s an opportunity that an online press
release can capture.
It’s not a case of sitting and waiting either. By optimizing your online
press release with keywords that match the terms people use when
they search, you can get your news found faster.
Added benefit #2: the media
Over the last ten years, journalists have started doing their jobs
differently, using search engines and social media to research
sources, trends and emerging stories. Surveys by TopRank show that
between 90 and 100 percent of them have used Google as a part
of their job. Online press releases can get you unsolicited media
pickups when journalists find your news.
Targeting stages in the buying
cycle: where is your customer?
Your potential customer is searching because they have a specific
need – and your online press release should anticipate it.
For example, a customer might be looking for running shoes. They
go to Google, search for retailers and find a pair that they like, but
dislike the price. So they go back to Google and search for the
same model, adding modifiers like ‘cheap’ or ‘discount’. They refine
their search, and then buy. With a business-to-business product, the
process could take six months. In both cases, though, each step
involves a different need – and a different set of search keywords.
So which need do you want to fulfill for your reader?
You might plan an optimized press release for customers who are
just ‘kicking tires’ – in which case the content might be a competitive
comparison as to why your product is better than its competitors.
Reel Them In
Capturing Readers
With Online
Press Releases
Tip: use a news release service with indefinite hosting
A press release has a limited shelf life in news search. Choose
a service that hosts your release online indefinitely without an
extra cost. As a destination, it can be very valuable for your
company’s visibility and page rank forever.
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Further along, customers might be looking at price or feature
distinctions, so your press release might be specifically about value,
longevity or customer satisfactions. At the end of the cycle, it’s time to
get really specific: your press release might be an actual offer, where
the reader can click a link and go straight to a transaction.
Whether you choose to focus on a single step in the buying cycle, or
publish multiple releases that address every single step, anticipating
reader need is key – especially when it comes to selecting the
keywords that will get your release found.
Choosing your keywords
You’ve selected your target audience and the stage of the buying
cycle that you’re targeting. The next step is to boil the essence of
your story down to a single concept, in order to choose the keywords
that will attract the right search traffic.
So what’s the essence of your story? Say you’re an online store
selling running shoes cheaper than your competitors. Your product
saves customers money.
First, brainstorm money-saving messages that might provoke
customers to buy your product.
Then, break them down and put the key phrases into a keyword
tool – Google’s free one1
, for example. The keyword tool takes your
phrases and gives you a list of variations that people are using when
they search, along with statistics on popularity and competition.
To choose your top-level concept, decide how you want to compete
for traffic. A popular set of keywords will have more competition
for search rank, but will have a potentially wider pool of readers. If
you’re a local athletics store rather than an online retailer, you could
target your top-line keywords by including the name of your city:
you’ll get less readers, but they’ll be more likely to visit your store
because they’re searching locally.
There will also be different permutations of your top-level concept to
consider. Entering the top-line phrase ‘cheaper running shoes’, for
example, might return popular variations like ‘cheap men’s running
shoes’. If your money-saving running shoes are suitable for men,
you should consider including this new variation somewhere in your
release to attract more traffic.
Optimizing your release:
the mechanics
Keyword density
Don’t obsess over keyword density (the number of times you use
your keywords). As a guide, the correct density of keyword phrases
is two to five times per 500 words. Any more than that might be
considered ‘search spam’ by a search engine, and lead to a loss of
search ranking. Place your most important keywords in the title, in
the sub-head, and in the body copy. It’s easy.
Up and to the left
Search engines are programmed to read documents like a Western
reader, starting at the top left of the page. When writing your
body copy, your most important keywords belong at the front
of your press release, where the search engine (and the reader)
will find them quickly. Although it’s not a ‘silver bullet’ for a
better ranking, search engines see it as evidence that your
page should rank higher.
Reel Them In
Tip: part of the brainstorming process could include a review
of competitors’ websites or online releases to discover the
keywords they’re optimizing. A tool like SEMRush.com2
can
give you a good idea of this – all you need to do is enter your
competitor’s URL.
Golden Rule: optimize for people first
Really good SEO is twofold: helping search engines to do their
job, and creating a positive user experience for people. In a
sense, the tasks are the same.
On an obvious level, if you lure a reader to your press release
with keywords that bear little relation to your actual content – for
example, optimizing your release for “women’s running shoes”
when your shoes are all men’s - you will alienate your potential
customer. Apart from a page view, it’s not going to result in the
outcome you’re looking for.
On a more technical level, search engine algorithms – the
formulas that match search terms to content – are designed
to look for language and content that genuinely matches. A
positive search experience means that users are more likely
to use the same search engine again, which increases the
likelihood of their clicking on an ad – the principal source of
search engine revenue. Just as with your customer, trying to trick
a search engine into indexing your content too highly (e.g. by
‘stuffing’ it with too many keywords) will ‘alienate’ it and lead to
a downgraded search ranking.
Don’t be tempted to cheat. With keywords, it pays to think like
a search engine as well as a marketer, and create a positive
user experience.
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Using links and media to create a
call to action that works
The function of the traditional press release is to get news coverage.
While an online press release does the same, it can drive other
results as well – as long as you give readers something to do.
If sales is your goal, you should link to your website first – preferably
to a landing page that you can track with Web analytics to measure
performance. You’d use a landing page for an email or pay-per-click
campaign, and your press release campaign should be no different.
If your main aim is media coverage, you might direct readers to
a video of your CEO explaining why your news is going to make
things better – or you could embed the video into your news release).
Embedding multimedia like images, logos and video into your
press release makes your news more appealing and more likely
to be written about. In a 2010 PRWeb survey of journalists and
bloggers, 88 per cent agreed that embedded images enhance their
experience of news releases, with 52 percent saying the same of
video. Significantly, 32% of bloggers and journalists said they would
be more likely to cover a story if it included multimedia.
Multimedia assets also have shelf life well beyond your news release.
In fact, they’re essential to the next steps of your campaign.
Reel Them In
And remember...
If you expect people to share and link to your press release, it
needs to be written to be shareable. It has to be good, it has
to be true, and it has to deliver on its promise. If this doesn’t
sound like your press release, go back and take another look
at it before investing your time in the next steps.
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The benefits of blogging
Let’s say you have a webpage on your company site about a new
pair of red running shoes. It’s an ‘all about’ resource page on red
running shoes, because this part of the campaign is about attracting
people who are just investigating them.
It doesn’t have a form on it – it’s just designed to rank well. Your
online news release reflects general information about the new
running shoes, and it links to the webpage. Now you need different
links to the page, so that it ranks highly. You want to dominate the
category of ‘red running shoes’ when people search for them.
A blog is another way of reaching people. It’s a content management
system that lets you do great things with writing and digital assets
like images and embedded videos. You can link to things – including
your webpage. Through RSS feeds, search, and social media,
your blog posts can reach a great deal of people – far more
than by pitching journalists with your story. And the people you
reach are going to be more targeted because they’ve opted into
reading your blog.
As well as this, if anybody copies and republishes the content from
your blog post, that syndication may also include a link back to the
page you’re promoting.
What to blog and how
to write it
Let’s say that you’re going to write your blog post to go live just after
your release does.
Like your release, you’re going to optimize it with keywords.
However, your blog post needs to be different. Firstly, copying and
pasting your release – posting duplicate content – can cause search
engines to ignore your blog post. Secondly, you’re in social media
territory now, where readers have different expectations.
The audience you’re targeting with your red running shoes is still in
the early buying stage. Your press release is a formal announcement
You’ve published your press release and created an online asset. Now, double your online strength by repurposing
your story and digital assets into a blog post.
Reel Them In
Tip: it’s good to include video or other multimedia in your blog
post. As well as making it more interesting, it provides content
that other people can share independently.
Simple ideas can work as well as bigger ones. It’s great to
conduct an interview with your CEO and publish the video –
but you could also use some simple screen capture software to
make a short product demo.
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to reach people who are just investigating. Your blog post should
empathize a little more with what it’s like to have the problem that
red running shoes solve. Let’s say they make you more visible at
night. The blog post might take a story format: ‘Mrs. Jones goes
running along a busy road every evening. Imagine if there was…’
Or three scenarios – common running problems that red running
shoes solve.
Make your blog post more conversational and more about opinion,
storytelling and empathizing with who your reader might be. You
need to tell your story in a less formal way than your press release
does. If possible, you should also embed multimedia like a YouTube
video in your blog post. As well as making your content more
engaging, it offers new ways to attract readers later on.
Reel Them In
Golden Rule: it’s all in the conversation
Blog readers expect conversational media. A blog is unlikely to
feature your company’s earnings statements and product
specs – readers expect it to be written by people at the company
eager to share what they’ve been working on in a relatively
informal manner.
Think of it this way: if the press release is the equivalent of
the news anchor announcing the news, the blog post is the
equivalent of bumping into a friend who works in the newsroom
and having a conversation about it.
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The benefits of sharing #1:
building links
On certain keywords – moderately competitive ones – news releases
will get search visibility on Google fairly quickly. A site like PRWeb
already has a lot of ‘page rank’ – where search engines recognize
the site as important and automatically give its content a higher
position - and part of the value of publishing there is that it passes
some of that page rank to every new press release.
However, because every news release is a new document when first
published to the Web, it could always use a little help.. The way to
do it is to acquire inbound links: links from other websites to your
news release, which can make your news release rank higher in
search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Social media helps you to promote your content in different areas of
the Web to attract the links that will help search engines understand
that your news release is interesting and worth ranking highly.
A word of caution: don’t go posting links to your news like a bull in
a china shop. Promoting your news with a comment on a blog about
red shoes is good. Promoting it five times in a row on the same blog
is irritating.
Follow etiquette, don’t spam, be appropriate to the forum that you’re
in, and choose the channels where the people who care about your
news are. Get it right and your news release can really take off.
Four tips for social
media success
#1: Submit your release or blog to a social
bookmarking website
Social bookmarking sites like Delicious allow users to create and
share public ‘bookmarks’ of links to sites they like – and you can do
the same for your press release or blog post. Although links posted
on these sites don’t increase your page ranking, they do provide
Reel Them In
You’ve created your content—now it’s time to promote it on your social media networks. You have a Twitter network
and a Facebook network… right? Your blog might have a good number of subscribers, and an email newsletter.
Good. Here’s how to start pushing your content out through social media channels.
Tip: People are creating fantastic content out there and no one’s linking to it. That’s because no one knows it exists. When you create
linkable content, promote it.
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exposure and attract readers who might read your news and link to
it from their own sites.
When using social bookmarking, it’s vital to understand the community
of the site before you submit a link. If your news release focuses on
a hi-tech aspect of your red running shoes, by all means submit it
to Digg, where an interest in tech is the common denominator. If
your release is about a celebrity who’s been spotted wearing your
running shoes, consider going elsewhere.
#2: Get Twitter Right
It’s great to promote your release with a tweet – but, as with any
social channel, you need to take into account the ways of writing
that work there.
Don’t make the common mistake of simply tweeting the title. Just
like your press release, your tweet needs to make a promise, be
believable and be compelling. You just need to accomplish that in
140 characters.
In fact – less than 140 characters. If you’re looking for retweets, you
need to leave enough space for people to retweet it. Not doing so is
another common mistake that’s easily avoided.
#3: Promote those who promote you
After your initial tweet, it’s bad form to promote your press release
repeatedly in a social media context. However, it’s good form to
promote other people who promote your news. Drawing attention
to a blog or news site that covered your running shoes is effective,
as long as the site links to your press release in a way that search
engines can crawl or follow.
#4: Engage with people on blogs
Why not promote your news release by proactively reaching out to
people and joining conversations?
Many blogs and websites have comments as a way to inspire
engagement. You can take advantage of this need by publishing
comments or responding to comments on relevant articles and
including a link back to your press release.
If it makes sense editorially, you can do it. If someone has published
an article about the top ten running shoes, and didn’t include yours,
you could write a comment complimenting the article, pointing out
that your red running shoes solve a problem that these ones don’t,
and linking to your press release. You can also arrange to write
guest blog posts, with an author biography that includes a link to
your news release.
The benefits of sharing #2:
promoting your content,
driving traffic and going viral
As we’ve seen, a lot of social media sites don’t pass on any page
rank when their members link to your press release or blog post.
However, there’s still a benefit: exposure, publicity and direct traffic
– as well as the possibility of someone creating a new blog post
based on, say, a retweet of your press release.
How it works:
social media search
Did you embed a YouTube video in your blog post? That’s
good – because the search function on YouTube is one of the
Web’s largest search engines. By optimizing your video’s title,
tags and description, you can capture search traffic. And, in the
video description, you can link back to your press release, blog, or
landing page. Search engines don’t care about this link, but people
will – and you’ll get more traffic.
Reel Them In
Golden Rule: start growing your networks now.
Literally - right now.
The techniques discussed here work best when you’ve been
building a network, commenting and joining the conversation
in social channels for months. Then, when the time comes
to promote something, you can share it with them before
everyone else.
Work in a concurrent order, not a sequential one.
It’s a big difference, but a lot of PR pros still do the second:
they get so excited about what they’re promoting that they only
create their accounts on the day of the press release, with the
first tweet of the campaign being its URL.
I’m a strong advocate of spending ten minutes a day doing
something on one or two different types of channels, and then
using editorial discretion on your own stuff – the same discretion
that you would when deciding whether to link to someone
else’s stuff.
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How it works: going viral
As well as driving traffic, you’re now publishing content that other
people can embed into their own blogs. It doesn’t have to be just
video – you could take some screenshots of your product and upload
them to an image site like Picasa or Flickr. You could summarize your
press release into five slides and upload them to SlideShare. There
are lots of possibilities – but remember to optimize all of your assets
with keywords so that people can find them.
Social media and search work together. While you want to be where
your customers are searching, people are increasingly willing to
engage and have conversations with businesses and brands. If you’re
really successful at promoting your news with content, the outcome
of these conversations might be entirely new content. Encourage
it by asking for opinions and getting discussions going. You can
create a situation where people aren’t just having conversations with
you and your brand – they’re having conversations with each other.
Your news can take on a life of its own - but all links back to you and
your online news release.
Reel Them In
Tip: social media search is fast becoming a rival to traditional
search engines. Facebook’s internal search is one of the top 20
search engines. YouTube is more popular as a search engine
than Yahoo! and Bing, while Twitter is searched 18 billion times
per month through Twitter.com and third-party apps.
Golden Rule: Listen before you commit yourself
When you’re promoting content over social media, listen
first—then, keep listening as you develop relationships, engage
with audiences and promote your content. Use a social media
monitoring tool which harvests conversations. It shows you
where the influential people you want to reach are—and that’s
vital to know before you commit your time and resources to
connecting with them.
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About Vocus
Vocus, Inc. (NASDAQ: VOCS) is a leading provider of on-demand software for public relations management. Our Web-based software
suite helps organizations of all sizes to fundamentally change the way they communicate with both the media and the public, optimizing
their public relations and increasing their ability to measure its impact. Our on-demand software addresses the critical functions of public
relations including media relations, news distribution and news monitoring. We deliver our solutions over the Internet using a secure,
scalable application and system architecture, which allows our customers to eliminate expensive up-front hardware and software costs and
to quickly deploy and adopt our on-demand software. Vocus is used by more than 7,700 organizations worldwide and is available in seven
languages. Vocus is based in Lanham, MD with offices in North America, Europe and Asia. For more information, please visit
http://www.vocus.com or call (800) 345-5572.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/Vocus-Earnings/Q3-2010/prweb4703774.htm
About PRWeb
PRWeb is recognized as a leading online news and press release distribution service worldwide. Since 1997, PRWeb has been changing
the way businesses, marketing departments and public relations firms think about press releases. PRWeb was the first company to develop
a distribution strategy around direct-to-consumer communication and to build and offer a platform for search engine optimized press
release <http://service.prweb.com/learning/article/search-engine-promotion/> distribution. PRWeb is an online news distribution service
of Vocus, Inc., a leading provider of on-demand public relations management software. For more information, go to
http://www.prweb.com.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/10/prweb4690314.htm
Reel Them In
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Footnotes:
1: https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__u=1000000000&__c=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWO
RD_IDEAS#search.none
2 : http://www.semrush.com/

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