Would your green business benefit from FREE promotion to thousands of people?
Of course it would! Who knocks back free marketing?
This also applies to eco friendly organisations, charities and events, by the way.
As a vastly experienced environmental journalist, I can help you achieve this.
But if you’d like to give it a go yourself, I share below a beautiful green mountain of knowledge, experience and advice, completely free of charge…
So no need to pay for a PR team, no need to pay for a course. So many people need help in these difficult times, so just read, learn and act to get results!
How And Where Do I Get Free Promotion?
As the headline indicated, we are looking at the media in this article - traditional and modern. And there are huge opportunities in both - if you know how to work the system.
You might not realise this, but there’s never been a better time to raise your profile through the traditional media.
Let me explain…
Even before the global Covid-19 pandemic, the media had been under intense financial pressure and had been making huge job cuts.
This has left skeleton staffs in charge, running around trying to do everything, when they just don’t have the time.
The situation has got even worse through the pandemic and that’s bad news for them, but great news for you and your business.
I can say this with certainty because I have been a journalist for 30 years. I’m only talking the talk because I’ve walked the walk, and here I’m going to walk you through everything you need to know to get free promotion in the media.
Are Press Releases Still Important Today?
Yes. Here is why you must still consider the press release an important factor in your marketing strategy:
- It is true that sales of printed newspapers and magazines are falling, all over the world, as digital communications take over, but these publications still have a loyal core readership.
- Traditional publications also have websites and social media and apps and reach tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of people.
- The journalists remaining in their jobs (not many sadly) desperately need your help to fill their pages, websites and social media feeds.
- All you have to do is give them something newsworthy that they’ll genuinely want to share with their audience. (Don’t worry, I’m going to show you how to do this)
- If you give them something they don’t need to tidy up, if you give them the finished product, that’s as good as a free advert for you — an editorial mention, perhaps a page lead, would cost you thousands if you’d paid for advertising in that space instead.
- Ten minutes spent reading this article might save you employing a public relations officer at a cost of tens of thousands more!
- Instead of ‘press release’ get used to saying ‘media release’ and realise you can send this also to radio and TV stations, website-only news channels, niche websites and blogs, influencers, forums, and to many other sources of free promotion and publicity — as well as publishing it on your own business website and social media channels.
Who Can Benefit From Sending Media Releases?
Another effect of smaller staffs at newspapers and magazines is a lack of specialists - and you may already have witnessed a tragic shortage of journalists who are versed in environmental issues.
So media outlets will be grateful for your informative, newsworthy environmental media releases, whichever of these categories you belong in…
- Business owners
- Start-Up owners
- Marketing professionals
- Marketing teams
- Home Workers
- Entrepreneurs
- PR professionals
- Press officers
- Event organisers
- Bloggers
- Charities
- Nonprofits
- Anyone who has to deal with the media
- Anyone looking for free publicity or promotion to a mass or niche market
- Businesses with products or services to sell
- Anyone looking to raise awareness to a wider audience
The only requirements for you to succeed are…
- A positive mindset
- Imagination and creativity
- A good command of language, punctuation, spelling and grammar
- Access to the internet, a computer, a word processing program or something like Google Docs, plus an email account
What Is News?
Think you’ve got something worth sharing through the media? Hopefully you do, but ask yourself these questions…
Is your information new?
If it has been published anywhere else, even on your website or Facebook page, the journalist will probably not be interested.
Is the subject topical?
If you can relate your story to current affairs (check out latest environmental news here), or a forthcoming event or date, you might have a greater chance of getting your article in print, online and also shared across social media.
Is it relevant and interesting?
When your media release lands in front of the journalist’s eyes, they will think: ‘How many of our readers / viewers / listeners will be interested in this?’
Positive news is always good news. Environmental stories sadly are not always upbeat, but they are often hopeful, or have important calls to action.
The location has to be relevant for regional newspapers. Interest will be also heightened by such things as a celebrity connection.
Remember this — media releases should not read like pure adverts for your green business. Find a newsworthy story connected to your enterprise.
Does the story have human interest?
This is the most important aspect of an article for the media, because all stories relate to people in some way, and the media like to answer the question - how are people affected by this?
Obviously, with many green stories, you could substitute ‘people’ for ‘animals’ - and thankfully there is now more awareness in the media of environmental, vegan and cruelty issues, and how important these are to readers.
Researching The Media Outlets
There are newswire services which, for a usually extortionate fee, publish all press releases online and distribute them to all media.
Maybe yours will get picked up, but probably not, as there are thousands upon thousands of media releases submitted in this way daily.
A far more successful method is to put a list together of specific publications to target, and, if possible, also find out when publishing deadlines are.
Some deadlines are way far in advance of when you might think they are, especially for magazines.
Also, many printing presses have been closed down and operations centralised, so ‘local’ newspapers might in fact be printed a long way from home. This makes story deadlines far earlier.
Find out the email addresses of the section editors (news editor, environment editor, business editor, gardening editor, etc), and also individual journalists’ names and emails.
Addressing your media release to ‘The Editor’ will not usually bring you results.
Answer the 6 W questions
At the heart of every media release you will ever write, you must answer the basic questions.
We are talking about the 6 Ws. Many call it the 5 Ws, but that would involve leaving out some crucial information.
I’m actually cheating by calling it the 6 Ws because it’s strictly 5 Ws and a H that ends in a W, but never mind that!
Just remember you have to answer these questions…
Who?
What?
Where?
When?
Why?
How?
Don’t leave any questions unanswered — the journalists won’t have the time to contact you for more details. Instead, that email will be sent to trash.
Write A Killer Headline
The first thing to write is the headline, right?
WRONG!
No journalist works like this.
And you’ve got to write your media release with the mindset of a journalist.
Your headline sums up the article and sells it. But until you’ve written the article, you won’t be able to sum it up, and you won’t know the best selling points.
We’ll still look at the headline here, but before we do, one crucial piece of information:
WRITE IN THE THIRD PERSON.
It might be tempting to write “we are doing this and that” but save that for the quotes you’ll be inserting, or when publishing on your own website.
Take a step back and write in the third person.
So it’s “Bamboo Baby Clothes has employed a team of people…” instead of “We have employed…”
That applies to the headline as well as the rest of the media release.
So let’s look at that headline again…
Your headline has to make an immediate impact. If it doesn’t grab the journalist’s attention, your email might be deleted without even being read.
Don’t try to be clever. Leave the actual published headline to the journalists, don’t try to use puns or be ambiguous. No clever play on words or smug alliteration.
You have to sell your story in the media release headline, simple as that. Just tell it as it is.
Also, unless you run a household name brand, don’t put your company name in there.
This may sound a strange one, and go against your business instincts. But please remember: You don’t want your media release to appear like an advert.
If that’s the impression given, it won’t be given the time of day, or will be reduced to a ‘nib’ — that’s a short, one or two paragraphs filler.
Writing The Intro: Summarise Your Story
The opening paragraph — known by most journalists simply as ‘the intro’ — is an exercise in summing things up neatly and succinctly, while making it so intriguing, people will want to read on — first the journalist, then the newspaper / magazine / website reader.
You must give a summary of the main thrust of your media release, preferably in 15–20 words, while answering as many of the 6 Ws as you can.
It is indeed quite a skill to sell the story in such a short wordspan, but that’s the guideline journalists get for their own stories, and they’ll expect the same from you.
Don’t worry, practice makes perfect!
If you’re really struggling, you can stretch to 30 words, but no more!
Complete the Story
After you’ve written the intro, explain your story in no more than four or five shortish paragraphs.
You’ll want to go into a bit more detail now, but you’re still keeping it concise, answering the 6 Ws and selling your story as best you can.
Make it easy to read and easy to follow. Use bullet points or sub headings if it helps to explain or break down the details.
Remember that local newspapers in particular can be very strict about requiring full names of all people in the story (correctly spelt of course), and where relevant, the ages and addresses (street name, town) of the people you mention. Readers like to know this kind of information!
Imagine your media release is on A4 paper — don’t write on more than one side. So that’s roughly 300–400 words, including a paragraph or two of quotes — more on those next.
Include Useful Quotes
Complete the main body of your media release with a paragraph or two of quotes from somebody most relevant to the story — maybe it’s yourself, the company CEO or a headline speaker at a sustainability conference.
Quotes give an extra human element and give your story extra weight because an expert is backing up the words you have already written.
Importantly, the quotes should add something to the story that hasn’t already been said.
If the quote amounts to repetition, it is not going to be used.
Conclude with a Call To Action
Finish off by asking people to go to your website for more details, and include your web address.
Simply by pasting the URL into your media release, means that the journalist may well paste it into the article, and if that article then runs on the newspaper’s website as well, and is shared on their social media channels, that’s going to provide traffic to your own site and a backlink from a very reputable source to help your site’s SEO.
How Important is SEO in Media Releases?
You may well find that your business ranks highly on search engines for certain words or phrases, and so you would like those keywords to be used in your media release.
My advice on this is to go carefully. If you want to use these, above all else make sure you are not adversely affecting the flow of the story.
Depending on what the keywords are, make sure they do not make the story sound like advertising copy.
And remember, all the keywords or phrases may well be taken out by the journalist.
Formatting the Media Release
You’ll be pasting the media release into the body of the email you send to journalists - so they don’t need to open an extra file to read your story. Their time is precious!
You do need to follow some formatting rules, just to make it easier for the journalist to follow.
So, at the top, type MEDIA RELEASE.
Are you happy for your story to be published as soon as possible? Then on the next line type FOR IMMEDIATE PUBLICATION.
If you want the publication to wait for some reason, type EMBARGO with the DATE AND TIME that the media is allowed to publish.
It’s often one minute after midnight on the day you want it to go out.
An embargo is not something a journalist likes to see, but if it’s a really good story, they might play ball — but they may just give you a call asking if they can release the story early to ‘break’ it first, before their competitors.
Now you’ve got your killer HEADLINE.
Then, an optional line.
In the United States, and occasionally across the world, it’s traditional style to give your LOCATION AND DATE before your intro.
For example:
‘Sacramento, California — November 4, 2022 -’
You don’t have to do this. But it certainly would be helpful for the journalist to know, right from the start, that this media release is suitable for them, if location matters.
So then you’ve got your INTRO, followed by the rest of the STORY, including a paragraph of QUOTES.
Keep the type black, no fancy colours and definitely no fancy fonts.
Keep your paragraphs as short and snappy as you can, and leave a line space in between each paragraph.
At the end, underneath the final paragraph, type ENDS.
Beneath this, write ‘FOR MORE INFORMATION’ and add your contact details, and if you need to, the contact details of anyone mentioned in the story, in case the publication needs to check anything.
Make sure you give phone numbers, email addresses, web address, even social media accounts.
Next comes a brief section often labelled NOTES TO EDITORS.
If you wish, you can call this Extra Information, Background Information, Helpful Notes, Further Details etc. These are short notes which give the story some background, context or explanation.
It looks better when you present them as bullet points.
This information is sometimes used by the journalist in the published story, but is more often used to help the journalist fully understand things.
Within these notes, you can give information about your company.
Feel free to mention if you’ve won any awards, or recall previous news.
Mentioning too many business details in the media release would have turned the journalist off, but you can get away with them in the notes, as long as you keep your bullet points brief.
SUPER IMPORTANT — Check your spelling, punctuation and grammar.
Sending the Email to Journalists
How do you grab the attention of a busy journalist, to make them open and consider your email among the hundreds or more in their inbox?
Often they will simply scan the email subject lines to see if anything interests them.
I see an ever-increasing use of emojis in subject headlines these days. Just DON’T!
While these undoubtedly make your email stand out, there is something about them that journalists won’t trust.
Perhaps because so much spam comes littered with emojis, too.
Make your subject line appealing, relevant and urgent.
Focus on selling your story. And making it sound like an email they really, really need to open.
I find it’s often the best tactic to use phrases that journalists themselves would use. So perhaps start your email subject line with ‘Urgent’ or ‘Breaking News’ (as long as it truthfully is).
Maybe use the headline you’ve written on your press release, if it’s a really good one. Shorten it further, if it needs to be.
If you’re not sure that you are emailing the right person, you could also get away with ‘FAO Environment Editor’ for example.
Time To Sell Your Story
OK, it’s been opened, you’re in…
Introduce yourself courteously to the journalist, say you hope they are well, and briefly explain what your media release is about.
Explain in simple terms why their readers will be interested in your story, and offer to assist with any further details they may need.
Thank them for their time… and then it’s into the Media Release you are pasting within the body of the email.
Make sure all the words within your email, and on any attachments, can be copied and pasted.
A journalist will not have time to type in a pre-designed media release you have scanned as an image.
Add Attachments
You might have been thinking, ‘I can’t tell my story in such a short space.’ If it’s genuinely worth far more media coverage, then offer to speak to the journalist to give more details, or attach a longer version of your media release to the email — it’s best to do this as a Word file.
More importantly, remember that by using photos, your story naturally gets more space and more prominence, and is also more likely to be used on the publication’s website and shared across their social media channels.
So attach between one and three good quality (hi-res) photos. Just make sure the total file size is less than 5MB - many media systems are still quite behind the times and will reject emails above this size.
Do not include any advertising / logos in the photo unless the story absolutely demands it — otherwise it may be seen as free advertising.
Do You Have a Video?
If you have a video to complement your story, include a link at the end, in your call to action section.
It’s unlikely to be copied in print, but on the newspaper’s website and social media channels it could be included as a link, or even embedded into the story.
If you’re putting on a vegan event and have a well known guest speaker appearing, for example, media websites will almost certainly run a video from YouTube, Vimeo and the like, so that readers can click and hear their previous wise words.
Send That Email!
After three or four days, if you haven’t heard anything back, follow up with another very brief email to the journalist.
Say, courteously again, you’re just checking in to see if they received your email, and you just want them to know you’re available if there are any more details they require.
If you can do all that, great. Or hand the responsibility to your marketing person. Stick with it and it WILL work. Which will save you an awful lot of money and spread the word about who you are and the wonderful green things you do.
- If you would prefer to get personal media PR assistance from GreenGreenGreen editor, and vastly experienced environmental journalist, Mark Campbell, simply get in touch here. Thank you.
