Don’t Let Your Press Disappear

Yippee…you’ve landed in a feature article on a popular website! The story showcases your work and even highlights how your amazing talents have evolved over the years. It’s the perfect article to share with the world – and you do. You send the link to everyone you know, post it on social media, give it to your Reps to share, add it to your newsletter and more.

 

Fast forward a few months later…and an industry insider emails you to let you know the link you shared is broken. First of all…WOW…this person is actually trying to read the article about you – so cool! But, that’s weird…they’re not able to. So, you click on the link and…OH NO…it’s not working for you either (insert panic attack). Wait – it gets worse — you didn’t create and keep a copy of the article. It’s lost forever! (insert major panic attack here)

 

This is actually a TRUE story…and totally preventable.

 

Despite what everyone things I want you to realize that…just because something “lives” on the internet, it doesn’t mean that it will forever be accessible to you.

 

Some sites shut down without warning, even really big ones. I had several clients reach out to me a while back when they couldn’t access the press articles we landed them on a large news outlet. That’s when I had to explain that the site suddenly shut down after many years in operation. It’s an unfortunate and grim reality of the news business these days. When this happens, sometimes the outlets leave their site up as an archive, but often times they take it down and everyone on them disappears.

 

For those sites that are still up and running but the link you have just isn’t working…try searching on their website for your article. Sometimes they reorganize and move them to another location within their site which could result in a fresh link. The good news is that the article is still up. The bad news is you can no longer access it with the link you previously shared with the world.

 

And, then there are other sites that simply take down old articles that no longer have frequent visitors or perhaps after a certain length of time. This can happen for a variety of reasons: to make room for new articles, unclog their system or perhaps they don’t keep a robust archive.

 

So, what should you do?

 

Instead of relying on a website to keep your article available forever – I suggest to create and save it as a .pdf file.

 

There are many ways you can do this, here are a few ideas:

 

In your browser: start on the webpage you want to save. Head up to File and choose Print, or press Command and P to open the printer window. Then, select PDF as the printer type and hit save.

 

Use a free third party website to convert any webpage into a .pdf file. I like web2pdfconvert.com — simply paste the URL you want to save into their page and hit convert…it’s that easy.

 

If you want to save a more exact version of any webpage, there are numerous platforms that you can purchase. One of the most popular is Adobe Acrobat or another one is PDFcrowd.com which has a free version (with branding) or low cost version which gives you more options.

 

 

As for my clients, luckily they now save their articles as .pdf files. And, this is what I suggest you do for every amazing article about you and your work that you want to keep and share forever.

 

 

THANKS!