Press Releases 101
Press releases have multiple goals. The first goal is to inform the target audience and media outlets about new releases, performances, and any other intended message that needs to be sent to the audience. A secondary purpose is to create backlinks to the social media presence. A backlink is a non-reciprocal link on a different web site which leads back to your site. The value of backlinks is two-fold. Firstly, search engines use backlinks in their evaluation of site ranking, so having more backlinks will improve the search results of the web site. Secondly, backlinks will provide additional routes to the site, resulting in greater traffic.
Press Release Length
Typically recipients will not read past the second paragraph so we will limit our press release to that length. The goal of the first paragraph will be to inform the recipient of the value of our web site, and the second paragraph will attempt to convince the recipient to put backlinks to our site on their site.
By Jack Johnston, MA TESOL, MBA, MSML