How to submit a press release in 3 simple steps (beginner guide)

You've got news — a launch, a raise, a hire, a milestone — and someone told you to "put out a press release." Fair. But a press release isn't a blog post, an announcement email, or a LinkedIn brag. It's a specific format, sent to specific places, in a specific order. Get those three right and your first release will do its job. Skip any of them and you'll wonder why nobody wrote about you.

Here's the whole process, boiled down to three steps you can finish in an afternoon.

Step 1 — Write it

Every strong press release answers five questions in the first two paragraphs: who, what, when, where, and why anyone should care. That's it. If a busy journalist reads only the first 80 words, they should still be able to write the story.

The structure that always works

1. Headline — factual, under 100 characters. "Acme raises $12M Series A to scale hospital robotics" beats "Acme is thrilled to announce a major milestone."
2. Dateline — city and date. "SAN FRANCISCO, July 2, 2026 —"
3. Lead paragraph — the whole story in 40 words. If you removed the rest of the release, this paragraph alone should still stand as news.
4. Body — one or two paragraphs of context: numbers, quotes, why now.
5. Quote — one from a real named person, not "spokesperson." Two sentences maximum.
6. Boilerplate — a short "About [Company]" paragraph at the bottom.
7. Contact — name, email, phone. Real ones.

Quick writing tips

• Third person, past tense. "Acme announced," not "We're excited to share."
• Numbers beat adjectives. "Cut deploy times by 74%" > "significantly faster."
• One story per release. If you have two announcements, send two releases.
• No exclamation marks. No "revolutionary," "groundbreaking," "leading provider of." Editors delete those on sight.

A free AI prompt to draft your first pass

This is the exact prompt we hand new customers. Paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, or any model, replace the bracketed parts, and you'll get a solid first draft in one shot.

Read it once, replace the AI-sounding phrases with how you actually talk, add a real number if the model made one up, and you're done. For a deeper dive on structure and style, the AP Stylebook is still the reference every newsroom uses.

Step 2 — Pick a publisher

You have two flavors of "publisher": free directories and paid distribution wires. They serve different jobs.

Free sites (good for a footprint, not for coverage)

Free wires like OpenPR, PRLog, and EIN Presswire (which has a free tier) let you publish for $0. You get a live URL on a real domain. What you don't get is Google News indexing, journalist reach, or ticker-page placements. Use them as a supplement, not a strategy. Our list of 5 free websites you can use goes deeper on each.

Paid distribution (fast, indexed, and predictable)

Paid wires exist because editors trust them. The classic names are PR Newswire and Business Wire — both charge in the $600–$1,200 range for a national release. Modern alternatives like Press Release Submit start around $45 for Google News indexing and scale up for specific outlets like Yahoo Finance or USA Today. Guaranteed placement, live-link reports, same-day turnaround.

Rule of thumb: if you need proof of placement for investors, customers, or a search-engine footprint, pay. If you just want a URL somewhere on the internet, go free.

Step 3 — Pay and go live

This is the fast part. On a modern platform, the full flow is:

1. Sign up, verify your company (usually under an hour).
2. Paste your release into the submission form.
3. Upload a hero image and any multimedia.
4. Pick your distribution tier and schedule.
5. Pay.
6. Editorial review — 15 to 60 minutes on business days.
7. Live. You get an email with every URL, plus a PDF and Excel report.

On our platform, same-day publication is the default, not an upgrade. Submit before 3pm ET and it goes live the same afternoon. See the full how it works page for the step-by-step.

Common first-timer mistakes

• Writing like an ad. "Excited to announce" is a red flag to editors. Write like the story already happened, because it did.
• No real number. "Massive growth" means nothing. "Grew from 12k to 84k users in nine months" is a story.
• Fake quotes. Editors can smell them. Two real sentences from a real person beats a paragraph of marketing gloss.
• Firing to twelve free sites first. That kills your Google News chances because the search index treats it as scraped duplicate content.

That's the whole game. Write it like news, pick the right channel for what you actually need, hit send. If you want to see it work without paying, your first release with us is on the house.