Formatting Your Press Release for Maximum Pickups

Writing a press release is easy enough when you have a template to follow and specific guidelines and instructions that will ensure the flow of your news. But we can never forget the smallest and simplest details that will make or break the distribution of your press release. In this tutorial article, you’ll be getting several tips to improve on your press release format and making it more search engine friendly to ensure that everyone can’t resist to get a piece of your news.

Using UPPERCASE or lowercase letters: Your headline should be written with the first letter of each word capitalized. Exceptions to this include words less than three characters and prepositions.

What you shouldn’t be doing is to write a press release entirely in uppercase. There’s no necessity and this increases its chances of being ignored by journalists and many readers. If your intention is to create emphasis on certain words or phrases, simply use bold or italics. You don’t want your press release to be classified as advertising or spam because of the all caps.

Summary Paragraph: The reason you see this all over again is because it is that important. As you should know, some media sites will only display your headline and summary, so if your press release is missing its summary paragraph, people aren’t going to know what your press release is about and as such, just won’t click and read your press release.

Dateline: Sometimes this includes City, State followed by the date but the former is not always necessary. The purpose of the date is to reflect when your release was distributed.

Spacing: You know you’re going to have separate paragraphs to discuss separate ideas, so space each paragraph out with a line as necessary. There’s no need for dashes and asterisks to segregate your press release into sections.

Language: Grammar is just a standard set of rules that has to be taken into account. No one wants to read press releases that does not sound legitimate or credible. Most press distribution sites would reject your press release if it’s filled with grammatical errors.

At MarketersMedia, we only support the English language so don’t use any other languages when submitting your press release. Alternatively for the more advanced coders, HTML embedding is supported.

Anchor texts: Even though anchor links are useful, try not to include more than one link per 200 words of your release. You don’t want to get labeled as spam.

Bullet points: These are good but they shouldn’t stretch across the press release like it was meant for grocery shopping. Search Engines tend to reject such press releases so keep the bullet points short and few.

Graphs and charts: All these should be converted to image files such as jpg, png or gif in order for them to display properly. We also only allow 1 image per press release.

Word count: The standard word count should be between 500 and 800 words. Remember that you’d always want to express as much as you can using as few words as possible.

*Now that you've formatted your press release, don't miss out on the 8 things to double-check before submitting a press release!