Over the last few days the Pressitt team has noticed a small uplift in spam releases submitted to the Pressitt platform and unfortunately a few slipped through the net.

As a consequence, Pressitt has updated it’s spam procedures and no longer allows content related to loans, finance, credit, along with the banned topics already prominent in the registration page.

Any account found to be abusing Pressitt in any shape or form will have its account terminated straight away.

However, if you feel you have a legitimate release covering one of the banned topic areas, please get in touch with the editorial team (contact@pressitt.com ) and we will review your submission on an individual basis.

Let us make it clear that the vast majority of Pressitt users publish relevant and newsworthy content, but we feel it is necessary to take these measures to maintain the standards of content available via Pressitt.

If you’re still not sure what Pressitt does and doesn’t allow in terms of content, please read our editorial guidelines before you submit your next release. All we basically want is relevant and newsworthy content.

To find out more about the different types of spammers out there, Joshua Titsworth at Search Engine Journal has written an excellent post entitled: Six Types of Social Spammers (none of which we want to see on Pressitt)

We look forward to viewing your next Social Media News Release.

The Pressitt Team

This is the third part of our tricks and tips blog post series, focused on getting the most out of the Pressitt Social Media News Release creation and publishing platform.

Part 3: Dont’ forget about your previous releases!

Pressitt previous releases tick box image

In page 2 of the editing and creation processing pages is a small tick box option that says “Tick the box if you would like to have your previous SMNRs listed. Only SMNRs from this company identity can be listed”

It’s always worth ticking this box as it always allows other SMNR’s created with this identity to be included on your latest published SMNR. This functionality helps give your viewer to your release a  chance to further explore your brands latest news.

Previous SMNRs image

We hope this gives you a few more ideas when creating your SMNR. Come back soon to see the next Pressitt SMNR tips and tricks post.

This is the second part of our tricks and tips blog post series, focused on getting the most out of Pressitt Social Media News Release creation and publishing platform.

In part 2 we will look at your identities and boilerplates.

Pressitt allows you to add as many identities as you need. So if you’re an agency with multiple clients you can have and individual identity for each one. The identity must consist of a logo that represents your brand and a bolierplate to go with it.

Once the identity is created it can be selected every time you create a release for that brand.

What is a boilerplate?

A boilerplate is usually found at the end of a press release, and briefly describes the company or organisation detailed in the release. The same boilerplate is usually used on every press release the company issues. It is important to remember boilerplates should be up to date, clearly written and short in length.

The boilerplates on Pressitt SMNRs are found at the bottom of the release. Here is an example of the boilerplate currently found on all Pressitt SMNRs.

Why are the identities so important?

Identities play an import part of the Pressitt SMNR creation process for a numbers of reasons.

1. By adding an identity you get home page advisability, along with visual exposure of your logo. A Pressitt SMNR without an identity will not feature on the home page, but will be found in the release pages and the brand’s relevant category page.

2. By adding a boilerplate as part of the identity creation process your are offering the viewers of your SMNR additional information and a chance to add extra keywords to help with your SEO visibility.

We hope this gives you a few more ideas when creating your SMNR. Come back soon to see the next Pressitt SMNR tips and tricks post.

Over the next few weeks Pressitt will be offering you some tips and tricks blog posts to help you create your SMNR more effectively. The first in our series looks at the relevant links section of your release.

The relevant links section of the creation process gives you a great opportunity to show your viewers other parts of your brand. Ideas for relevant links could be a link back to your: Company Twitter account, YouTube page, Facebook group, blog, website, other coverage around your news and any supporting research. Here is a recent example of best practise from the ‘Women cyclists benefit from noseless saddle solution to riding-related health problems’ SMNR.

Here is another example: ‘Celebrate Asian music, dance and fashion at The Mela at The Mall 2009‘, notice here some of the social media profiles are highlighted with visual logos, which updates automatically when you add the link.

We hope this gives you a few more ideas when adding links to your SMNR in the creation process. Come back soon to see the next Pressitt SMNR tips and tricks post.

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The Pressitt social media news release team are always striving for ways to get PRs, brands, small businesses, and anybody else interested in the SMNR format, to share knowledge about this increasingly popular communications tool.

Today, we are pleased to announce a new social network: Pressitt SMNR Best Practice – that allows you to share best practice and helpful tips when creating your Pressitt SMNR. We hope Pressitt’s new social network will help to crowd source knowledge from those that create SMNR’s and feedback into the community with best practice, helpful tips, advice and any other thoughts. Of course the Pressitt team will be fully involved in the network, adding relevant links, new forums topics, user examples and generally answering your social media news release questions.

So, if you use Pressitt regularly, or want to find out how to create SMNRs, please get involved and share your thoughts, recommendations and ideas.

Pressitt Team

To get the latest Pressitt SMNR’s please follow us on http://twitter.com/Pressitt

The team behind Pressitt, Social Media News Release creation and publishing service have come up with a guide on getting the most from social bookmarking and news sites. These play an important part of the SMNR share process alongside other sharing processes such as sharing via email to your PR contacts online and offline, adding to your news wire release via a link and forwarding to targeted industry experts and peers.

What are bookmarking sites?

Social news and social bookmarking sites are websites/portals that save website posts, blog posts, images, and videos - anything that a wider audience would want to view.

Social News sites also tend to have voting systems where users can vote for or against the articles posted, allowing readers to quickly navigate to the best articles. The more votes you get the higher ranked and recommended the post is, making it more visible and likely to attain a place on the home page where it gains maximum exposure.

Which is the best site?

One of the most popular sites using a voting system is Digg. It is separated into two sections: a ‘most popular’ list, which comprises articles receiving the most votes in the past few days or weeks, and an ‘upcoming’ list, which are new articles. Most other social news sites follow a similar setup.

Social news sites are also a good place to get a discussion going just like a blog commenting system.

Let’s get started

Pick out a social news site and browsing through the categories to familiarise yourself with the layout and the functionality. Try adding new articles to the site or commenting on existing articles. To do this you will need to register and set up an account.

Digg ,Reddit, Mixx are among the more popular sites but you might be better off targeting your efforts to a niche site that is more geared to your SNMR,  brand, products and services.

How to Use Social Bookmarking to Promote Your SMNR

Social bookmarking and news sites are a free and effective way to get* backlinks and drive traffic to websites and blogs. The bigger sites such as Digg and Reddit have the most traffic and are a good place to start.

When you start looking around the site pay attention to the blogs, websites, and articles that are bookmarked the most and ranked the highest on the home page, it’s also worth looking at how the headlines and summaries are written. This will give you an idea of what people like to see.

*Backlinks: Backlinks are links from one website to another website. The high Page Rank the website that contains the link has, the more power it has to help BOOST the linked website with its search engine position pushing above it’s rivals. So the more high quality backlinks you get the better position Google grants you.

Submission tips

• Don’t *spam, you will get a bad reputation and nobody will vote your pages up
• No sales copy - it’s boring and nobody fall for it!
• Entertainment posts, relevant news, and a snappy hook all help to encourage votes
• Only submit quality content - interesting and well written.
• Vote on articles quickly. Articles that get at least 25 votes within the first 15 minutes will rise through the social bookmarking ranks faster than articles that get 25 votes over two days.
• Don’t just vote for your own post and articles - If you are only promoting your own blogs and affiliate marketing programs users will quickly lose interest in your content. Remember, other users can view your profile to see what you are submitting or promoting.
• The best way to promote your content and get it on the front page for maximum effect is to get colleagues to vote for it, also Tweet about it ” Hey great post on xxxxx I think it really deserves a Digg!” and link to the post on Digg

*SPAM: In terms of social news sites means that you are only looking to submit and publish your own related content to gain an advantage. Users will realise you are not being part of the community and will not vote your submissions up, so you have no chance of gaining front page status. Spam is also considered to be one of the following topics, alcohol, activism, extremism, petition, prescription or other drugs, religious, ringtones, tobacco or vitamins related themes.

Top social bookmarking and news sites

1  digg.com

383,598,000 - Inbound Links | 33,433,760 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 11,400,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 183 - Alexa Ranking.

2  Yahoo! Buzz

6,031,000 - Inbound Links | NA - Compete Monthly Visitors | 3,600,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | NA - Alexa Ranking.

3  StumbleUpon.com

234,000,000 - Inbound Links | 4,418,609 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 1,100,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 362 - Alexa Ranking.

4  reddit.com

161,685,000 - Inbound Links | 4,908,990 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 1,300,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 441 - Alexa Ranking.

5  Technorati.com

175,287,000 - Inbound Links | 3,309,174 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 2,000,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 662 - Alexa Ranking.

6  del.icio.us

427,665,000 - Inbound Links | 1,623,083 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 317,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 2,476 - Alexa Ranking.

7  kaboodle.com

2,600,000 - Inbound Links | 3,941,212 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 2,500,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 1,694 - Alexa Ranking.

8  mixx.com

16,005,000 - Inbound Links | 879,108 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 2,200,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 645 - Alexa Ranking.

Make it easy

Social Marker is a fully automated tool that allows you to type in the details (name, url, tags, description) of the post you are submitting to many bookmarking and social news sites.  You will need to have set up accounts at each of the individual sites first though.

Additional resources - Niche social news and bookmarking sites

List of Social Bookmarking Websites

http://knol.google.com/k/shital-jethva/-/1lch2budony0n/4#

50 Social News Websites: A List of General and Niche Social Media Communities

http://www.doshdosh.com/list-of-social-media-news-websites/

83 Social News Sites - Categorised By Niche

http://www.squareoak.com/blog/83-social-news-sites-categorized-by-niche/

List of Social Media and Social Networking Sites

http://traffikd.com/social-media-websites/

20 Do-Follow Social Bookmarking Sites That Actually Work

http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/do-follow-social-bookmarking-sites/

Other useful resources

Digg front page data - useful to see what sorts of stories are hitting the front page, plus lots of other insightful information:

http://socialblade.com/digg/diggfpdata.php

Link Attraction Factors Keyword Tool - Enter a keyword and the tool will return data on the average number of links accumulated by stories popular on Digg that mentioned that keyword:

http://danzarrella.com/link-attraction-factors-keyword-tool?word=free

LAF Title Check - Enter a title and the tool will break down the words and display the effect they had on the link accumulation of popular Digg stories:

http://danzarrella.com/laf-title-check

Here are some SEO optimisation tips to help your Pressitt Social Media News Release get a headstart on Google, Yahoo and other search engines.

1.Instead of just dropping copy in your release and hoping it will be picked up by search engines, use keyword tools such as Google AdWords keyword tool and Wordtracker’s FREE keyword suggestion tool.

Google AdWords keyword tool

You can either enter the keywords you want to research into the top box, or you can enter a URL of your website if you want to research that in the subject area.

The second half of the screen shows the actual keywords being searched into Google, the competition on Google Adwords and an indication of Search Volume (how many searches  per month).

2. Your most important keywords should feature once in the Pressitt headline, once in the summary/overview, several times in the core facts and in the boilerplate/company information.

When adding your keywords make sure your SMNR still makes sense to both your audience and to Google.

3. When adding images and documents to your Pressitt Social Media News Release make sure they are correctly labelled to tell the viewer what the images are or what the documents are about. All the images and documents can be indexed by Google.

4. Use the social feature within the Press Contacts section and relevant links to create a clear path back to any online ways inwhich you can be contacted, and social profiles/websites that can help widen your brand reach.

5. After you have published your SMNR you can re-edit, or change your keywords to try and attain a higher ranking in Google.

6. Search engine rules change for time to time as do search algorithms. Pressitt will try and keep you updated with the best way to write your SMNRs.

7. Most importantly, make sure your release is well written and of interest to your audience.

This post was written by Ian Howie Account Director at 1upSearch

Twitter: ihowie

Web: www.1upsearch.co.uk

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ianhowie

Below is the next in the series of Pressitt help videos. This screencast shows you how to create your SMNR and get the best out of Pressitt social media news release creation and publishing service.

Other help Pressitt videos include RSS feeds and boilerplates/company information.

We hope you find these videos useful.

If you think a particular element needs explaining better within Pressitt please let us know and we’ll add it to our list of updates.

Regards,

The Pressitt Team

The Pressitt team would like to share with you an image of what the Pressitt Social Media News Release creation and publishing service can do. Please take a look at the red circles for an idea of the functionality, and what you can expect a final Pressitt release to look like. This image is taken from the current version 1.o, and there are still many updates to the Pressitt SMNR to come!
Click the image to view a larger image.

We are actively trying to incorporate user feedback into the Pressitt site. Something that we’ve received a number of requests for are help and features videos.

So here are are first two.

The first is all about RSS within Pressitt. The video goes through how to get the best from the eight RSS enabled categories and brand RSS feeds on the final SMNR release.

The second is about how to add company information and boilerplates to your Social Media News Release.

We hope you find these videos useful.

If you think a particular element needs explaining better within Pressitt  please let us know and we’ll add it to our list of updates.

Regards,

The Pressitt Team