To most people a press release is a mysterious artefact that corporations issue and journalists ignore. Both halves are half true, and neither is the point. For a person building a record, a release is the cheapest way to create a dated, third party hosted page that states your facts, names your company, and links to your canonical site. It lands on dozens of news and finance sites that search engines index. It costs about the price of a dinner. And because almost nobody does it for themselves, having one makes you look established in a way a LinkedIn post never will.
What you need to announce
A release needs a reason to exist. You do not announce yourself; you announce something that happened. Any of these will do: a book, a new role, a company launch or funding, a product, a speaking slot at a named event, an award, a milestone with a number in it, a partnership, a podcast launch, a research finding. If none of those is true this month, wait until one is. A release with no news is noise, and the sites that carry it have filters for noise.
The structure
Every release has the same bones, and following them is part of why it reads as legitimate.
- Headline, under twelve words, in sentence case. The news, with your name or your company in it. "Maria Chen publishes Counting What Matters, a guide to subscription pricing" rather than "Exciting new book released".
- Dateline and first paragraph. City, date, then one paragraph that answers who, what, when and why it matters. Someone who reads only this paragraph should have the whole story.
- A second paragraph with the detail. What the book covers, what the role involves, what the company does. Specific, no adjectives.
- One quote from you. Two or three sentences, in your voice, saying why this matters. Write it the way you would say it on a podcast, not the way a committee would approve it.
- A boilerplate paragraph about you. Your one exact name form, your title, your company, one sentence on what you are known for, and a link to your home page. This paragraph is the same in every release you ever send, and it is the part that feeds the graph.
- Contact details. A name, an email on your domain, your site address. Then "###" or "Ends" on its own line, the convention that tells an editor the release is over.
Three hundred and fifty words is plenty. Five hundred is the ceiling.
A template
Writing the quote
The quote is the only part of a release in your voice and the part most likely to be lifted into coverage, so it is worth more care than its two sentences suggest. Say why the thing matters, in the way you would say it to a smart friend, with one specific in it. "We built this because every pricing tool we tried assumed you already knew your customers' willingness to pay, and almost nobody does" beats "We are thrilled to announce this exciting new chapter". No thrilled, no excited, no chapter. If you would not say it on a podcast, do not put it in quotation marks.
Headlines that work for a person
The headline carries the whole release on the syndication sites, which show it in a list with hundreds of others. Yours needs a name, a verb and a thing: who did what. "Maria Chen publishes Counting What Matters" is complete in five words. Add a clause that says why anyone should care, in plain terms: "a guide to pricing for subscription companies". Avoid adjectives entirely; "groundbreaking" has never once made a reader click. Avoid questions and puns, which the networks' filters treat as low quality. And keep your name in the first three words, because the name is what the machine will index the page under, and what a client searching you will match on.
Timing and cadence
One release per real event, timed to the event. The week a book is available to order, the day a funding round closes, the morning a talk is announced on the conference site. Releases that arrive a month after the news read as afterthoughts and the sites that carry them have seen the story elsewhere. One a quarter is a sensible ceiling for a person; more than that and the news gets thinner to fill the slots, and thin releases train the distribution networks to deprioritize you.
What to expect from distribution
The budget tier gets you syndication, not journalism. Expect your release to appear verbatim on a few dozen sites that republish newswire content, some of them recognizable finance and local news brands, most of them small. Do not expect a reporter to call. The value is the dozens of dated, indexable third party pages carrying your facts and your link, which is exactly what the machine counts. If a journalist does pick it up, that is a bonus, and the way to raise the odds is a genuinely newsworthy headline and a quote worth lifting, not a more expensive tier.
What to link
The link in the boilerplate goes to your home page, not your LinkedIn and not your company's site. Your home page is the canonical record; every release pointing at it is another third party page that agrees with it. Link the book to its retailer page and the company to its site, but your name goes to your domain. The release is a corroborating source for your record, and a source has to point at the thing it corroborates.
Where to send it, and what it costs
The wires are the services that push a release out to the news sites that republish it. For a person, the budget tier is the right tier.
| Service | Rough cost per release | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| EIN Presswire | About $99 to $149 | Wide syndication to indexable news and finance sites, fast |
| PRWeb | About $105 to $110 | Long established, good search pickup |
| eReleases | $399 to $699 | Adds distribution through PR Newswire's network |
| PR Newswire direct | $800 and up | The tier large companies use; not needed for this |
Prices move; check before you buy. Expect your release to appear on twenty to a hundred sites within a day, most of them small, a few of them recognizable, all of them indexable.
Three releases a person could send this year
Afterwards
Log it. The release is an appearance like any other: date, headline, a link to the version on the most recognizable site that carried it. Put it in the press section of your record, where the rest of your appearances live, and add the best link to your media kit. Then share the hosted version, not your own copy, because the point was the third party page.