| Catherine Spicer 
There are a lot of things to consider when getting your news release or content ready for promotion. However, even after you and your colleagues run through the checklist and double-check distribution details, you're not done. "Communicators must figure out how to tell the larger story of their brands or products in a way that connects emotionally with their audience and inspires them to act," writes the author of our white paper Driving Credibility & Success for Your Brand: How to Earn More Media. That emotional connection can be put at risk when your audience's reading experience is disrupted by a typo. When a company sends their press release to PR Newswire, the Customer Content Services team prepares it for distribution. In addition to reviewing the text's essential elements such as headline, dateline city, and media contact information, we look for any last minute mistakes we can correct prior to sending it out. Here are the three most common press release mistakes we fix. 1. Dateline dates Would it surprise you to learn that our editors still routinely see the year 2015 in press releases' dateline dates? I've personally seen three in the past week. After you spend so much time on the most important parts of your content, it's easy to let your dateline date fall by the wayside. Perhaps you planned to send your press release last week, but needed one more thing to come through before you could issue it. Or you thought it was going to be distributed today, but something changed and now you need to hold it until sometime next week. When going through your press release checklist, don't overlook the dateline city and date. Including the correct month, day and year of distribution helps readers determine how recent the information is. 
2. Website errors You have to be strategic about how many links you include and where you place them, but once you've made those choices, do you go back and double-check that those links are working correctly? We often see links to website pages that haven't been published yet or files bookmarked on the writer’s desktop. Have a colleague or friend test your links and confirm the URLs are not just working, but also directing readers to the landing page you intended. 3. Common word misspellings It's been a long-standing PR Newswire tradition to train our content specialists to look out for words like "manger" where it should say "manager" and other, um, more colorful misspellings that aren't caught by spell-check (like the word "public" minus a critical letter). But we also see others that are a little harder to catch. One example I saw recently referred to people purchasing a particular product as "costumers" rather than "customers." Because spellcheck doesn't catch this type of mistake, you need to re-read content for context. Throwing a really tight deadline into the mix makes it that much trickier to spot. If you can take a few extra minutes, comb through your content for these common types of mistakes. It's always better to catch them before they are distributed versus having to correct them after the fact. Fortunately, before issuing your press release, the Customer Content Services team will double-check dateline dates, embedded URLs, and other easy-to-miss mistakes. As you write press releases and other brand content, make sure you're doing everything you can to secure the maximum value from your efforts. Download Driving Credibility & Success for Your Brand: How to Earn More Media for more tips on what to look for with your content distribution. Author Catherine Spicer is a manager of customer content services with more than 20 years' experience counseling brands on their content. Each year, the Customer Content Services team catches around 45,000 mistakes. Follow Cathy on Twitter @cathyspicer. | 
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