People love quizzes.

So do bloggers and journalists. That’s why adding a link to a quiz can super-charge your press release and tip the scales in your favor that a website, newspaper or magazine, or your favorite blogger will announce your news, or use the quiz by itself.

Each year, The American Kennel Club announces its results for The Most Popular Dogs in the U.S., based on registration statistics. Read the press release for the 2011 rankings. Here’s a screenshot of what appears at the end of the release. Notice all the links and the invitation to use the trivia questions. 
 

I also love the list of statistics for 50 U.S. cities, the invitation to interview the AKC spokesperson, and the note about photos. 

What kinds of quizzes have you offered with press releases?
   
   
Other Tools That Can Help You:

89 Ways to Write Powerful Press Releases, my free email course

Special Report #30: The Shortest, Easiest Articles You’ll Ever Write

Here are my Top 10 tweets from this past week, great for retweeting! If you missed these, follow me on Twitter.

How to write a hip-hop press release. http://ow.ly/9NW5M

How To Add Tech Billionaires To Your LinkedIn Network Right Now – Forbes. http://ow.ly/9Ooag

12 Most Little Known Tricks to Use On LinkedIn. http://ow.ly/9Ooua

8 ways to drive traffic to your website with Google+. http://ow.ly/9OpeU

Your social media dashboard is killing you if you make this major mistake. http://ow.ly/9PWZe

Proud of your company’s social media success? Compete against others in this fun contest, sponsored by biz journals. http://ow.ly/9PWJg

Facebook Photos Now Shown In 4X Bigger High Resolution and Can Be Viewed Fullscreen. http://bit.ly/GN7UF8

3 Steps: Setting Up the LinkedIn “Follow Company” Button | SEO Blog | Excira http://ow.ly/9Oom2

PR crisis deepens at Susan G. Komen | Articles. http://ow.ly/9OEES

3 places to send a press release. [See my comment on this blog post for 5 more ideas.] http://ow.ly/9NWmK

Here are my Top 10 tweets from this past week, great for retweeting! If you missed these, follow me on Twitter.

50 Ways to Get More People to Like your Facebook Page | Facebook Tips and Tricks – FanPageFlow.  http://ow.ly/9jBz0

Big list of 200 “Write for us” pages. http://ow.ly/9kmjE

The mounting minuses of Google+. It’s a ghosttown, compared to Facebook, study says. http://ow.ly/9ljxI

Why do journalists make so many mistakes that demand corrections? Top reasons, from a NY Times editor: http://ow.ly/9ljPS

Today’s Publicity Ezine: A great PR pitch, how Pinterest violates copyright & new LinkedIn “follow” button. http://ow.ly/9ltsG

5 “musts” you must follow when adding or changing your photo on LinkedIn. http://ow.ly/9mn8r

The one skill that makes an online entrepreneur unstoppable. http://ow.ly/9mRXl

Twitter to give marketers access to old tweets. http://ow.ly/9mTV8

Facebook opens timelines to brands. http://ow.ly/9om8V

Excellent summary of how to write a press release for SEO, by Brian Hanson, who owns 300+ niche websites.

This guest post was written by Deb McAlister-Holland, a publicity expert who works for Distribion, a Dallas SaaS software company that makes marketing automation tools. She is also the author of 2 books, Slimed Online: How to get your online reputation back despite Google and The Customer Never Sleeps: 21st Century Marketing. She lives in Dallas, Texas. Visit http://debmcalister.com/ for more information.

****

I wrote my first press release decades ago, on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Back then, press releases were viewed as disposable documents created for one purpose – and only one purpose: to convince a small group of media gatekeepers to share something with the audience they controlled.

My boss had lots of rules about press releases. We were told how long they could be, what had to be included, what was never included, how many we could send in a month, and exactly how long the process should take to write it, get it approved by a client, get it distributed via fax, postal mail or press wire service, and how to follow up on it by calling the targeted journalists.

I was pretty good about following those rules for years, but I threw them out the window as the new century dawned. Good thing, too, because as the first decade of the 21st century came and went, it became crystal clear to me that the good old press release had been completely reincarnated in a new role – and anyone who hasn’t yet rethought the press release is missing a tremendous opportunity for low-cost content marketing.

What’s changed? Here are the four most important things that have changed in the way press releases function in today’s connected world:

• Press releases are read by anyone and everyone with access to a web browser or smart phone. They aren’t the “insider” documents they once were, and they have become one of the cornerstones of a company’s online reputation.
   
• Press releases aren’t disposable. Google never forgets – the release you post on your website or send via newswire today will be searchable for the foreseeable future. Maybe forever. And there are legal and customer satisfaction implications involved in how press releases are written that would have turned my old boss’s hair gray.
   
• Press releases now have hyperlinks, embedded photos and videos. I know, that’s old news, right? We’ve been adding web addresses to press releases for the last 20 years. But 20 years ago, those links weren’t trackable the way they are today – and any photos or videos we offered were completely separate from our press releases.
   
• Press releases have a whole new constituency. Bloggers, content aggregators and scrapers, and a global audience are eager for news they can use and share.

The truth is that I send out more press releases today than I ever thought I would in the days when I viewed them as a way to convince someone else to write about my company. Ever since I learned that the press release itself was a great marketing tool to drive traffic, increase customer engagement, and boost my search engine rankings, I’ve discovered dozens of new uses for them.
 
 
The Proof is in the Testing

In February, 2011, when I started a new job as director of marketing at a SaaS software company, I put in what I thought was a routine budget request for a media data base – Vocus, Cision, MyMediaInfo – I wasn’t picky. I just knew that I would need a good database in order to add PR to my multi-channel marketing mix. The chairman of our board suggested I try a new service called MyPRGenie instead, and he arranged a free trial for me of their premium service.

That gave me the chance to try something I’d wanted to try for a long time: a head-to-head test to see just how much traffic press releases by themselves could drive to a website or blog. One of the content marketing strategies we launched was a new blog designed to expand our reach and introduce the concepts behind our products and services to new audiences.

The Distributed Marketing Blog published its first posts in late March, and from April through mid-June, I sent out an SEO-optimized press release with half of the blog posts, and posted the others without a press release. All posts – those with and without a press release – were supported with the same social media out-reach: links to our company Facebook page, updates on my personal LinkedIn profile, and tweets on the five Twitter accounts our company uses.

The results are clear in the graphic below: the posts supported by a press release got twice as many visitors as the posts without a press release.

Of course, the June numbers presented here are just a little bit misleading – I had to remove about 200,000 unique visitors to our blog that month because one of those press releases we sent out resulted in pick-ups from PC World, CNET, BNET, Fox Business, Forbes, Fortune, and the Wall Street Journal (along with several hundred smaller blogs and publications).
 
Traffic Target Surpassed
 
So 12 weeks after we launched our blog, I had blown our traffic target out of the water, and gotten global exposure for our company and our blog – thanks to that old standby, the press release. It was just the first of many similar successes we’ve had this year.
 
Although no other post has gotten more traffic than that very first one, we’ve had eight posts so far that have gotten awfully close – and if I was keeping an old fashioned PR clip book, it would have over 980 clips from major publications and broadcast outlets in it.

Those “clips” came straight off the press releases we’ve sent out. In more than nine months at my job, I haven’t made a single phone call to an editor, attended a single press event, or done anything else that even smacks of the PR skills I have no time to use. I don’t have a PR firm. The only thing I’ve done is post SEO-optimized press releases on a single service that sends the releases with an email cover note to journalists, bloggers and analysts in their database.
 
Press Releases and So Much More

So I stopped testing, and started writing a press release for every piece of content I wanted to promote. In fact, whenever I post new content, I write four things:

1. The new content itself (starting with a catchy headline, followed by an outline, followed by the SEO-optimized content).
    
2. The press release.
    
3. A series of 5-7 tweets.
    
4. An abstract for sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and StumbleUpon.

Webinars, presentations, new blog posts, White Papers, trade show speaking engagements – you name it, we probably send out a press release about it. The distribution list for our releases ranges from a few hundred contacts in a particular industry to about 2,000 contacts for a more general topic.

Every press release follows a standard outline designed to boost search traffic:

• SEO-optimized title / headline
   
• Sub-head
   
• Two to three paragraphs promoting the content with a call to action (read it, download it, attend the event, etc.)
   
• A two-paragraph boilerplate (who, what, where, when, why – all the basics, including links)

Like other services, MyPRGenie has built-in SEO optimization tools, and that makes each release work overtime to drive traffic back to my content or website. The right words – the words my prospective customers use when they’re searching for products like mine – are critical in the strategy of using press releases to build traffic.
 
 
Don’t Forget Photos

Perhaps just as importantly, every single press release (and every single piece of content) gets its own unique photograph or graphic.

I’m a “word person”, and I was slow to realize just how powerful great art is in building traffic for content marketing. But I’m a true believer now. A press release titled, “How to Become a Legendary Marketer” illustrated with a photograph of a knight in shining armor (who just happens to be my son, so the photo is especially attractive) gets much more attention than a press release with the same headline and no photo. How do I know? Because I tested that, too.

Here’s a look at two weeks’ worth of press release titles and images from The Distributed Marketing Blog. (Our total cost for the legal, licensed images you see here, by the way, was $12 – most of them were free. For a look at great free or low-cost art for your content, check out this post from my personal blog.)

Last, but not least, we use the social media links available through the press release service extensively. Because all I have to do is click a button, I’ve been able to expand my social media outreach to services like StumbleUpon, Reddit and dozens of others that are well beyond the scope of my internal social media capabilities. 
 

No Such Thing as “Too Many” Releases

So here’s the bottom line for me: press releases work, whether or not they results in direct coverage.

Long ago, I remember being afraid to send out too many press releases. It was expensive, and I worried that I’d overwhelm the small number of journalists I was targeting.

That was then.

Now, I don’t have to worry about it. The people who read my press releases now do it because they want to. They’ve opted in to a distribution list, clicked on a link, searched for the keywords, or gone to a website where my release is featured.

As for the journalists, many of them are now paid at least in part on the number of readers they draw. From the standpoint of a blogger or journalist on a deadline, a press release offers:

• Fast copy that’s usually well written. (Your press releases ARE well written, right?)
   
• Freedom from copyright hassles or questions. (You wouldn’t send it to them if you didn’t hope they’d reuse it, right?)
   
• Fresh ideas that may be timely and topical. (Your press releases are timely, right?)

Nearly 75 percent of all the journalists working today are freelancers – a complete turn-around from a time 10-15 years ago when high-paying jobs in journalism were the norm instead of the rarity they are today. For freelancers at even the most prestigious sites, compensation is usually tied directly to the number of readers they attract to their online posts.

The more articles they post, the more opportunities they have to draw readers. So they’re hungry for fresh content and fresh ideas in a way that their predecessors never were. It’s a hunger I’m happy to fill – and press releases remain the most cost-effective item on the menu for everyone.

If you haven’t made any resolutions for improving your publicity or social media efforts next year, promise that you’ll steal at least one tip from this free ebook, “The Best of The Publicity Hound’s Tips of the Week of 2011” and do it.

This is the seventh year I’ve compiled the very best tips from my weekly ezine and offered it to you as a holiday gift—along with my enthusiastic recommendation to regift it to your friends and clients.

Click here to download the book. (If you’re having trouble, try a different browser or a different computer, or email Scott Buffaloe, my customer service manager, and he’ll send it to you.)

Here’s what you’ll find in this year’s book.

Social Media Tips Galore

• Tips on how to attract more Twitter followers by using Twellow, my favorite Twitter directory, to really drill down and identify people in your target market—and make it easy for others to find you
• 6 bios that need updating. Trust me. They’re either filled with stale information, or your bios are missing key links for new social media profiles you’ve created.
• 3 strong reasons for joining groups on LinkedIn, and the recommended number of groups to join.
• How to create a link for a Facebook status update so you can pull more people to your Facebook page. This still stumps many Facebook users.
• 3 ways to use Twitter lists to save time, get in front of influential bloggers who write about your topic, and start to build relationships with journalists.
• A big no-no that several LinkedIn “gurus” are teaching about how to write your LinkedIn profile.  It looks bad, it smells bad and it can get you into trouble.
• A  new feature on YouTube that lets you edit your videos right in the browser!
  
• Where to find a valuable template on how to write a product review that you can share on the social media sites or at your blog.
• Where to find “52 Headline Hacks,” a handy cheat sheet for writing blog posts that go viral, or headlines you can use on articles.

Publicity Tips for Traditional Media

• An important reminder if you’re planning an event so you don’t blow a big chance at publicity in a magazine.
• 6 ways to avoid corrections and what to do if a mistake in your press release or article slips through and ends up being published.
• The one word to never use when you’re talking to journalists.
• Angles for news stories you can pitch so you can get onto the most watched TV newscast of the entire week on your local station.
• Why press releases are usually ineffective if you want a journalist to cover your story—and the one thing that works instead.
• 3 types of publicity photos that scream “We’re lazy. And we don’t mind boring you with this photo.”
• The one person to follow on Twitter who can provide lots of hot leads from traditional media who are looking for sources to interview.

Tools for Online Publicity

• A hyperlocal website that’s begging for neighborhood news in 16 bigger cities in the United States. This site is perfect for news from clubs and civic groups, schools, nonprofits, churches, political campaigns and neighborhood groups.
• A news powerhouse that you should be pitching because its stories get high rankings on Google News and Google Blogs. You’ll also find a link to a valuable video that explains exactly how to pitch.
• A local publisher that wants news from hundreds of communities in 19 states in the United States. They’re competing with local newspapers for stories, photos, videos and ad dollars.
• 4 tips for creating your 2012 Publicity Plan for online and traditional media.

Tips for Building Your Business & Nonprofit

• Where to find step-by-step instructions on how to format a book for the Nook, the Barnes & Noble ereader, and Amazon’s Kindle—sometimes in less than 30 minutes.
• Where to find detailed instructions on how to produce webinars that sell your products and services. Includes a recommendation for what webinar company to use.
• Nonprofits, 9 ways to make it easy for people to donate at your website.

If you like these tips, you’ll love the newsletter. Today’s issue will be published this afternoon and it includes a cute dog video. Sign up here.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a very Happy New Year!

Here are my Top 10 tweets from this past week, great for retweeting! If you missed these, follow me on Twitter.

25 Worst Passwords of the Year for 2011. [Is one of yous on this list?] http://ow.ly/81QNc

How to get a ton of new subscribers to your blog. http://ow.ly/7ZR3S

Should you post press releases in social media? Conflicting answers from the experts. http://ow.ly/7ZmYQ  http://ow.ly/8486v

Top 10 Marketing & PR Trends in 2012. http://ow.ly/7ZcO4

A free cheat sheet for writing blog posts that go viral, from @Copyblogger. http://ow.ly/7XSx3

How to answer a journalist’s query on HARO, Reporter Connection, PitchRate & PRLeads. http://ow.ly/7YMvB

8 secrets that writers won’t tell you. http://ow.ly/803Km

17 Fun Freebies That Build Thought Leadership. Something for everybody. http://ow.ly/7Wwxs

10 Worst Media Disasters of 2011 from @MrMediaTraining. [Can you guess #1?] http://ow.ly/81xh3

5 strategic social media tips for PR pros, from @PerkettPR [No. 4 is my favorite] http://ow.ly/81x3q

Here are my Top 10 tweets from this past week, great for retweeting! If you missed these, follow me on Twitter.
    
How to improve your Facebook marketing for the holidays
http://ow.ly/7DjbU 
     
    
50 tools that can help you write
http://ow.ly/7BtSv
     
    
The care and feeding of the press: Super tips from the Internet Press Guild
http://ow.ly/7BtCU
     
    
Publicity Tip: Contact a media outlet that already covered you & suggest a “follow up story” to the original one
     
    
6 tips for making your press release Twitter-friendly
http://ow.ly/7AqL8
     
    
Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it. ~William Arthur Ward
     
     
10 words that can help or hurt your click-through rate on Twitter.
http://ow.ly/7xNfu RT @DanZarrella [Testing is powerful]
    
    
Social bookmarking tips to pull traffic to your blog or website
http://ow.ly/7BzRk

      
 ”I love Thanksgiving turkey. It’s the only time in Los Angeles that you see natural breasts.” ~Arnold Schwarzenegger
     
    
6 ways to help people find your press releases
 http://ow.ly/7FkmY 

Do you already follow me, but you’d like to read tweets about certain PR, publicity and social media topics? Which ones?

Does your nonprofit tell visitors at your website all the ways they can donate?

During the webinar I hosted yesterday on nonprofit marketing, PR and publicity with nonprofit marketing expert Sandy Rees, one of the participants asked if she should include a “Donate” button on every page of her agency’s website.

Uh, of course, we answered. (No-brainer.)

I wish I had seen the “Ways to Give” page at the Wikimedia Foundation’s website, which I just stumbled across this afternoon. That’s the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, the world’s mammoth online encyclopedia.

It lists these nine ways to give:

1. Credit card or Paypal
     
2. Via regular mail
     
3. Monthly recurring giving
     
4. Stock donation
     
5. Direct deposit
     
6. Combined Federal Campaign
     
7. Corporate Matching Gift
     
8. Moneybookers
     
9. Payroll deductions

Especially helpful are the detailed instructions. Brilliant! Nonprofits could link to a list like this from the end of articles they write, from blog posts or from press releases.  

What other ways can your donors give? And how do you let them know? 

The next time you’re struggling with a headline for an article, press release, blog post, a page at your website or a paid ad, whip out this handy five-page cheat sheet and steal one of the 102 headline-writing formulas.

Fill in the blank, and you’ve got a killer headline.

It’s courtesy of blogger Chris Garrett, and it could be one of the most valuable tools in your office. Download it here.
     

Why Writing Great Headlines Is Important 

Killer headlines pull people into your copy. They beg to be retweeted. And they often tell the reader, “You have a problem and this article will solve it.”

For added oomph, choose several other headlines from the list and place them throughout your article or blog post as sub-heads, like I’ve done in this blog post. Sub-heads are great for scanners, who often won’t take the time to read every word. They’re visual clues that tell readers what else they’ll find within an article.
     
     
Sample Headlines 

Here are examples of headlines from this free report:

Get Rid of Your ___________ Once and For All

What Your _____________ is Not Telling You About _____________

10 Lies We Tell Our ________________

How to Spot a Fake ________________

5 Reasons _____________ is Better Than _________________

If those don’t fit the article or blog post you’re writing, you’ll find several that will.
     
    
More Tools to Help You

This report is one of 60 free or inexpensive tools I shared during the webinar “60 Ideas in 60 Minutes:  Free (or Practically Free) Tips, Tricks, Tools & Tutorials for Publicity & Social Media.” Click here to read more about what it includes and how to access the video replay and the handouts.

I’ve listed several ways you can use these headlines. How else would you use them?

Create a buzz all over town long before your store opens.

These days, in a sour economy, businesses opening just about anywhere are major news. So don’t shy away from publicity. Here six ways to promote your retail business before you open.

1. Display a large banner or sign outside your building letting people know you’ll be opening. Thanks to Alyson Stanfield, a business coach for artists and an art marketing expert, for this idea which I read at her blog yesterday.
   
   
2. Pitch the story to the local media. Contact a reporter at your local newspaper, business journal or business magazine and pitch a story about the opening. Angles can include why you chose this time, when the economy is bad, to open a new business.
   
   
3. Write a press release. Post it on a site like Craigslist, which gets millions of eyeballs. Post it only in one category and only in the city closest to where your business is located.
   
   
4. Plan a fun grand opening celebration. Publicize it on a local event sites like Yelp, EventCrazy.com and MeetUp.com.  This list of 27 questions to ask before promoting your event will stimulate ideas and help you plan a more interesting event. Please, no boring ribbon-cuttings. You can do  better than that. Here are some alternatives to ribbon-cutting events.
   
   
5. Just before you open, create a business profile on Google Maps.
   
   
6. Contact related businesses and offer to cross-promote. Ask them to display flyers about your grand opening at the front counter. Tell them that once you open, you’ll be happy to promote something they’re doing. If you’re opening a pet store, contact owners of dog kennels, dog obedience schools and veterinarians.

What other ideas can you offer for ways that retail businesses can promote long before they open? Any examples in your own community?