Stop the press! If you want to get more exposure for your white papers, consider using the tried-and-true press release.

Press releases can help you get more visitors to your website which leads to more sales. While press releases have been around forever, there’s a new way to think about press releases. In the old days, you wrote press releases for print media. Today, you write press releases to get attention from your prospects via search engines.

That’s because search engines love press releases. If you’ve been trying to get Google to index your site and link to your content, then you should consider writing a press release because press releases are one of the fastest ways to get Google’s attention. In fact, Google will automatically index all press releases sent via PR WEB, a press release distribution company which has an agreement to this effect with Google.

Simply post your release on PR WEB for as little as $80 and you’ll see it posted to Google within 48 hours! For a $200 investment, you can target certain industries (such as aerospace, chemicals or computer software) or various geographic regions (i.e., New York State, the South or Los Angeles).

Once the press release is indexed on Google, prospects who look for information will find your press release and click on the link to see how to access the white paper.

Sound good? Here are the details for writing a great press release that gets people to read it and want to learn how to get more information from you.

A press release is a 250- to 500-word document that highlights the news value of your white paper. Another way to think of “news value” is to think “what’s in it for the reader?”

Here’s a bad example:
“Company X releases new white paper.”

Here’s a good example:
“Productivity rates improve when multitasking goes down, according to new white paper.”

The first example is all about the company. The second example shows how people will benefit from reading the white paper.

The rest of the press release highlights other details from the white paper, information about how to obtain the white paper and information about the company that produced the white paper. Yes, you can promote your company in the press release. However, you do that after you grab people with the news value of the white paper. We call this the “inverted pyramid” style of writing, where the news is on top and the details follow.

Here are a few tricks to get the most attention for your press release so you get more prospects:

Have a newsworthy headline and put the name of one target group in the headline (i.e., Multitasking reduces productivity in engineers, according to white paper from X&X Corp.)

In the first paragraph, have as many as three target groups (i.e., engineers, scientists and laboratory managers can improve productivity by reducing multitasking, according to a new white paper published by X&X Corp.)

Use a call to action to get people to come to your website to get the white paper (i.e., for a copy of the report, go to YOURURL.com/whitepaper). You can include a price for the white paper in the press release, or you can say if there’s no cost.

Get a second opinion of your press release at www.pressreleasegrader.com, a site that analyzes your press release and offers search engine optimization tips. It’s amazing!  If you write press releases, you’ll find more prospects interested in learning about your white papers.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.