It’s great marketing to be mentioned in print.  But if you simply link to the online version of the article, you are not getting the full benefit of the piece.

When you link to the article or post on the publishing website:

•  You are directing your visitor off of your site where you can lose them to the distractions of ads, other articles, post comments, or mentions of your competition.  (Look at all the distractions in the webpage capture of the article on the left side of our graphic above.)

•  The publisher may remove or change the link at any time.  Your article is lost and you have a dead link on your site.  (BTW, if you do go this route of simply linking to an article, put a reminder in your calendar for a few times a year to test all the links on your site so you can fix any that are broken.)

• Out-going links do not help search engine optimization (SEO) at all.

We recommend putting the content of the article to a PDF which is uploaded to your website’s server.  That way, you can control the content and remove ads, mentions of your competitors, and all distractions (see the clean article on the right side of the graphic above.)  You always have possession of the story.  And while PDFs may not be optimized for SEO the way a regular web page may be, they do help SEO.

To see samples:

HAWAII ISLAND ENERGY COOPERATIVE Click on any of the articles on this page.

SKINSPIRIT SKINCARE CLINIC AND SPA In this PDF, we removed all distractions, including mentions of our client’s competitors.  Here, we highlighted the relevant information and greyed-out the rest of the article.  Note that the URLs show the page is on our clients server.

HPD PUBLIC RELATIONS Here, we integrated press articles with items related to this event: postcard and poster (MPS designed and produced), photos, social media, blog posts, and the press release put out by our client, Hope Patricia Daly.

Send John a line for more information.