This episode, I am joined by Press release expert and business partner, Shane Oglow. In today’s episode we will be discussing how press releases work and how you can benefit from the incredible power they have online. We go over the many different components of a press release, the benefits, and some misconceptions.
Shane has been an Amazon seller since 2013 and was fortunate enough to realize early success by building his first brand to over 1 million in revenue in just over a year.
Since that time he’s continued to not only sell and grow on Amazon and other marketplaces but has been active in training literally thousands of Amazon sellers, primarily in the past through the highly successful Amazing Selling Machine program and continues to be a regular monthly contributor to Amazing.com as host of their “Amazing Updates” program.
His latest endeavour is that of co-owner of prREACH, a video and traditional press release distribution platform, where they’re crafting revolutionary and unique content marketing strategies specifically designed for Amazon sellers to build brand authority and increase traffic like never before.
Date: July 5,, 2020
Episode: 5
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Shane Oglow, President of prREACH, a Video and Traditional Press Release Distribution Platform.
Subtitle: The power of Press Releases and its anatomy
Final Show Link: https://lunchwithnorm.com/episodes/5-anatomy-of-a-press-release-shane-
In this episode of Lunch With Norm…, Norman Farrar introduces Shane Oglow, president of prREACH, a video and traditional press release distribution platform.
Shane Oglow is a content expert, Amazon coach and Account Manager. He discussed how press releases work, it’s components, benefits and some misconceptions.
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Norman 0:00
This is Norman Farrar and I just wanted to have another lunch AMA meeting with my buddy, Shane Oglow. Kick back, grab a cup of coffee and we’re going to just take a little bit of time to go over the anatomy of a great press release. Many times, we had questions about, why do we use press releases and how do you put them together? I decided that it’s probably a good idea just to do a quick little chat about how you put it together. So with that being said, I’d like to introduce, now my son put this little script together for me because I’m always really bad with this, but he says, with that being said, I would like to introduce to you a really incredible person. So really incredible, If I wrote this, I wouldn’t say that but anyways, here’s Shane.
Shane 0:55
Thanks, I think. Yeah, let’s talk about PR’s man, because, I think that we’re both pretty familiar with the fact that I mean if people have been using PR’s, they know PR’s, the most people don’t know much about them, and they don’t understand how they’re working or what they’re doing if they’re driving traffic or backlinks they get was different stories that don’t know what to expect and how they’re written and should they do themselves the IRA guy, a fiber, should they have us do it like this, just literally don’t know where to start.
Norman 1:29
So you said something about fiber and here’s the issue with that. So most of the time, when we see a press release that comes in, that somebody’s written, it sucks. It’s not going to get the exposure. People are trying to do it. So it’s very inexpensive. A press release, it was done right. and there’s two different ways of looking at a press release. You’ve got it where you’re building a brand, which you probably want to put out a press release once a month and there’s different types of press releases. Now, we’re not going to talk about that here. But when we’re talking to our clients, we’re trying to tell them the difference between a traditional press release, an online press release and a social media press release and even with a traditional press release, and they are more expensive. I mean, you could spend a lot of money with them, but you get so much more exposure. But a lot of people want to do it for nothing, and they don’t understand that. If you do it for nothing, you’re gonna get what you pay for, right?
Shane 2:33
Absolutely, and the other thing too, is you don’t just not even the fiber thing. Like let’s say you get someone to do a PR, it’s probably not gonna be very good. I’ve had plenty of times where we’re talking with a client or suddenly say, Oh, hey, you know what, I got a writer. He’s fantastic. He’s been in the business for years as our ad copy, and they send over this PR. It sucks. It’s a great piece of content. It just sucks as a PR because it was written like ad copy or is written like a blog or whatever. It wasn’t, it didn’t follow the format, it needs to follow to get accepted and widely distributed through a distribution network.
Norman Farrar: 3:10
Right and these blog articles or blog writers, they can be exceptional writers, but they just don’t understand the little tips and tricks that will get them optimized and these little tips and tricks can mean hundreds of keyword rankings through top authority sites, to none. It really is how you lay out your press release. So, I thought today, Shane, that we could just go through what we look for, what our editors look for, when they’re looking at somebody’s submission. So let’s just break down the anatomy of the press release and like the first thing that comes to my mind, and probably the most important thing is the title. Would you agree?
Shane 3:54
Yeah, absolutely. The majority of the weight and the effectiveness of Press Release is all about the title. So you want to keep it short and snappy to the point so that the reader reads it and they know exactly what’s going on, elimination of fluff keywords, you don’t have to repeat keywords, you’re not keyword stuffing it’s just short, snappy and very descriptive. It has your primary keywords in there that read well, just like any other piece of content – well not just like any other piece of content actually. Google treats PR’s as its own special type of content but everything with Google it’s all about not keyword stuffing having a very readable and just well put together so the title is very important. But I think even before that, Norm, too and we kind of touched on it earlier where we said hey you get a great writer who writes a crappy Press Release because it’s more like a blog or more like ad copy. I think that’s the first thing you have to address because you can have a properly structured Press Release but it’s written like it’s ad copy. You’re just not gonna to get as much, could be outright rejected, but you’re just not going to get the same distribution, the same effect, as if it’s written as a piece of news. So assuming we have a good piece of news, we’re praying for it and it could be about anything and I know right now, people are gonna freak out and say, well, geez, I just sell green widgets. What the heck do I have to talk about, right? Well, everyone has that concern. When you talk to Amazon sellers, they think that the only thing they can talk about is a launch of a new product or maybe they’re doing a sale on Black Friday, or they’re contributing to a charity. There’s just sort of a few base core things people think they can talk about. But there’s so much more many things you can talk about. I don’t think we want to get into that. But I just want to get it because when I say it’s going to be newsworthy, I don’t mean it has to be groundbreaking. Jeff Bezos just phoned you up and made a deal. Well, sure, but that’s not the reality. You can talk about a lot of different things. Just starting off with a good newsworthy piece of content is your first step that’s not salesy or spammy, or written like a broad blog and then, of course, the title, short, snappy, keyword efficient, no fluff keywords.
Norman 6:14
Yeah and if people are interested, we do have either on the site prReach.com. 108 brilliant ideas for writing a press release. So you can go there or you could just, we could probably put a link in so you could just download it here. But anyways, yeah, what you were talking about, some people are probably scratching their head because they’re talking about writing a press release and then having it distributed. But the distribution, so once we receive a press release, our responsibility to our clients is to get the best distribution possible. So we send it out to our proprietary network as well as other news wires and so it could be going out to influencers or bloggers or search engines, it could be going out to content providers like Market Watch and Finance Reuters. So that’s what we’re talking about when we give it distribution. It’s not coming out like if you were to take a look at your press release, on prReach or on any, wherever you submit your press release from, you’re not going to see a ton of traffic at the source at the host, because it’s distributed to all these other news outlets who publish it and depending on the quality of their authority, you can get rankings that way or get authority links back to wherever you want them to be. But anyways, going back to the title, one of the tricks that we try to do, we try to like let’s say in keyword research is very important. But let’s say there’s a lot of single keywords. You don’t want to keyword stuff, you definitely want to put the keywords at the front of the title. So I like using bully sticks. So natural grass fed, organic bully sticks, or natural, odorless bully sticks and then the title that I can use as an example is, Natural Grass Fed Bully Sticks Provide Healthy, Nutritious Snack for Elderly Dogs, is a proven healthy snack for elderly dogs and that gives it kind of a newsworthy appeal. The other thing about this is you’ve got 70 characters, you can you can give as many characters as you want, but you know what you’re gonna get the dot dot dot at the end and a lot of the time and I think you’d agree that there’s a lot of micro brands that feel, I don’t know if it’s ego, but they’ve got to have their brand in the logo or in the at the beginning and it ruins it. You don’t need to see your brand, people are going to read about it in the summary and in the body. But if you are going to do if you’re going to try to stick your brand in there, let it go after the dot dot dot so put 70 characters of really good keywords, features, benefits and then dot dot dot after the dot dot dot, buy your brand, that’s a little trick that we use and some people absolutely want to have their brand in at the very beginning and okay, but you’re gonna, you’re gonna lose a little bit of juice from it.
Shane 9:38
Yeah, I think that I, for the Amazon sellers out there. It’s basically just like your Amazon title. You want to get those important keywords near the front as much as you can. Now obviously on Amazon, sometimes they make you have your brand name at the front but where you can circumvent that. I usually agree, you put that at the end of the title or somewhere else, unless your brand is starting to grow, and you are certain to get recognized for your brand name then fine, I suppose but for most smaller people starting out , yeah, it’s just a kind of a waste of keyword juice.
Norman 10:16
Yeah. So once you put together the keywords, this is the type of ranking that you can get, so on any given day, with any given press release, we can release it out within 24 to 48 hours and we’ve got plenty of case studies to show this, that Google will pick it up. Google, let’s say, on the bully stick example, because I use that exact example and we did it and one day it was one day later, we were showing 279 times on Google with a variety of different combinations and some of the keyword combinations were horrible, they’re five or six keywords long, but some of them are really good. So we had 279, ranked on Google, 100, I think it was 170 that were on page one and 131. They were actually number one on Google and some of them were, again, horrible, but some were like bully sticks launched Amazon, that’s pretty good, and there were a couple of two keyword phrases that were matched. Google is going to pick it up. It’s not just the keyword phrase at the beginning, they’ll mix everything up in the title that will combine so you could have hundreds, you could have 400 different, the most I’ve ever seen was about 400 plus keywords ranked on Google within about 24 hours. But that’s the norm, it’s not something that , Oh, if you write a good press, at least if you write an average press release, you could get those types of results. It’s this not something that just happens once in a while.
Shane 12:09
Yeah, absolutely and we’re talking about this, and you’re talking about just the title only and that’s the most important part. That’s what, we’ve never tracked keywords from the body so much, because that would be gazillions of keyword combinations and it couldn’t really efficiently be done. But now we’re starting to look at tracking some other kind of major terms that you might be having part of a Google Ads campaign or something, and just seeing the effects happening there and we’re seeing different effects. The power of the press is interesting. Now that would be difficult for us to track for a client because we don’t know what keywords or other keywords are going after. So we can really only look at the title and say, Look, it was different permutations, and it’s actually quite amazing. But the tentacles of the PR is because Google treats it as its own sort of special piece of content and their algorithm changes all the time. In fact, I think I shared with you just the other day, there is an algorithm update and the biggest winners out of that algorithm update were news pieces. So that’s, I think it just goes to show how much emphasis and how much importance Google is still placing on news items, because they’ve really cleaned up the industry. I don’t want to go too far into this, because we’ve talked for hours on it. But, we all know that 5,6,7,8 years ago, there was a lot of abuse of the press release system, which caused Google to make some big changes to stop people from doing that and so we went through a bit of a phase where people had to understand and refill their way through the market. But, press releases are back and there’s still very, very effective as long as you’ve got a decent, well written PR, which we’ll talk about today and a good distribution network behind you.
Norman 13:52
Right. So now that we’ve got the main point, the title out of the way, as I said, probably 80% of the ranking. The next step would be the summary and the summary, excuse me, too many cigars. It’s really just 160 characters. It’s made, basically for Twitter and the sole purpose of this is to get the word out to journalists, bloggers, they don’t want to read the whole body of your press release, they want to see if it’s interesting, and then pick it up. Most press release companies, high quality press release companies have their own independent group of influencers and bloggers and journalists that they can go after. So it’s sent out, they can take a look at it, and then they can pick it up. Yeah, I don’t know. Do you have anything more to say about that?
Shane 14:48
No, I mean, I think you’re right. It’s sort of the same rules apply. If you’re doing your own press. If you’re writing your own you’ve got the title. It’s short, snappy, and doesn’t have a lot of characters to play with before we get the truncation. But that summer is just designed for people who are scanning through Twitter feed, for example and it’s one or two sentences, basically. But it should tell the reader everything they need to know about that PR. All the information is so if it captures their attention, okay, that’s interesting, though they’ll read it. That’s the sole purpose is just to capture that attention of those influencers or journalists or editors, whoever happens to scan through.
Norman 15:25
Yeah, and I have seen and we’ve both seen people try to sneak a book through summary, and then it’s just not gonna work. 160 characters think of Twitter and I guess the third item would be the body of the press release.
Shane 15:46
Yeah, and I think and I’ve seen this go both ways. I think we generally say sort of 350 to 750 words kind of that range is a nice range. You don’t have to write a Pulitzer winning prize novel there. But sometimes we see them too short, which is problematic and again, you don’t want to put a novel, you don’t need a 1500 word press release out there. It’s not what it’s designed for. If you got really good information to share, then we’ve got other techniques where we pair that press release up with content linked to it and we’re not getting to that on this call, but, the body is important to keep it within reason. It depends on the type of use you have and then it gets through. I don’t know if you have any more said about that but then I guess in the body is where you have links or could potentially have links and that’s probably something very, very important too, because that’s another thing that has changed a lot since we’ve certainly, since I’ve been in the Press Release business, in terms of the way linking was done. Back in the day, we’d put all different kinds of URLs in there. Yeah, everything you can imagine under the sun in terms of URLs. But as Google goes through and cleans up the industry, I guess is, you don’t want to have spammy links, you don’t want to have a ton of links. You don’t need to be repeating the same links, all those kinds of techniques that, maybe people thought about, years back and say oil presses don’t work. No, practices don’t work anymore. But if they’re properly done, that’s very important. So, no more than three links and a lot of times, we’ll only have, one or two, we always mix it up and I think, yeah, you’ve been a big advocate especially when you have big PR campaigns, you’ve got a client, they’re doing all kinds of stuff, if they’re gonna do 20 PRs over the course of a month or two, might have two or three of those go with no links at all and just let the PR itself in the weight of the title, do the work and Google I think recognizes and appreciates that It just looked like we’re trying to game the system.
Norman 18:03
Yeah, I think it’s important that, especially with the embedded links, with the keyword phrases, we’re getting away from that and what we like to use is just with the first paragraph, it addresses the keywords that are in the title. There’s a second link, right? It’s not a paragraph, it’s just a line, learn more or understand or I don’t know, click here, but it’s the raw link where you want it to go and that is so much better than having an embedded link. If we are doing those types of links and by embedded I’m talking about taking a keyword phrase, highlighting it doing a hyperlink over to, let’s say, an Amazon product listing. You don’t want to do that. Though that could be the raw link from your product page or your product listing that’s, to learn more to, to see our product, now click here. Then you’re right, Shane, 350 to 400 words is really, max. I never told you this. So, there was a guy that gave me a 13 page press release and it was about Yeah, it was about him, 13 pages! I’m sitting there going, I’m trying to really politely say, Wow, you got an ego. It was about him too. So, it was about launches of a website, and it was his bio. Okay, 13 pages now. I go to his website and say, well, let’s go to your website and just take your bio off of your website, right thinking, Oh, it’s gonna be a paragraph or two. It’s 13 pages! It’s the same thing. He copied the information off of his homepage, this is his bio off of his homepage. So yeah, it was crazy. But we don’t want 13 page press releases, nobody’s going to read them, except the person who’s giving it to us. So yeah, 350 to 400, very limited links and if it is just more of a direct link, going back to whatever you’re talking about, it could be a magazine, it could be a blog article, it could be some research, whatever it is and then within there, we want to make sure that people understand that this is more press releases get rejected, I think from this than anything else is that people talk about themselves and press releases have to go out. Like, think of a news anchor, Walter Cronkite. If people remember well, I’m an old guy, Walter Cronkite, you’d never hear him talking about himself. He’s talking about the new Third Person, right? That’s very important. You can talk in first person, when you’re talking about a quote and you can have a couple of different quotes. You don’t want to overkill it with quotes. But you can put 1,2,3 quotes into the press release, about what the president of the company said, or, whoever the contact person is. I don’t know if you have anything more to say about the body.
Shane 21:27
No, I think that’s actually a couple of things. I think we both seen press releases, which is basically just one big quote, to try and bypass the third parading. Yeah, right, and a third person, just pretend you’re a reporter. If you’re writing your own, writing about your company from an outside perspective, the one of the things I want to mention about links, I think it’s important. So if you are writing a press release, and you’re talking about your company, ABCCompany.com and you want to drive your links back there, make sure your site doesn’t have early spammy, pop up, Google looks very unfavorably on that. So if you go to the site and it pops up in a tweet, save 20% today only using something that’s not a good thing. I would disable those pop-ups during a PR campaign.
Norman 22:12
Oh, yeah and even more, Google can come back within these puppets we’re talking about. So some people have tried to, they know it’s a, when you’re sending out a press release, it has to be newsworthy, so you can’t have 10% off or a pop up coming up. So they’ll timeout where it’ll come up, a minute afterwards. Well, if Google deems that as a terms of service, they can actually ban that domain. So now you’re not talking about a press release getting declined by a distribution channel, you’re talking about your, your domain being banned by Google. Now, that’s very rare, but that can happen. So that’s a really good point.
Shane 23:02
Yeah, and I think a lot of these things, and I kind of alluded to the way people used to do stuff, just for people who are wondering what happened back then, back in the day, 5,6,7 years ago, there were some techniques that people were promoting where you’d pump out 30,40, 50,100 PR’s in single month, save 25% this Thursday, whatever, very, very spammy salesy titles, using PR’s, and that would get them number one rankings on Google for a period of time and that’s kind of a leftover from that period, especially the Garcinic Embrosa people. If you remember, I don’t even know if they still sell cars, I guess I don’t even know. But that was like the big thing back to you. People are making millions. It was cutthroat and they were doing wherever they could and they really upped the PR system and that’s when the distribution networks rebelled and Google said, Okay, that’s enough guys. So that’s kind of a throwback to those days. So basically, Google’s just say, Hey, this is great, they treat PRs with a lot of respect. But you’ve got to respect it back in kind.
Norman 24:10
The fourth area, and I love this area is the contact information so you can put your name, your address, your business name, your website, your email, I already said email address, but you have an opportunity to let people contact you. How many times have we seen it? Where people have sent in no contact information, we contact them and say, Oh, we need you to put your contact information in there and they say, oh, we don’t want people to contact us. I almost knocked over my elf. Anyways, how crazy is that? I hope nobody’s listening that did that. But anyways, you want people to contact you, you want people to go over. I don’t know why you would do this if you didn’t want that. So it’s there.
Shanes 25:07
Yeah, sometimes I wonder if people just want to fly into the radar like, Oh, we don’t want anybody to know where we’re headquartered, they think we’re going to find out our supplier. I don’t know why they’re trying to be. I don’t know. Yeah, doesn’t make sense to me. But, yeah, that’s the great thing about PRs, too and obviously we can talk a little bit or maybe you can talk a little bit on my local businesses about how powerful PRs are for ranking. If you’re an insurance agent in Phoenix, Arizona, or a dentist in Wichita, Kansas. I mean, it can be very, very powerful for getting you showing up on Google rankings if your local search results and so obviously, having your information in their address and all that is extremely important in that case,
Norman 25:56
For the citation.
Norman Farrar: 25:58
Yeah, that’s it. Google will pick it up and so let’s just go back quickly, you hit a point that we completely missed. In the title, if you put, the thing about the elderly dogs promotes healthy dogs, just put, In Phoenix and by doing that, and getting it published, you will be amazed at one press release how it will get you ranked number one with some really powerful keywords, whatever is in the title and then by having that information under your contact info at. Google will pick that up and that you will get picked up there’s a citation there. I mean, it’s worth it. You might as well you know fill that information as well not mine as well you should fill that information in which will help for SEO as well. Now, the fifth thing is pretty simple. Put in your social media, and you’ll have the ability to put in all your social media, most places will allow you to put in your YouTube channel and the reason I’m saying, I’m going to separate YouTube, because they allow two things. Your YouTube channel, which will be with your Facebook and your Twitter and whatever else you’re doing, but a lot of good quality press release companies will let you embed a video. Here’s why, and this is the number six, is embedding a video. If you have a press release about elderly dogs, it’s newsworthy, but if you have a video that you make about five reasons why dogs should eat bully sticks. People are like, that’s more of an engagement thing. People will watch it, it’ll be a lot more of your story. It can be very easy, going it does not have to be newsworthy. So that’s important that you embed that so all you have to do is, just create a very small video, it could be talking heads, but you can give out information that way. It can be very helpful to sell your product.
Shane 28:14
Yeah, absolutely. I think the other thing too, you can add as I sort of group in with all your social media links, with your contact information, your logo, you can have that in there as well. So it’s kind of neat the way and this is, what we’re talking about here are social media press releases, that can be shared via social media, so you get to add, so each PR, it’s kind of, it’s jam packed, well said, in fact, the things we haven’t even talked about because, we could talk about attachments too. So if you’ve done a research paper, or you have a PDF to go or maybe you’ve got a 13 page bio attached, you can do that. So you can depending on the type of business and In a lot of things like oh research paper, well gosh, we work with a lot of people maybe you’re you sell some type of a food product or supplement and maybe your product has turmeric in it and your PR is about the health benefits of turmeric or about a recent study that came out about turmeric and, you, as the President of the spokesperson are talking about it, and then you’re linking to the authority site as well. You can put research papers on your benefits of turmeric in there. There’s a lot of ways you can do that and it just value packs that just it’s like a super powerful punch in that PR.
Norman 29:41
The other thing I guess our last tip, well actually there’s two, you can put images. So if you have product images, or if you have a portrait of the founder or whatever it is, you can usually attach anywhere from one to four or five images. So, one of the others and probably the last thing would be the video. So this is different from the YouTube video. Some companies, we are one of these companies that we get anchors to read, we create a video script, and it goes out with the press release. Now the purpose of that, is that you get to repurpose that video, and you can cut it up or you can put it on Facebook. There’s a lot of distribution, or news outlets that won’t pick up that version. When they’ll pick up the written press release, they won’t pick up the video press release. But this is more for, to add to a blog article or to add to your social media by itself, it’s downloadable. So, I mean, if you want it to go through and sort of just kind of, summarize what we talked about and when you’re putting through a press release, we’re looking at a title, the summary, the body, the body with one raw link, the contact information, the social media, the logo, a YouTube embedment and then you’ve got attachments and images. That’s everything that comprises a great PO and if you kind of put them all together and you know how to do the proper keyword research, you can get really crazy results.
Shane 31:32
Absolutely and that’s I think one last little thing at the very end you said keyword research. I know too many people and I was guilty of this too. When I first started using press releases myself, I would just put them out willy nilly on anything without really any true regard to keyword research. But if anybody’s on online e-commerce, important keyword research is for everything. I treat the PRs the same way, if I’m doing campaigns with Google ads or Instagram or my Amazon PPC, whenever I’m doing, I’m probably focusing on certain narrow sets of keywords to try and gain rank for those. I make sure that PRs are in full alignment with those and we can talk on another day about some of our techniques, because we can talk a lot about that. But make sure you do the keyword research, don’t just have a willy nilly title that has nothing to do with everything else you’re doing. Make them work together and they’ll support each other.
Norman 32:25
Right. So I think that’s, everything that you need to know about at least the anatomy, we’re gonna come back like Shane said, and dive deeper into it, week by week. But what we’re going to do with this, is we’re going to post the whole, I think it was a half hour, and we’re going to break it up into little snippets. So you can take each section and kind of go through it. So we’ll be posting that up on prReach as well as The Beard Guy website. So, Shane, is there anything else that you want to add?
Shane 33:00
No, that’s it.
Shane 33:02
I’m proud, super proud of Bob and Doug McKenzie, the two Canadians circling the Earth right now in that spaceship. Other than that no, we’ll get it.
Norman 33:15
Yeah. Bob and Doug.
Norman 33:20
So what’s the best way people can reach you?
Shane 33:23
Yeah, just shane@prReach.com. Just, you can consider the message there. If you want to talk to me about press releases, that’s cool. Just visit our website prReach.com and just hit the “Contact Us” button.
Norman 33:39
Okay, and once again, make sure you like and subscribe to the NormanFarrar.com site or follow me on social media @normanfarrar. So that’s about it for today. I hope you enjoyed it, and thanks a lot, Shane, for coming on.
