Digital PR is a solid link-building strategy that allows you to get placements on major news websites. Now a lot of these links will be no-follow links, but of course, because they are on a powerful news website, you should still want them. And we’re not talking about just any type of links here. We’re talking quality, DR70 backlinks — free of cost!
Skip the Expensive Agencies: Land Powerful Links Yourself
Crafting the perfect pitch to publications is the way you achieve these; and to do that, you need some sort of story, some sort of data, a unique insight that’s not just some irrelevant tidbit that falls under the business-doing-business category.
Business journalists are not interested in business doing business, so you’ve got to come up with some sort of value-driven content, some sort of revelation; whether it’s some research or some groundbreaking data. And basically, you then want to write the story for them and come up with the hook. So you’re not just tipping them off, you’re doing the legwork for journalists.
Target Local Media for Easy Wins
The real secret to pitching local newspapers that I’ve uncovered with digital PR in recent months is that it’s actually so much easier to pitch local newspapers. That’s because they’re just desperate for content.
A lot of big media organizations still have really quite strong editorial teams and editorial practices whereas, your local newspaper down the road or even the local newspapers for major cities are a bit more relaxed with their processes, while still being very powerful websites with lots of authority. They tend to be desperate for content because a lot of them are still based on ad revenue.
Build Credibility with Each Placement
I’ve recently read the book “Trust Me, I’m Lying” by Ryan Holiday, where he talks about how you can basically trade your way up the food chain. A lot of these blogs are desperate for traffic and if you can provide a source of traffic, i.e., a trending topic, or an article that’s going to attract or appeal to a certain audience, then that’s likely to be very valuable to them.
And if you get featured in one blog publication, you can then trade up and say to subsequent webmasters; “this story has already been covered in so-and-so publication, so you’re missing out and you should really cover it. That way, you can build some legitimacy around the digital PR campaign.
From Data to Compelling Story: Let AI Do the Heavy Lifting
With local news, it’s quite easy to pitch a story and when I say pitch a story, you might as well just write it for them, and when you do that, it’s very difficult for them to actually say no, as long as it’s still a good story.
Effortless Content Creation for Busy Entrepreneurs
So what makes a good story? Like I always say, you need some unique insight, something interesting and new, and then you need a hook. A hook is basically about how you apply that to today’s times.
Why should people care about the subject of your content? So examples I’ve done recently are about AI taking over jobs or increasing beer prices, inflation, and property prices.
Choose Captivating Stories That Resonate With Webmasters
So think about any standard tabloid newspaper. You can easily see the kinds of issues they’re constantly attacking: whether it’s property prices, inflation, social issues, etc. So these are the kinds of things you can get quite easily.
Obviously, you shouldn’t be too too salesy with the content you create. Many times, the best you can normally expect is just a homepage link with your branded anchor text, and that’s the limitation of PR versus say a link-building agency like mine where we get you well-optimized anchor text links.
What does that mean? So the text of the link is your keyword and that link will go to your main money pages, your commercial pages. So it’s quite difficult to get those kinds of links with digital PR. On the other hand, you can build up your power, and your overall authority through these news websites.
Never Over-rely On One Method
Ultimately, you want to mix. You want digital PR on one side that’s going to give you legitimacy, build your brand, and get you a lot of no-follow links that’ll still get you a lot of power. At the same time, you want to build actual outreach links such as we do. Our method is to get do-follow links pointing straight at your money page, talking about your product.
In reality, you don’t really want to rely on a single strategy. You want to have them all. That’s why we’re bringing more and more digital PR in-house to our link-building agency. So as part of a standard practice, you get those links pointed at your money pages and you also get brand features, which are essentially PR mentions talking about your brand and how great you are.
We’re also aiming to optimize those placements as well so that those news articles can basically rank on Google and people will get to see your brand and get convinced about why you’re great, and why they should buy from you. So they can then click that link which is still a powerful link back to your site. But it’s also a very human touch that they’ll click that link and then buy from you.
Key Takeaways:
- Make it easy for the journalist. A lot of them are really quite lazy, so go with local rather than national. Obviously, we’d all love to get national news stories but that’s a lot of work, whereas loads of local stories, those local newspapers that are still in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, can still get some really powerful links. Those local news sites have much lower requirements than big national news websites.
- And then once you’ve got a few of those, you can do it at volume. That will help you a lot. But then you can trade up. That will give you the authority and legitimacy to then pitch bigger publications saying: we’ve been featured in 10 local newspapers, would you also be interested in the story?
Real-World Example: How We Secured DR70 Backlinks with ChatGPT
In one of our campaigns, we did some research, put some data together, gave that to ChatGPT, and prompted ChatGPT, as we do with all our guest posts, to write as a journalist or a PR expert. So we created a story based on this data and cited our client as a source. The content was about commercial property in Sussex.
Witnessing the Power of AI-Powered Digital PR
That content is only a week or so old but it’s already ranking for five keywords. That’s because Sussex World has a domain rating (DR) of 75. Now obviously the whole purpose of the article is about commercial property.
A look at the ranking keywords shows that they are all about commercial property in Sussex. This is pretty fantastic because not only is it a really good link for our client from a DR 75 website, but it ranks really well for related, commercially inclined terminology for that client in that niche.
Home Brewing Success: Another Example of AI-Powered PR
Another example: we had a client in the home brewing niche. So we basically put together some data on how the price of drinking outside, drinking in pubs and bars is going up, and therefore more people are interested in home brewing. So again, we just did a PR piece based on that and that also included a link to the client. And again that page is ranking pretty well for three keywords so far.
We haven’t actually been optimizing these media pitches but that’s the next step.
If you need help implementing suggested methods, or if you do not have time to do it yourself, check out our affordable SEO packages and choose the optimal one for your business and budget.
