How to link your press release for mass publication

"EXTRA! EXTRA! Read all about it..!"

A press release is a great way to publicize your company and services for free.

You can write a press release to:

• Get more customers
• Inform your current client base about a new service offered
• Hide negative posts or comments left by an angry customer (or your competition)
• Launch your business in a new market

There are a few simple steps to ensure your press release will have a high ranking in search results, and this how-to is designed to help you maximize the impact of your press release.

While you think of a topic for your first press release, let's take the time to set up a system to auto-post your press release onto a few other sites.

Doing this before-hand will ensure that when you publish your press release on one site, it will be fed to the other sites you set up and automatically post them there.

If you don't already have a WordPress(PageRank: 9) account, its time to set one up. WordPress is the free blogging program used by millions of people daily. That means it's really easy to use.

To set-up your WordPress blog, visit my hub How to Set-up Your Free WordPress Blog for more info.

In the Settings section, find Reading. You will want to set the:

• Syndication feeds show the most recent - 99
• For each article in a feed, show - Full Text

OK, your blog is now ready to start catching and feeding your articles from MyNewsDesk (or any other entering feed).

Press release service: The origin of the distribution system we're about to create.

I use MyNewsDesk.com (PageRank: 7) because they allow you to post with your press release with links embedded for free, which is important. A few other notable features is the ability to publish blog posts, not just news articles. They also let you publish photos and videos.

Following the steps on this post, you can input any other site with an RSS feed for your posts to distribute over your network of sites.

Register your account with MyNewsDesk.com using your company name as the username and name. The username is what you sign in with, and the name is the moniker your articles are published under.

SEO TIP: If you're writing the press release to deflect negative press, you may want to choose a username and name with the keywords used in the complaint.

Be sure to fill in all the information fields provided, new customers will need this to contact you! This info will be available on your profile page, so only put contact information you'll want others to see.

There are a few fields in the Create your Profile page worth mentioning:

• Pressroom URL - Make this the name of the business, or your campaign keywords

• Categorization - Think of a few relevant sections to publish your articles

• External Links - Use any relevant links to for the Photos, Documents, and Contact fields

• Blogstream - Select yes. This will auto-comment your press releases when a blog publishes your article

Remember to fill in the keyword fields with the keywords for your business and services. You might also consider using complaint or any other negative keyword if you're trying to bury negative press with the articles you're about to publish.

Once your profile is complete, save the changes and leave this tab open. You'll want to come back to this site once you complete the next few steps.

Posterous.com is an amazing tool to get your articles published on many different sites. Sending your article through your Posterous.com profile to your multiple websites and blogs is super easy.

Currently Posterous allows for auto-posting on the following sites:

• Facebook Profile
• Facebook Page
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• MySpace
• Identi.ca
• Friendfeed
• Plurk
• Blogger
• Jaiku
• Tumblr
• LiveJournal
• Shopify
• Typepad
• Xanga
• Squarespace
• WordPress
• Moveable Type
• Delicious
• YouTube
• Drupal
• Flickr
• Picassa
• YouTube
• Vimeo
• Viddler
• Blip.tv
• Scribd
• and more added frequently

To set your Posterous profile to automatically post your press release, look for Import Blog in the Tools section. Enter the URL for your WordPress site, and it will automatically feed your press release into the Preposterous network of your other blogs and websites.

Sign into Google Reader with your your Google account.

Along the top left-hand corner is Add a Subscription. Paste the URL for your MyNewsDesk pressroom into the pop-up box.

Your press releases are now collected onto Google Reader.

If you want to create an auto-publishing public links page of all your imported RSS feeds in Google Reader, visit my other hub How to create a public auto-publishing bookmark page in Google Reader.

Feedburner is a good RSS tool to aggregate your articles with little effort. It easily imports others sites' RSS feeds and creates HTML versions you can then feed other sites with.

Take the URL for your MyNewsDesk pressroom, and create a Feedburner RSS feed.

Each site is different, but you will want to look for one of these phrases to set-up your RSS for that particular site:

• Other/Outside/External Services
• Applications
• Feeds
• Import

Paste your Feedburner URL where it asks for the RSS feed, and Feedburner will begin to feed the site with your posts from MyNewsDesk (or wherever).

Here are some worth mentioning that can auto-publish from RSS:

• Bebo.com
• Hellotxt.com
• Netvibes.com
• Facebook Profile and Pages
• Live.com Spaces
• Presently.com
• Multiply.com
• Chi.mp
• Friendfeed
• Twitter

Do the same for the sites listed here, which is just a partial list. Search in Google for RSS to Post for even more sites.

Once you set-up your blogs, you will want to register them with Technorati which will basically host a mirrored of your blog on their site. What's even better is that their site will outrank your site in the search engines. 

After you claim your blogs with Technorati, your blog count is now double what it was before you registered with Technorati.

Your auto-publishing system is now complete, so what's the next obvious step...

Publish your press release.

Go back to MyNewsDesk to write, or to paste your press release for distribution.

At the bottom of the Publish a Press Release (or blog, video, photo, contact, event) page is the option to send the press release to your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.

You're required to save your article before registering your WordPress blog with MyNewsDesk, so save the article. Now click yes to publish to your WordPress blog and it's done. Your press release will begin to be imported into your blogs. It's not entirely instantaneous. There is some lag as you get further down the list, but within a few hours the auto-publishing should be complete.

This is a great system to send off your information to many, many sites with very little effort. It has it's advantages and disadvantages, and can be evolved to meet your needs.

While this system is effective and pain-free, you can create a little more work for yourself to gain in the long-run. 

What if this was set-up a little differently, and you used this idea to create a multi-day, time-elapsed publishing system.

It's really not that hard once you've gone to this step. It takes some organizational mapping, and some fore-thought, but you'll definitely be rewarded for the effort. 

Here's something I've heard before when describing this proceedure.. I'll save you the trouble of asking and answer it preemptively:

Isn't this considered Spam?

Technically no, it's not Spam. Spamming is unwanted mass-posts in forums or your email, or in the comment section of other people's blog or sites. They're unwanted, and more-often-than-not, way off-topic.

These are all your own blogs and sites that you created for the purpose of distributing your content, and therefore not unwanted.