Bury bad news with online press releases

It could be a lawsuit against your company.

Or a health department violation against your restaurant.

Or a post at somebody’s blog, written by a rabble-rouser who wants to drag your name through the mud and destroy your business.

If it’s bad news and it’s online, it could live on forever.  Anybody who uses the search engines to research companies can find it.  That is, unless you know how to bury it.

Enter Glen Selig, a former TV investigative reporter who today writes and distributes press releases for his clients to bury or “push down” the bad news on the organic search list.  That’s the list that appears on the left side of the screen when you type a keyword or keyword phrase into a search engine like Google.

“You still need something newsworthy to disseminate, but then it’s about strategy and technique,” says Glen of PressReleasePros.com.

I’d go one step further and say you don’t even need something newsworthy to write about. 

Let’s say you sell jewelry.  Three years ago, a consumer group incorrectly accused you of selling fake gems.  Their accusations appeared online and kept popping up in the searching engines when people typed certain keyword phrases about gems.

Here’s how you could bury it:

—Write and distribute a press release about your new money-back guarantee.

—Write and distribute another release about how to buy gems.

—And then another on what to do if you love jewelry, but you’re allergic to certain types of metal.

—And then another on the most popular types of gems.

—And then another on what to look for when buying gems.

Get the idea?  You aren’t writing these releases for journalists.  You’re writing them for consumers.  If journalists find them, that’s great.  But the whole point of the exercise is to bury the bad news. The more press releases you write, the further down the list the bad news will fall. Even if it ends up on page 3 or 4 in the organic search list, most consumers wouldn’t bother looking that far into the list. 

“I help large and small companies use this secret weapon all the time,” says Selig.  “And it works like a charm.”

He distributes his press releases through his own company, PRNewsChannel, so they get picked up by Google News, Ask.com, Yahoo and MSN.

You can hire someone like Glen to write and distribute press releases for you.  Or you can do it yourself with help from my free email tutorial called “89 Ways to Write Powerful Press Releases.”