Online Public Relations

Traditionally, Public Relations activities are designed to use media outlets as a way to generate attention to your company. In the same way, online public relations gain attention toward your website and help lead to sales. This can be achieved through search engines, blogs, news searching, and forums.

A key component of online Public Relations is keeping in line with the theme and design of your site. For example, putting your logo on your site, articles, press releases, and printed materials will associate the visual image of the company with the name.

News about your company is great for online PR. Placing the content on your site refreshes your content and keeps the search engine spiders coming back for more. Another trick you can do with your news release is to try and pitch the story to online news journalists and bloggers.

The #1 online news source is Yahoo News, surpassing even CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. Many of the journalists for online news sites, especially Yahoo News, search the web for stories. If your company has news then putting it on your site in a News or Press Release section can only help.

When attempting to pitch a story to a blog there are a few safeguards to watch for when submitting.

1. Make sure your news and site are relevant to what the blog discusses.
2. Don’t just submit them your story, bloggers are not like journalists, they are more personal in their writing. They prefer to write a brief summary in their own words and external link to your article.
3. The blog(s) you submit a story to must also be highly respected and have a high Google page rank.