Top Ten Tips for Successful Online Press Releases and Publicity

The following tips for writing online press releases will help generate buzz about your products and services across the web, driving traffic back to your website and creating a direct channel to journalists, media outlets and customers.

1. Use major keywords in your heading and first paragraph - these are often all that will be picked up by Google and other News Indexing services
2. Proactively share your news using the share and RSS buttons on press release websites
   
3. Don't use "you" and "your" or "I", "we" or "our", unless it's within a quote - your press release should be written in the third person so it doesn't sound like an advertisement
4. Make your headline meaningful to media and search engines - don't be too clever
5. Keep it short - Google will not index news item that are too long
   
6. Make your press release relevant to news or trends - get the message across succintly in headline and first par
   
7. Make sure you have good landing pages on your website relevant to your press release - otherwise you are missing an opportunity
   
8. Proofread your release and make sure it's of a press-ready standard; your release could end up anywhere and you don't want to spread an unprofessional image of your company (or yourself)
9. Use free online press release services tagged with relevant keywords to make it easy for people looking for your products/services to find them - this is the cheapest, easiest free publicity you will find
10. If you're new to online press releases, post older material first then work your way up to the present so you have a good history online, driving incremental (long tail) traffic back to your website

Have fun - email me editor at newsmaker.com.au if you want to discuss any ideas you think would make a good press story.

Connecting Up CEO named Innovator of the Year

Congratulations to Doug Jacquier of Connecting Up Australia who was named Non Profit Innovator of the Year by Equity Trustees. This is so well-deserved. Doug has worked fearlessly to champion the use of technology ro reduce costs and increase productivity in the non-profit sector for many years.