How To Turn A Free Reprint Article Into A Press Release

You may be wondering what the difference between a free reprint article and a press release is, and if the two of them can be used together in marketing your website.

They actually can work hand in hand, but they are two totally different types of content that need to be adapted to fit each particular purpose. In this article I'll tell you how to turn your free reprint article submissions into a press release (PR), but first it's important that you know how these two pieces of online content are different.

Although PRs and free reprint articles are both content that is syndicated online, they each have their own distinct characteristics, and they cannot be used interchangeably. For example, you should not submit a PR as a free reprint article, nor should you submit an article as a PR.

A PR has the characteristics of being promotional (written with the purpose of making sales or directly promoting a business or product). You can openly talk about your business in a PR and link to your website. Press releases are also usually time sensitive, in that they tend to announce some event that is upcoming. They are usually most popular when they are first published and then quickly dwindle in importance as time passes.

Free reprint articles, on the other hand, are teaching oriented and should not be written with the purpose of selling a product or drawing attention to a website. Most online publishers will not let you link to your website in the article body or use the article to serve as a sales piece for your business.

This type of online content is a lot more subtle than a press release, but it has the added benefit of being timeless and useful to readers for many years. The longer that an article is published on the internet, the more reprints it will tend to have.

I suggest that the easiest way to incorporate both types of content into your marketing plan is to write the free reprint article first and then adapt the article to a press release format. Here are some simple steps for doing that:

1 - Press releases actually look different from articles. Because they are time sensitive, they usually begin with a date stamp that precedes the first sentence of the content. They also include the location from which the press release originated.

Like an article, press releases have a title and a summary. The summary usually appears under the title before the press release body. The title should sound like something you would find in a newspaper, which may be quite different than the title that you chose for your article. If you can, try to work one of your keyword phrases into the title in a way that reads naturally.

2 - Links in the first paragraph: Press releases allow you to put links in the body of the content, so you will be able to hyperlink keyword phrases associated with your website. Try to place your keywords in the first few sentences of the PR (in a natural sounding way, of course), varying the keywords that you use each time. The keywords don't have to match yours verbatim--they can be variations of your main words (such as "sailing boats" for "sail boats").

3 - When re-writing the body of the press release, your goal is to make it more journalistic in tone. Press releases are written in the third person and are strongest when they can include statistical data and quotes from experts or other sources.

It may feel a little odd at the beginning writing about yourself in the third person and quoting yourself as if you were an outside reporter, but you'll get the hang of it.

The PR should ideally be about 500 words. That's short enough for people to read quickly, but not so short that it comes off as just a sales letter. The idea is to make the content appear as news.

4 - While free reprint articles have a resource box at the end, press releases allow you to put similar information in the body of the release. For maximum benefit, end your PR by telling the reader what he or she should do in response to reading the article. Tell the reader what website to visit and give a link. Also tell them why they should go click that link--it might be enough to say "For more information on this topic visit [website address]."

Press releases tend to get the most attention right after they are published. Since they're news oriented, it makes sense that everyone wants the "freshest" news possible. When you submit your PR could impact how many people end up publishing it. Those that are submitted earliest in the week tend to get the most attention.

You can get double duty out of your free reprint article submissions by turning them into press releases. A few simple tweaks need to be made to make them suitable for the different distribution method, but the effort is worth the increased exposure.