Category: PR

5th December is International Volunteer Day, a day created by the United Nations to celebrate volunteer organisations and raise awareness about the importance of volunteering. Each year volunteers from all over the world offer up their services for everything from litter picking to blood drives to fundraising events.

For small business owners, International Volunteer Day is a great opportunity to give back to the community. Plus, volunteering can bring all sorts of added bonuses that can help to build your business.

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Writing press releases is a key part of PR.

Get your releases right and they’ll be published far and wide, but get them wrong, and they a) won’t generate the coverage that they deserve or b) you were hoping for.

It’s not possible to write all of your press releases in exactly the same way, but there are best practice techniques you can follow, like these:

1: THINK ABOUT HOW THINGS LOOK

Before we focus on the writing side of things, there’s just one small, but crucial thing I wanted to flag that has the potential to really impact how your press releases perform, and that’s how they’re presented.

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Here at Get Ahead VA our team includes experts in a wide variety of fields.  From Accounting to Admin, Hootsuite to Holiday cover, Email Marketing to Excel, our VAs can add value to many aspects of your business.  In this Expert Showcase series our team deliver some of this expertise to you, with ‘How to’ guides to help you get the best bang for your buck in your business.

In this guide one of our PR & Marketing specialists Caroline talks about how you can write a persuasive and compelling awards entry to help you grow your business through PR:

“Awards can be a fantastic way of boosting the profile of your business – both locally and online.  Simply being nominated for an award is an accolade in itself, and being selected as a finalist or even winning an award provides fantastic fuel for your PR and social media.  Every step of the awards process is an opportunity to talk positively about your business and about the third-party recognition you have gained.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT AWARDS (more…)

Journalists are busy people, bombarded with story ideas and press releases every day.  For your news story to stand out and get noticed it needs to get many things right – be relevant, specific, interesting enough, with a catchy headline etc.  It also needs to have the right images.  Not having the right images can make or break that once in a lifetime opportunity to get your brand featured across the local, national or even international news.

Whether you are contacting journalists yourself or outsourcing it to other PR professionals, having the right images is vital.  You need to be prepared for all types of media, with images that are small enough for website and email use – and large enough for print.  Just as you tailor your approach to each media outlet with your covering email and press release, you also need to tailor the images you send – low resolution for an online only publication but high resolution for print media.

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