The most important thing to do before you even write a release is to decide what is going to be the focus of this release. Some people write news releases so infrequently that they think that once they do sit down to write one, they have to stick everything in it. That really doesn't work, because what that does is, it just disperses your creative energy and your writing energy so that you're trying to go in too many directions. You're trying to stuff unrelated things into the release, rather than choose the one thing that you want to make most prominent in the headline and develop in the release, and then people are going to get one message from this release.

Now, it's OK to mention other things. But you want to tuck them in casually toward the end of the release and not try and feature too many things up front. I'm going to make a general rule that there should be one main theme to a press release and you should know what that is before you sit down. If you have just one point that you want to make in the release, like any good news writer, you could stick it in one paragraph-the who, what, when, where and why-and everything else is elaboration. You have to choose how much elaboration are you going to put in that press release, and there's really no reason why a press release cannot be limited to one page, or one page and a half, at the very most. For more tips on how to write fantastic press releases, read "The Do-It-Yourself Press Release Makeover."