Steps to a Writing an Effective Press ReleasesWritten by Diana Ennen
Want to get most media attention and spotlight for your business? Then first place to start is with a GREAT press release. Now I can almost see half of you leaving now, dreading thought of having to write one of these. But wait!! I’m going to show you easy methods to make your press release work for you and get attention it deserves. Ready? Let’s go.We’ll briefly go over basics because of their importance. Editors want to see things done RIGHT way. I would bet that a lot of good releases simply get tossed out just because they aren’t set up properly. To a busy editor, that all too familiar 10 second glance says a lot for you and your business and if you’ve done your research enough to warrant that release to be placed in their newspaper or magazine. Here are your essentials: "FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE" on top left of page. Your contact name, phone number, e-mail address, and website follows. Headline is next, normally in bold and centered on page. Summarize what release is about and capture their attention. Spend almost as much time on your headline as you do writing release. It’s that important. The press release body starts with location of release and date (Margate, Florida, May 5, 2005.) Most press releases are between 200-500 words, and no more than a page. The first paragraph has most important information. Don’t save best for last, it won’t get read. In this paragraph answer questions, who, what, when, where and why? It is recommended that you write press releases in 3rd person and use short sentences and paragraphs. Do not go over board, trying to dazzle editor, it won’t work. Target your release. You will be sending your release to a specific audience so make sure that in your release you keep to what would appeal to that audience. What don’t they know that you can add? Nothing works better than getting an “AAH HAA” when an editor is reviewing your release. Provide statistics. Do some research and find some relevant information that applies. You can easily do this through Google. Once you find your quote, do a Google search or Yahoo quote on that particular topic. However, don’t stop on first Google link and take that for gospel. Research it a bit further. Have it come from a respectable company or magazine.
| | GoogSpy: Business Counter Intelligence for EveryoneWritten by Sandra Stammberger
So, you want to know what your competitors are up to these days, or maybe you want to research a keyword campaign that will rank you at top of heap for whatever product or service you're selling? Meet GoogSpy, a special search engine that not only shows you what Google AdWords your competitors are buying, but it will display all of search terms that rank them in top 10, PLUS it even displays their top 25 competitors.What search engine does it base all of its intelligence on? Well, with a name like GOOGspy, there can only be one. GoogSpy.com is powered by a product called "WebScraper+" which is brainchild of Arizona-based Velocityscape. According to Michael J. Roberts, Velocityscape's President, GoogSpy extracts 500,000 search results per day from Google and loads them into GoogSpy.com database which it then makes available for anyone to search. Normally, when it comes to business intelligence software, a sentence which read: "which it then makes available for anyone to search." would end with phrase "for a fee.", but that's not case with GoogSpy. At least for time being tool is 100% free to use by anyone who cares to go to http://www.GoogSpy.com and use it. So, what's value of such a powerful tool for average business web site operator? That depends upon how much value you place on being able to see how a competitor spends their advertising dollar and who else is competing with them. The interface is fairly straight forward. You enter your search term in text box and click "Search button. If GoogSpy finds content it will display company name, if any, as a hyperlink under company heading and search terms, also as hyperlinks, under Search terms heading. If it doesn't find anything then it doesn't display anything. For about two minutes more development time programmers could have added a "Sorry, your search term did not return any results" message but I guess less is more with these guys.
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