Press releases can be a great tool for promoting your small business. Don’t let poor formatting choices detract from your message. Once you have crafted the content for your release, use this 9 item checklist to make sure it is properly formatted.
- Use “Title Case” for headlines. The first letter of each word capitalized. Exceptions to this include words less than three characters and prepositions.
- Don’t use ALL CAPS. It is considered bad form to submit a press release entirely in upper case letters. Most release services with an editorial process won’t pass a release written in all caps. Even if they did, most journalists and readers will ignore it anyway.
- Have your Dateline look like this: City, State, Day, Month and Year. Including the city and town related to your news is optional, but helpful for readers and local reporters. The date should reflect the date of distribution for your release.
- Keep even spacing and avoid special characters. Each paragraph should have natural line wraps, not forced line breaks. Leave one line break between each paragraph. It’s not necessary to include dashes, asterisks or other symbols to separate sections in your release.
- Be careful about using HTML. Many services distribute news over a wide array of networks – many of which do not support HTML.
- Limit in text links to one link per 100 words. These links include both anchor text links and active URL hyperlinks.
- Convert charts and graphs to images or PDFs. Attach graphs and charts to your release by converting them to images or PDFs as they often will not display properly if they are cut and pasted into the text of your news release.
- Keep your release within 300–800 words.
- Include your email address only in your contact information (rather than the body of the release)
