Boom shake the room fire nation J L D here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network with great shows like the salesman podcast.

Today we'll be focusing on hacking the press release to drop these violence. I brought Mickey Kennedy on the mic. Mickey founded e releases 22 years ago to help small businesses authors and startups increase their visibility and credibility through press release marketing.

He lives in the Baltimore area in fire nation today. We'll be talking about what tech is a press release. How do they work some tips for writing a winning press release. Why so many fail? How can you actually measure press release performance and so much more when we get back from thinking hours.

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Mickey say what's up to fire nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with what's up fire nation I believe that creativity can really be the difference for you know.

Building a successful business. Creativities the thing that sort of have kept kept me on my toes and you know I keep reinventing myself in my business over time.

Fire nation I really hope you're absorbing these comments by our guest because sometimes it's like this out of the box thinking it's like a different shift that's going to give you that how long this crack opens something for you and I think this is a great example of that because today we're talking about hacking the press release and there's going to be some out of the

box thinking and chatting and strategies and tactics will be talking about in regards to hacking the press release because hey if everybody was doing it's it wouldn't be successful so what exactly

Mickey is a press release and how the heck do they even work press releases basically an announcement to the media it's usually written very objectively third person pretty boring.

It's basically explains the who what when where how and why of what you're announcing you know we see a lot of them that are like a new hire at a company like a new vice president of HR or something like that and those are the worst types of press releases but they're also the most common type that we see.

And so we want to talk about not just doing the common we want to talk about doing the above the beyond and really writing that winning press release let's go into some pretty deep detail now give us some tips give us some tactics give us some strategies for

getting a winning not losing a winning press release I think that the thing that a lot of people get tripped up with press releases is they spend a lot of time writing and following the format of what a good press releases the headline is of course the most important aspect because you

lead with that and it's what journalists see when they are on a newswire like PR newswire looking at press releases and that determines whether they drill down so headline is important and you know the writing is important but it's not very important the most important part of the press releases the strategy behind it what are you

announcing. I would say like 80% of the press releases that I move through e-releases don't do anything they get zero media pick up and it's not

surprising because a lot of the press releases that we're moving aren't newsworthy they don't move the needle there you know nobody really cares about a

personnel change at your company or the fact that your website is now you know mobile responsive it you may have invested a lot in that but it's not something that a journalist as a gatekeeper is going to want to share with his

audience so you have to sort of think what can I announce or what can I say from my company that a journalist would want to share with his readers or viewers in the case of TV or or listeners with radio and I think that once you change your

mindset and start creating content with that in mind you can really come up with some compelling stuff the hack that I see utilize that works the best is a survey or study you

know we had an auto repair center in Pennsylvania that wanted to do a press release they were looking for the SEO benefit of getting links from

articles and they did a survey and they partnered with a small trade association of independent auto repair members and one of the survey questions that they asked was what's the strangest thing you found

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