A Media Room will jack up the traffic to your sales, event sign-ups, or membership subscriptions by offering all the necessary easy-to-use copy and photos for the editors and producers who are on a deadline.

A journalist or an editor visiting this MR should find very little reason not to write a good story about your company, services or offerings.

The MR should have not only all the copies of your previous Press Releases but should also suggest new story ideas. There must a list of interesting story ideas to hook the editors.

For each story idea, you must also offer the modular story ingredients to help an editor put together a story in a hurry, without committing any of her own resources.

You should become a “profit center” for any editor who is in need of a quick and informative story on your subject area or expertise.

If you are, for example, selling vacuum cleaners, your MR should be the best source for a journalist or a writer to drop by and write an interesting story (complete with photos and diagrams, etc.) on (let’s say) a new robotic vacuum cleaner that can decide on its own if the floors are dirty and then activates itself and vacuums the floors until your house is clean.

What are those story ingredients that you should keep ready and downloadable in your MR?

• Pre-written leads, quotations and paragraphs.
• Photos of relevant personalities, events and places.
• Fact sheets, interesting side-bar materials, trivia, Insider
• Tips, Top-10 lists, etc.
• Contact information on not only your company’s VP Marketing or the PR Manager but also those relevant names quoted in the story.

(Some web sites actually make available camera-ready fully-written stories with embedded photos for small publishers just to grab and publish as is.)

A well-stocked MR will multiply your chances of getting invaluable free publicity. Omit it from your small business web site at your own peril.

Ugur Akinci is a writer and an independent business owner who owns such web sites as <a href="http:///www.TechnicalCommunicationCenter.com> http:///www.TechnicalCommunicationCenter.com</a> and <a href="http://www.How-to-Write_Anything.com"> http://www.How-to-Write_Anything.com</a>