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@The-J 'sup my dude? Sorry I just now remembered to reply to this.
A couple caveats first.
There's a difference between getting press and doing press releases.
Also, in the SEO game, doing press releases usually means signing up for some press release service. Those are a waste of time, imo.
Last caveat, we get press for all kinds of clients, but this is my real estate related thread, so I'm just going to talk in terms of real estate.
Since you asked about press releases, the "secret" is you've got to have something newsworthy. PR folks talk about having an angle. I like to think of it as telling the story in a way that normal humans are actually interested in it.
So there's two stages in a new project's life cycle that are pretty "easy" to get press releases out there and get them picked up. Maybe three actually. First, when you announce the project. There are a lot of factors to consider, and like I said in the original post, I don't take part in all the meetings, so I can't really advise you on the best time to announce a project. But honestly, a lot of these projects don't do a big push when they first announce it.
They do their big push when they do a groundbreaking. So that's the second ( or first) time. And then the third one is when your phase one of the project is done, or you're somewhere around halfway and you make it sound like a phase one is done. I know some real estate communities have multiple phases, but I've yet to work on a bigger project like that.
Taking a human interest angle on it makes things so much easier. Like the project that's bringing affordable housing to downtown. Super easy. The project that was coming out of the ground first after the great recession. Super easy. The community that took great steps to make sure they were friendly to people with special needs, including not having streets or garages so that there was plenty of wide walkways. Super duper easy.
But sometimes you got to dig deep. And sometimes you take swings and miss. That one project I mentioned up above where we upped the prices and sold out. That project is in South Phoenix. We never got a bit of press for it. We just couldn't figure out how to tell the tale in a way that the press wanted to share the story with their readers. They didn't want to cover the groundbreaking. And that big rush of sales at the end took us by surprise, so we never did the first phase sold out.
Anyways, beyond just releases, there's a bit of an art to getting press. I feel like it's a game to connect the dots sometimes.
Find a magazine you want to get into. Do your research on the kind of articles they've done before. Pitch them something that's similar, but with a different spin on it.
I see last year you wrote about travertine. Well this year we've got a project that's using porcelain. Would your readers be interested in learning more about the porcelain countertop trend? (That's a terrible pitch. Don't use it. This is why I pay other people to do the pitching. But you get the idea...)
Sometimes it's easy to figure out what kind of magazines would want to write about your project.
Find the publications that write about real estate. Submit yourself for their annual awards (if you live in a big enough city).
You can probably connect some of the dots, as I've already shared what makes some of these communities special. Golf course home community gets written about in luxury magazine. And a golf magazine. These luxury apartments are using smart home tech, we get that written up in a tech mag.
There are architecture magazines, and design magazines, and home and garden magazines, and builder magazines, etc etc.
I didn't even talk about blogs. We don't do much pitching to blogs. But you can.
But you don't use the press release strategy on these kind of things. You just approach them and pitch tailored story ideas. Well, we usually pitch one story idea at a time. Or we'll give him a quick three ideas and ask them if they're interested in any one of them.
Anyways bro it's late, that's all I got for now. Hope that helps you get started. Feel free to ask any follow up questions. I am planning on writing more about this topic in its own thread at a later time.
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