When you want information on something -- anything -- what do you do? Start scrolling through a news website to look for it, or type a search into Google? If you chose the second option, you’re like most people. It’s common sense, and everyone’s getting better at it.

But, as a marketer or PR pro, how are you going to get people to read your news? Media pitching still has its place, but there’s another way.

Get online and put your news right in front of people – and help them find it and share it. You don’t need to be a programmer or IT expert. You have access to all the resources you need.

You can take a piece of news and turn it into a content series that gets people interested, boosts your search rankings, and gives your story a life of its own through social media.

Vocus teamed up with Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, to bring you this three-stage guide on how to do it.

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About Lee Odden

When Vocus decided to publish this guide, it was natural that we went to Lee Odden (@leeodden) to tap his knowledge – after all, his agency is where companies go when they need to perform better online.

Odden is the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, a pioneering Internet marketing agency that helps companies improve customer relationships and increase online sales with integrated search, social media and content marketing services.

As a consultant, Odden has worked with Fortune 50 companies like HP and McKesson as well as trusted marketing industry brands including PRWeb, Marketo and StrongMail. Among other accomplishments, he edits the 45,000-subscriber Online Marketing Blog and has been cited by The Economist, DM News and U.S. News & World Report for his digital marketing expertise.

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Table of Contents1: Capturing readers with online press releasesTargeting your press release for readers’ needs, optimizing with keywords, and making the most of links and media.

2: Increasing interest with bloggingBuilding interest and turning up the volume with blogging – and how to get it right.

3: Building buzz and links with social mediaUsing social media to build links, suggestions to get started, growing your social networks, promoting traffic with simple assets – and going viral.

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Getting started: introducing the online press releaseThe first step of the process is the online press release. It’s a press release in digital form, which serves more purposes and works harder than its traditional equivalent, the media release.

On one level, it works in a similar way. It distributes your news to journalists and bloggers who, by subscribing, opt into receiving news relevant to their industry or region. However, it also does much more. It’s usually hosted on a central website and distributed to partners like news websites, giving your news an independent presence on the Web. In a way, it’s like having a miniature, one-page website for your story.

Added benefit #1: the publicAs well as going to journalists and bloggers, online press releases also bypass the media and get straight to consumers – because they get picked up by the search engines that people use every day. Someone, somewhere, is searching for information about your industry or field right now. That’s an opportunity that an online press release can capture.

It’s not a case of sitting and waiting either. By optimizing your online press release with keywords that match the terms people use when they search, you can get your news found faster.

Added benefit #2: the mediaOver the last ten years, journalists have started doing their jobs differently, using search engines and social media to research sources, trends and emerging stories. Surveys by TopRank show that

between 90 and 100 percent of them have used Google as a part of their job. Online press releases can get you unsolicited media pickups when journalists find your news.

Targeting stages in the buying cycle: where is your customer?Your potential customer is searching because they have a specific need – and your online press release should anticipate it.

For example, a customer might be looking for running shoes. They go to Google, search for retailers and find a pair that they like, but dislike the price. So they go back to Google and search for the same model, adding modifiers like ‘cheap’ or ‘discount’. They refine their search, and then buy. With a business-to-business product, the process could take six months. In both cases, though, each step involves a different need – and a different set of search keywords.

So which need do you want to fulfill for your reader?

You might plan an optimized press release for customers who are just ‘kicking tires’ – in which case the content might be a competitive comparison as to why your product is better than its competitors.

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Capturing Readers With Online Press Releases

Tip: use a news release service with indefinite hostingA press release has a limited shelf life in news search. Choose a service that hosts your release online indefinitely without an extra cost. As a destination, it can be very valuable for your company’s visibility and page rank forever.

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Further along, customers might be looking at price or feature distinctions, so your press release might be specifically about value, longevity or customer satisfactions. At the end of the cycle, it’s time to get really specific: your press release might be an actual offer, where the reader can click a link and go straight to a transaction.

Whether you choose to focus on a single step in the buying cycle, or publish multiple releases that address every single step, anticipating reader need is key – especially when it comes to selecting the keywords that will get your release found.

Choosing your keywordsYou’ve selected your target audience and the stage of the buying cycle that you’re targeting. The next step is to boil the essence of your story down to a single concept, in order to choose the keywords that will attract the right search traffic.

So what’s the essence of your story? Say you’re an online store selling running shoes cheaper than your competitors. Your product saves customers money.

First, brainstorm money-saving messages that might provoke customers to buy your product.

Then, break them down and put the key phrases into a keyword tool – Google’s free one1, for example. The keyword tool takes your phrases and gives you a list of variations that people are using when they search, along with statistics on popularity and competition.

To choose your top-level concept, decide how you want to compete for traffic. A popular set of keywords will have more competition for search rank, but will have a potentially wider pool of readers. If you’re a local athletics store rather than an online retailer, you could target your top-line keywords by including the name of your city: you’ll get less readers, but they’ll be more likely to visit your store because they’re searching locally.

There will also be different permutations of your top-level concept to consider. Entering the top-line phrase ‘cheaper running shoes’, for example, might return popular variations like ‘cheap men’s running shoes’. If your money-saving running shoes are suitable for men, you should consider including this new variation somewhere in your release to attract more traffic.

Optimizing your release: the mechanicsKeyword density

Don’t obsess over keyword density (the number of times you use your keywords). As a guide, the correct density of keyword phrases is two to five times per 500 words. Any more than that might be considered ‘search spam’ by a search engine, and lead to a loss of search ranking. Place your most important keywords in the title, in the sub-head, and in the body copy. It’s easy.

Up and to the left Search engines are programmed to read documents like a Western reader, starting at the top left of the page. When writing your body copy, your most important keywords belong at the front of your press release, where the search engine (and the reader) will find them quickly. Although it’s not a ‘silver bullet’ for a better ranking, search engines see it as evidence that your page should rank higher.

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Tip: part of the brainstorming process could include a review of competitors’ websites or online releases to discover the keywords they’re optimizing. A tool like SEMRush.com2 can give you a good idea of this – all you need to do is enter your competitor’s URL.

Golden Rule: optimize for people first

Really good SEO is twofold: helping search engines to do their job, and creating a positive user experience for people. In a sense, the tasks are the same.

On an obvious level, if you lure a reader to your press release with keywords that bear little relation to your actual content – for example, optimizing your release for “women’s running shoes” when your shoes are all men’s - you will alienate your potential customer. Apart from a page view, it’s not going to result in the outcome you’re looking for.

On a more technical level, search engine algorithms – the formulas that match search terms to content – are designed to look for language and content that genuinely matches. A positive search experience means that users are more likely to use the same search engine again, which increases the likelihood of their clicking on an ad – the principal source of search engine revenue. Just as with your customer, trying to trick a search engine into indexing your content too highly (e.g. by ‘stuffing’ it with too many keywords) will ‘alienate’ it and lead to a downgraded search ranking.

Don’t be tempted to cheat. With keywords, it pays to think like a search engine as well as a marketer, and create a positive user experience.

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Using links and media to create a call to action that worksThe function of the traditional press release is to get news coverage. While an online press release does the same, it can drive other results as well – as long as you give readers something to do.

If sales is your goal, you should link to your website first – preferably to a landing page that you can track with Web analytics to measure performance. You’d use a landing page for an email or pay-per-click campaign, and your press release campaign should be no different.

If your main aim is media coverage, you might direct readers to a video of your CEO explaining why your news is going to make things better – or you could embed the video into your news release).

Embedding multimedia like images, logos and video into your press release makes your news more appealing and more likely to be written about. In a 2010 PRWeb survey of journalists and bloggers, 88 per cent agreed that embedded images enhance their experience of news releases, with 52 percent saying the same of video. Significantly, 32% of bloggers and journalists said they would be more likely to cover a story if it included multimedia.

Multimedia assets also have shelf life well beyond your news release. In fact, they’re essential to the next steps of your campaign.

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And remember... If you expect people to share and link to your press release, it needs to be written to be shareable. It has to be good, it has to be true, and it has to deliver on its promise. If this doesn’t sound like your press release, go back and take another look at it before investing your time in the next steps.

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The benefits of bloggingLet’s say you have a webpage on your company site about a new pair of red running shoes. It’s an ‘all about’ resource page on red running shoes, because this part of the campaign is about attracting people who are just investigating them.

It doesn’t have a form on it – it’s just designed to rank well. Your online news release reflects general information about the new running shoes, and it links to the webpage. Now you need different links to the page, so that it ranks highly. You want to dominate the category of ‘red running shoes’ when people search for them.

A blog is another way of reaching people. It’s a content management system that lets you do great things with writing and digital assets like images and embedded videos. You can link to things – including your webpage. Through RSS feeds, search, and social media, your blog posts can reach a great deal of people – far more than by pitching journalists with your story. And the people you reach are going to be more targeted because they’ve opted into reading your blog.

As well as this, if anybody copies and republishes the content from your blog post, that syndication may also include a link back to the page you’re promoting.

What to blog and how to write itLet’s say that you’re going to write your blog post to go live just after your release does.

Like your release, you’re going to optimize it with keywords.

However, your blog post needs to be different. Firstly, copying and pasting your release – posting duplicate content – can cause search engines to ignore your blog post. Secondly, you’re in social media territory now, where readers have different expectations.

The audience you’re targeting with your red running shoes is still in the early buying stage. Your press release is a formal announcement

You’ve published your press release and created an online asset. Now, double your online strength by repurposing your story and digital assets into a blog post.

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Tip: it’s good to include video or other multimedia in your blog post. As well as making it more interesting, it provides content that other people can share independently.

Simple ideas can work as well as bigger ones. It’s great to conduct an interview with your CEO and publish the video – but you could also use some simple screen capture software to make a short product demo.

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to reach people who are just investigating. Your blog post should empathize a little more with what it’s like to have the problem that red running shoes solve. Let’s say they make you more visible at night. The blog post might take a story format: ‘Mrs. Jones goes running along a busy road every evening. Imagine if there was…’ Or three scenarios – common running problems that red running shoes solve.

Make your blog post more conversational and more about opinion, storytelling and empathizing with who your reader might be. You need to tell your story in a less formal way than your press release does. If possible, you should also embed multimedia like a YouTube video in your blog post. As well as making your content more engaging, it offers new ways to attract readers later on.

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Golden Rule: it’s all in the conversation

Blog readers expect conversational media. A blog is unlikely to feature your company’s earnings statements and product specs – readers expect it to be written by people at the company eager to share what they’ve been working on in a relatively informal manner.

Think of it this way: if the press release is the equivalent of the news anchor announcing the news, the blog post is the equivalent of bumping into a friend who works in the newsroom and having a conversation about it.

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The benefits of sharing #1: building links On certain keywords – moderately competitive ones – news releases will get search visibility on Google fairly quickly. A site like PRWeb already has a lot of ‘page rank’ – where search engines recognize the site as important and automatically give its content a higher position - and part of the value of publishing there is that it passes some of that page rank to every new press release.

However, because every news release is a new document when first published to the Web, it could always use a little help.. The way to do it is to acquire inbound links: links from other websites to your news release, which can make your news release rank higher in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Social media helps you to promote your content in different areas of the Web to attract the links that will help search engines understand that your news release is interesting and worth ranking highly.

A word of caution: don’t go posting links to your news like a bull in a china shop. Promoting your news with a comment on a blog about red shoes is good. Promoting it five times in a row on the same blog is irritating.

Follow etiquette, don’t spam, be appropriate to the forum that you’re in, and choose the channels where the people who care about your news are. Get it right and your news release can really take off.

Four tips for social media success #1: Submit your release or blog to a social bookmarking websiteSocial bookmarking sites like Delicious allow users to create and share public ‘bookmarks’ of links to sites they like – and you can do the same for your press release or blog post. Although links posted on these sites don’t increase your page ranking, they do provide

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You’ve created your content—now it’s time to promote it on your social media networks. You have a Twitter network and a Facebook network… right? Your blog might have a good number of subscribers, and an email newsletter. Good. Here’s how to start pushing your content out through social media channels.

Tip: People are creating fantastic content out there and no one’s linking to it. That’s because no one knows it exists. When you create linkable content, promote it.

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exposure and attract readers who might read your news and link to it from their own sites.

When using social bookmarking, it’s vital to understand the community of the site before you submit a link. If your news release focuses on a hi-tech aspect of your red running shoes, by all means submit it to Digg, where an interest in tech is the common denominator. If your release is about a celebrity who’s been spotted wearing your running shoes, consider going elsewhere.

#2: Get Twitter RightIt’s great to promote your release with a tweet – but, as with any social channel, you need to take into account the ways of writing that work there.

Don’t make the common mistake of simply tweeting the title. Just like your press release, your tweet needs to make a promise, be believable and be compelling. You just need to accomplish that in 140 characters.

In fact – less than 140 characters. If you’re looking for retweets, you need to leave enough space for people to retweet it. Not doing so is another common mistake that’s easily avoided.

#3: Promote those who promote youAfter your initial tweet, it’s bad form to promote your press release repeatedly in a social media context. However, it’s good form to promote other people who promote your news. Drawing attention to a blog or news site that covered your running shoes is effective, as long as the site links to your press release in a way that search engines can crawl or follow.

#4: Engage with people on blogsWhy not promote your news release by proactively reaching out to people and joining conversations?

Many blogs and websites have comments as a way to inspire engagement. You can take advantage of this need by publishing comments or responding to comments on relevant articles and including a link back to your press release.

If it makes sense editorially, you can do it. If someone has published an article about the top ten running shoes, and didn’t include yours, you could write a comment complimenting the article, pointing out that your red running shoes solve a problem that these ones don’t, and linking to your press release. You can also arrange to write guest blog posts, with an author biography that includes a link to your news release.

The benefits of sharing #2: promoting your content, driving traffic and going viral As we’ve seen, a lot of social media sites don’t pass on any page rank when their members link to your press release or blog post. However, there’s still a benefit: exposure, publicity and direct traffic – as well as the possibility of someone creating a new blog post based on, say, a retweet of your press release.

How it works: social media search Did you embed a YouTube video in your blog post? That’s good – because the search function on YouTube is one of the Web’s largest search engines. By optimizing your video’s title, tags and description, you can capture search traffic. And, in the video description, you can link back to your press release, blog, or landing page. Search engines don’t care about this link, but people will – and you’ll get more traffic.

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Golden Rule: start growing your networks now. Literally - right now.

The techniques discussed here work best when you’ve been building a network, commenting and joining the conversation in social channels for months. Then, when the time comes to promote something, you can share it with them before everyone else.

Work in a concurrent order, not a sequential one.

It’s a big difference, but a lot of PR pros still do the second: they get so excited about what they’re promoting that they only create their accounts on the day of the press release, with the first tweet of the campaign being its URL.

I’m a strong advocate of spending ten minutes a day doing something on one or two different types of channels, and then using editorial discretion on your own stuff – the same discretion that you would when deciding whether to link to someone else’s stuff.

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How it works: going viralAs well as driving traffic, you’re now publishing content that other people can embed into their own blogs. It doesn’t have to be just video – you could take some screenshots of your product and upload them to an image site like Picasa or Flickr. You could summarize your press release into five slides and upload them to SlideShare. There are lots of possibilities – but remember to optimize all of your assets with keywords so that people can find them.

Social media and search work together. While you want to be where your customers are searching, people are increasingly willing to engage and have conversations with businesses and brands. If you’re really successful at promoting your news with content, the outcome of these conversations might be entirely new content. Encourage it by asking for opinions and getting discussions going. You can create a situation where people aren’t just having conversations with you and your brand – they’re having conversations with each other. Your news can take on a life of its own - but all links back to you and your online news release.

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Tip: social media search is fast becoming a rival to traditional search engines. Facebook’s internal search is one of the top 20 search engines. YouTube is more popular as a search engine than Yahoo! and Bing, while Twitter is searched 18 billion times per month through Twitter.com and third-party apps.

Golden Rule: Listen before you commit yourself

When you’re promoting content over social media, listen first—then, keep listening as you develop relationships, engage with audiences and promote your content. Use a social media monitoring tool which harvests conversations. It shows you where the influential people you want to reach are—and that’s vital to know before you commit your time and resources to connecting with them.

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About VocusVocus, Inc. (NASDAQ: VOCS) is a leading provider of on-demand software for public relations management. Our Web-based software suite helps organizations of all sizes to fundamentally change the way they communicate with both the media and the public, optimizing their public relations and increasing their ability to measure its impact. Our on-demand software addresses the critical functions of public relations including media relations, news distribution and news monitoring. We deliver our solutions over the Internet using a secure, scalable application and system architecture, which allows our customers to eliminate expensive up-front hardware and software costs and to quickly deploy and adopt our on-demand software. Vocus is used by more than 7,700 organizations worldwide and is available in seven languages. Vocus is based in Lanham, MD with offices in North America, Europe and Asia. For more information, please visit http://www.vocus.com or call (800) 345-5572.http://www.prweb.com/releases/Vocus-Earnings/Q3-2010/prweb4703774.htm

About PRWebPRWeb is recognized as a leading online news and press release distribution service worldwide. Since 1997, PRWeb has been changing the way businesses, marketing departments and public relations firms think about press releases. PRWeb was the first company to develop a distribution strategy around direct-to-consumer communication and to build and offer a platform for search engine optimized press release <http://service.prweb.com/learning/article/search-engine-promotion/> distribution. PRWeb is an online news distribution service of Vocus, Inc., a leading provider of on-demand public relations management software. For more information, go to http://www.prweb.com.http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/10/prweb4690314.htm

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Footnotes:

1: https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__u=1000000000&__c=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWO RD_IDEAS#search.none

2 : http://www.semrush.com/