Leveraging public relations to gain visibility in the marketplace is often overlooked by many small and mid-size businesses. Well done, public relations is far reaching and much more credible than advertising. For hundreds of years, PR has been about providing newsworthy information to reporters and editors of media outlets, such as magazines and newspapers, to ultimately reach the readers of those outlets.   

With Web 2.0* in full swing, the rules of public relations are changing. Now PR is also about reaching your actual prospective buyer rather than simply getting media coverage. It’s about driving traffic to your website, achieving higher rankings on search engines, and competing more effectively with press releases.   

How does this work? People, media and prospective buyers alike, turn to the Internet when searching for information. News releases today can be about anything your firm is doing from speaking at conferences or winning a new client to providing a new solution to an old problem. What your clients and prospects care about; that’s what your news releases address.  

Then—and this is important—publish the news release on your website and distribute it through a service such as PR Web. Optimize the release by using keywords, meta descriptions and title tags so it can be found by search engines and include hyperlinks to your website. PR Web offers Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds for news releases, which make them available to other sites, blogs and individuals.  

PR Web also lets you target industries and locale for your news release. For instance, if you want to specifically reach cardiologists or accountants in Chicago and New York, you could via the PR Web distribution. Your release reaches vast numbers of people when other websites post your news, which drives traffic to your website.

Each release has a “tail” that continues to reach prospects for months, even years, after it has been distributed. I’ve been working with the media and helping business clients get media coverage for a couple of decades. I’ve seen incredible results from using PR Web. Traditional PR isn’t washed up yet though. The third-party credibility it achieves is still valuable and more cost-effective than advertising. It’s best to work in transition mode.

After all, Web 3.0 is right around the corner. 

*Web 2.0 refers to the web development and design that facilitates interactive information sharing (social networking sites, blogs, video sharing sites, etc.).