Seems revenue streams do matter.
I still vividly remember my first dot com client. The CEO was 25, and the director of communications was 23. Not that’s there’s anything wrong with youth and fresh ideas. But every time we went in for a meeting, the business direction had changed and they wanted us to switch gears and promote something different to a new target market. When we asked silly questions like where the revenue stream was going to come from, what their strategy was or to see the marketing plan, we were told we were old school and just didn’t ‘get it’. That the only thing that mattered was driving eyeballs to the site. It didn’t matter what the cost of customer acquisition was as long as you had lots of clicks a month to report.
They were going to work hard for a couple of years, take the company public, make a bundle on their stock options and sail off into the sunset. I’m sure you’re shocked to find out that different happen. And in the end revenues streams not just eyeballs did matter.
That’s why I was so happy to read Peter Shankman’s post last week: I Will Never Hire a “Social Media Expert,” and Neither Should You He likened the current obsession with social media to the dot com era and says. “We’re making the same mistakes that we made during the dotcom era, where everyone thought that just adding the term .com to your corporate logo made you instantly credible. It didn’t. If that’s all you did, you emphasized even more strongly how pathetic your company was.” (more…)
Back in the day, press releases used to go exclusively to the media. We PR professionals used to write them, post them on the wire and send them out to our databases. An editor would then determine whether it was worthy of their attention. That’s still how it works, but a press release is so much more these days. Not only are they read by your customers and anyone with access to the Internet, but they are also a great tool for increasing rankings in search engines.
The elements of a good press release remain the same: use the inverted pyramid style; write a strong headline and lead paragraph; cover the five Ws—who, what, where, when, and why—in the first or second paragraph; avoid jargon, buzz words and hype. See my earlier post about taking a buzz saw to the buzz words. Oh yeah, and make sure you actually have something newsworthy to announce!
But what’s new is that you need to think about optimizing your releases for search engines. What does this mean? Make sure your releases are full of keyword-rich copy. Think carefully about what the pertinent keywords should be; the ones that would be commonly used by your customers to search for your product or service, not just the ones your industry uses to talk about itself. Need help figuring them out? Use Google AdWords for ideas. Try to use the keywords in your headline and in the first 50 words of the release.
Other tips:
- Integrate anchor text hyperlinks within the body copy of the press release.
- Post the press release to a news area on your site. This will create an additional page the search engines can crawl, index and perhaps show in search engine results.
- Watch the length of your release. Some news search engines will not recognize a press release that is longer than 1,000 words or less than 200 words. Additionally, the longer your press release, the less keyword density it will have.
However, above all make sure your release reads well. Just like writing web copy it’s always a balancing act between pleasing the search engine Gods and pleasing your audience. Don’t stuff your copy with keywords to the point where you turn off your readers and customers.
For more tips check out the great resources that PRWeb offers.
