Most people have real difficulty writing press releases. Some people even compare writing a press release to working while under influence of a week-long migraine headache. Ugh!

You don't have to strain your brain. Relax! Believe it or not, it's easy to have fun when you write a news release. You can minimize hassle and help yourself to a great news release with something I call “The 3 I Technique". Here's how.

Start by using following basic assessment strategy to define what to say in a basic press release:

1. Who are my customers?

2. What do they read, watch or listen to when they get information that motivates them to buy a product I can offer?

3. What media allow me to target these people with a news release in way they appear to be responding?

4. What types of articles or feature options are presented in media you've identified?

5. What can you offer to match readership and editorial interests you've identified?

The answers to these questions establish your writing environment. To make actual news release creation process simple, you then utilize “The 3 I Technique” to see what you can learn about what your key target media look for. This can be a very insightful experience and you can learn how to do it and develop your own great news releases.

The specific goal in this case is to learn and devise an approach to getting in to say, USA Today. Of course, you can use this technique to write news releases for any individual publication or a target group of publications.

The 3 I Technique is pretty simple and works like this:

1. Identify a successful model. 2. Imitate structure and content of success model. 3. Innovate with your own information.

Step 1: Select your top media or publication.

Study it carefully and identify a successful article or book or product review similar to what you want to offer. What you are looking for is an article that is just like what you wish would be written about you. If you want to be in USA Today, study USA Today. Look at and analyze five to ten USA Today articles.

In each case plan to evaluate their writing structure and glean what USA Today produces from their contributing reviewers.

Identify and review number of words in each article and know that a one-page news release can have between 200 and 400 words and still fit on one page in 14-point type.

Identify number of words per paragraph.

Identify number of sentences per paragraph.

After analyzing five to ten articles, select one or two of them as your favorites. These are your success models to emulate.

Step 2: Imitate structure and content of success model.

Develop a general outline of structure and purpose of each sentence and paragraph in your chosen success model article. Do this so that your own article will parallel outline of successfully published review article.

Sounds familiar?

I know a lot of people are receiving them, even though they should not. The problem is that many so-called “Internet Marketers” collect emails from newsgroups with a software and spam people on this list. Then they write a nice sentence at beginning of message like one above, thinking that you will think something like, “I guess I forgot I subscribed to this mailing list”. I call these mailings “legal spam”, since they trick people into thinking that they agreed to receive them.

BEWARE: “Anonymous Marketers” also use a nice legal scheme where they write “To be removed from this list, hit REPLY button and write REMOVE in subject line” and then they add something like, “According bill 1234567890, since a way to be removed from list is included in this message, this is not spam.”

The fact is: it does not matter whether or not it is legal, it is still very annoying, because they were unsolicited emails. And sometimes when you reply with REMOVE in subject line, you receive a nice email from you ISP, saying that message could not be delivered because email address does not exist.

Of course, it only takes a few seconds to start reading these emails and delete them. However, if we want to have an internet that is a nice place to be. These tactics (and people using them) must be stop. This is why we must try to stop these postings: to build a “high-quality internet.”