Press releases are a favorite of SEOs and PRs. You can get an SEO boost by earning links from journalists across the web. You also get traditional PR benefits. However, focusing on your media page can bring you even greater dividends.

A press page is a part of a broader strategy. You’re doing “outbound PR” if you email and phone publications to try to get your client or yourself mentioned. This is the PR equivalent of cold calling. Surprisingly, journalists don’t like it. Bloomberg’s David Lynch warns that ‘you’re likely to strike out most often’.

A press page is inbound PR. Journalists come to this page looking for information to help them write their stories. Although the story may not be about you directly, there is often still room for you to contribute. If you create a press page that is professional and well-written, someone will want to promote it on trusted sites with high authority that many people trust.

Tim Donnelly explains. When journalists want to find you they have two things in mind.

Sometimes they are looking for information about company news, product releases, or industry trends. Sometimes they want to talk to multiple companies for more depth and balance.

Donnelly says that, especially in the second case, ‘you want the media to be able to navigate your website quickly to find the experts at your company they are looking for. You must ensure that reporters and editors have access to all the information they require, from contact information to photographs, quickly and seamlessly.

What does a great press page look like?

Many press pages are difficult to find, uninformative, or hard to navigate. Your press page should deliver the information journalists need.

Lizzie Benton, Datify’s spokesperson, says that it is important to remember that many other businesses want the same coverage. If you don’t deliver what they want and when they want, then you might as well forget all about it.

Who has a great page for the press?

Instagram’s pretty solid.

It is easy to navigate from page to page. It’s easy to navigate from page to page. This is crucial: journalists are familiar with the contents of a press page. The more information they have, the harder it is for them to find the important stuff.

MapBox provides an easy way to navigate based on what the journalist needs, rather than the type of information. This is a huge plus.

You would know where to find a brief introduction to MapBox or images to illustrate an article.

It’s easy to find

Impatience is a common trait among casual website visitors. Do you think a journalist who is on deadline will be more impatient? Make it easy for journalists to locate your press materials. If you have the space, place the press section in the top menu.

You can put it in a sidebar, or the bottom menu if you don’t have space. Tech journalist Dan Ryans said that he doesn’t want to make him search for it or hide it under “Company”, “About”, or, worst of all, “Investor Relations”.

Asana placed theirs under “About” (Sorry Dan!) It’s still very easy to find. It takes only one click to reach it.

It is important to minimize the scrolling, clicking, and searching that a journalist does to get to your photos and press releases.

Give them what they need.

What information are journalists looking for when they visit your page?

Press releases

They should be clearly labeled, kept separate from “in the news” and made clear about what they are.

Make them easily accessible. It’s more difficult to copy and paste a press release that is locked in PDF. It should be an HTML document so journalists can quickly grab the text.

What should a press release say?

Press Release: Anatomy of a Killer

The keys here are clarity and brevity. Your press release should not be misunderstood by anyone who sees it.

• Who is your company?
• What to do
• What just happened?
• What role does the quote have in the organization? Who are they?

Journalists look for images, stats, and quotes. Make your press release simple to read and stand out.

Include:

Stats box: Gather all of the important stats and label them. Journalists don’t want to hunt or squint but copy and paste.

Infographics: Pre-made imagery for branding that helps explain something in the space. Journalists will grab it with both their hands.

Boilerplate. This would be the part that is identical in each press release.

A section that explains who you are and your work is necessary. It’s a simplified version of your “About Us” page. According to Susan Paynton, Boilerplate copy “contains all information that you want readers to know about your brand,” including your age, location, specialties, awards, clients, and website links.

The boilerplate is located in the ‘About Amazon” section. This section is boilerplate.

Block quotes: If you want to make key quotes stand out in magazines, newspapers, and blogs, block quotes are the way to go. To give balanced insight to their readers, reporters love to use quotes from people in the industry. The reporter will ask a question and invite the source to answer. The Washington Post’s Hayley Takayama wrote

Experts have identified several reasons for the slow adoption of VR technology. The technology can cause motion sickness, and it is expensive. Developers said it’s been difficult to get people to try it. It’s difficult to give people an adequate taste of the virtual reality experience on flat screens.

“How can you advertise a color TV with black-and-white TVs?” It takes people walking down the main street to see it for themselves,” stated Steve Bowler, co-founder of VR game developer CloudGate Studio.

Tsukayama asks for the help of other industry experts to explain why VR has taken so long to take off. Without these perspectives, the article wouldn’t be as meaty. Reporters are often pressed for time and don’t have the luxury of searching for the right quote to support their points, educate their readers, or move their stories forward. Make it stand out with bold block quotes on your press pages and individual releases.

Don’t let your enthusiasm get in the way of your press release copy. They want facts, figures, and quotes, not your enthusiasm. suggests to startup PR Oliver Griffin that they stick to facts and avoid adjectives.

The News

This stuff is fine, but don’t mix it with your press releases. You might be better off not releasing press releases if your brand isn’t making an impact in the media. GigSky does it right.

You can see how they use press releases and foreground images. The principles of good design make it super easy to find them.

It is listed in the news, but it is at the bottom of the page. This is the most important priority that most journalists would give it. Mark Shapiro states ‘As both a PR professional as well as a writer, it is very important to have an archive of recent media coverage. It’s a great section to use for sales, but they will be directing people there. It shouldn’t compete with press releases to get journalists’ attention.

Images

A content strategy that is based on a text-only approach to content would not work. Images are increasingly in demand by consumers. Journalists have the same audience. You should be able to provide them with a photo, a quote, and some figures about someone in your space. Images of:

Products

Each release features high-quality graphics and a slick design. Click on a release to see a detailed press release. It is full of images and illustrations that highlight and illustrate aspects of the product.

Journalists don’t have to take screenshots of those images or figure out how they can be obtained: you will find the option to download all the images in 1000+ px sizes at the bottom, just above the boilerplate.

You shouldn’t show products in isolation. They should be displayed in action. This is where both you (the journalist), and your user (the user) want the same thing: to share photos of your product or service being used as widely as possible.

Members of the Key Team

You can have them do things as well as take standard headshots.

Pictures of executives standing at podiums, gripping their hands and smiling are rare. Instead, we see speakers speaking, listening, and thinking.

Key Events

Most likely, you haven’t launched any rockets in recent years.

If you want journalists to write about your experience, take a few photos.

Logos

You can have background-free PNGs with your logo in several different sizes. Journalists won’t accept your JPEGs or “Photoshopping” them with a lot of resizing. So offer standard sizes.

Contact Information

These web forms are not the best option. Instead, provide an email address that directs to a real person’s inbox. This is where the journalist gets stuck. ‘info@website.com or ‘pr@startup.io say ‘no one checks this.

For extra points, add a direct phone number. You’ll lose points if this is the main switchboard. The journalist doesn’t want the caller to wait while their worst nightmare, a klutzy intern figures out how to get them through. This number is unlikely to be called by non-press personnel. However, if this concern arises, Google will do the right thing and clarify that press means press.

Include a phone number if you want to include it. This is especially important if you are in New England, and the journalist calls from the South China Sea.

Conclusion

You can create or improve a press page by focusing on what the user wants. Keep it simple, concise, and focused on the facts. Make everything easy to find. Images are important!