What would happen to your business if you appeared on Oprah? Or if a major magazine did a feature story on you? Or a major newspaper?

Your business would never be the same again. No amount of paid advertising can match free publicity.

Up to 90 per cent of stories in newspapers and on the TV news appear because someone sent out a press release.

And yet, very few small businesses ever bother sending out a press release. (The terms “press release” and “news release” are interchangeable, but I prefer “news release” because it reminds me that the release must contain news of some kind.)

I’ve been making it a personal crusade to convince small business people to send out news releases regularly.

You can even write your releases yourself. (I offer a press release service if you don’t want to DIY.)

Sure, it means educating yourself as to what constitutes a news release. And that education is VITAL. Nothing ticks off a reporter more than receiving a blatant ad masquerading as a news release.

A point to keep in mind - most releases you send out seem to go nowhere. “Seem” is the operative word.

Let’s say you’ve spend four hours sweating over a news release. You send it out. To coin a cliché, the silence is deafening.

However, all is not as it seems. The more often your name crosses a reporter’s desk, the more familiar you become.

In my copywriting practice, I send out news releases for clients regularly. It’s very difficult to convince some of them that news releases which aren’t picked up do have an effect. Sometimes the effect happens a year later - the business owner gets a call from a reporter because he’s working on a story an needs an expert to interview.

On the Web, a big benefit of sending Web news releases is that the releases are indexed by search engines. This sends traffic to your site painlessly. How else could you get onto Google News?

So send out news releases to publicize your business regularly.

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