Why your RSS feed could get you more publicity
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Press releases can help you in three ways:
- Get media coverage for you or your business, products or services
- Increase search engine rankings by using keywords and posting to online PR sites
- Get prospects excited and motivated to want to learn more about you and do business with you
But most people don’t use one simple tool to help their news releases do all three: that’s putting them on your own RSS feed.
Think about it for a moment: if you are consistently writing releases (I recommend at least two a month), then why not create a blog separately for them on your site and use the RSS feed to help with distribution?
Many reporters are using RSS feeds to get their releases, because they can customize what they are receiving for their target market. Many of the press release posting sites only have on feed, so journalists avoid them due to all the clutter of releases not pertinent to them. They would certainly rather subscribe to news feeds, like your press release feed, that’s targeted.
And by putting your releases on a blog-type site, Google, and other search engines, will be crawling your site more often, especially with your updated content. Of course this doesn’t hurt your search ranking, but helps them.
And when your prospects are searching, they’ll find you easier and your release will give you more credibility because it’s written in a style that’s objective, not full of salesy-hype. They may also grab your RSS feed as well.
Your press release RSS feed can also be streamed through your social media outlets, giving you even more exposure to journalists and your target audience.
Talk about a great bang for your buck.
Want to learn more on how to use press releases to get your prospects finding you? I’ll be sharing more about RSS feeds and other press release tips at Leesa Barnes’ Social Media Telesummit in just a couple of weeks.
Editors Note: That is an affiliate link, but you need to know that the Social Media Telesummit is one of my favorite events of the year because you get real tactics to use on social media platforms to build your business.
nifty little tidbit here. Adding this to my list of things to do when I revamp my site…
The other important thing to consider when writing content that is republished in an RSS feed is how you write your headlines. Excellent headline writing is vital today more than ever. Most feed readers (like Google Reader) treat news like an inbox where only the subject, in this case the headline, is shown. If you’re headline isn’t short and descriptive then it’s like to get passed over. Plus, many RSS feeds are republished on Twitter where the 140 character limit is crucial to getting your tweet read. In fact 120 characters is what you should shoot for in order for your tweet to be retweeted easily.
So getting your content into an RSS feed is certainly important to allow for quicker consumption of your news. However, good headline writing is even more important.
Scott,
I see where you are going with this. Yes, headlines are important, but if you have a salesy crappy headline and salesy crappy press releases, you aren’t going to do well with prospects. Sure, you’ll get your rankings up there, but the conversion won’t happen. I think it goes hand in hand, don’t you?
And my real point is most people don;t even think press releases should be posted and distributed via RSS. What a waste of content!
Shannon, I couldn’t agree more. It’s a big relief to find someone else campaigning on the importance of RSS in PR. There are some other things to watch out for too:
-Make sure your RSS feed contains the full content of your release. Some settings and services will give you the first few sentences… why make someone who has subscribed click through?
-Headlines are important like Scott said. But you have to find that balance between interesting to readers and interesting to Google. If your approach is truly social, the readers should come first.
When it came to developing Presskit’n, we knew we had to build newsrooms around RSS (and even if the newsroom itself is locked, we redirect to the RSS feed).
As far as I know, we’re still the only ones offering full, free RSS feeds in a social media release platform.