In the case study, the RebootOnline team shared some fascinating insights into writing subject lines based on a study they ran.

So, I wanted to know more.

Oliver told me I needed to talk to Helena because she had put together this excellent subject-line study.

This episode is packed with great insights on ideating, iterating, and testing your subject lines to perfection.

Main Takeaways

1. Avoid Questions: Subject lines with questions have a 13% lower open rate than those without. Statements tend to perform better.

2. Be Direct and Clear: Providing a clear and direct subject line that tells the recipient exactly what they will get increases open rates.

3. Leverage Buzzwords: Using trending topics, celebrity names, or current events in subject lines significantly boosts open rates.

4. Keep It Short: Subject lines between 4 to 8 words tend to perform better, as they are concise and less likely to be cut off in email previews.

5. Avoid Overused Keywords: Common words like “data,” “study,” and “survey” don’t significantly impact open rates and can sometimes be seen as spammy.

6. Use Listicles Wisely: Listicle headlines (e.g., “Top 10 Beaches”) perform slightly better, but ensure they are relevant and compelling.

7. Personalization Matters: Personalizing subject lines based on the recipient’s preferences and writing style can increase engagement.

8. Mobile-Friendly: Shorter subject lines are more user-friendly for mobile devices, ensuring they are not cut off.

9. Build Relationships: Focus on building long-term relationships with journalists by being transparent and avoiding deceptive tactics like fake “RE” or “FWD” tags.

10. Test and Iterate: Experiment with different subject lines and analyze what works best for your audience, refining your approach over time.

Resources Mentioned

Reboot’s Case Study

Reboot Online

Note: below is the slightly-edited transcription.

Can you lay out the methodology for your study?

Yes, sure. The methodology we used is analyzing over a thousand subject lines targeting a variety of topics. Our aim was to identify the ideal headline length and the type and styles of headlines that are most likely to grab journalists’ attention.

We analyzed the headlines into four groups and wanted to compare their open rates.

So the four categories were:

1. Interrogative: so the type of headlines that end with a question mark,
2. Research-based headlines: headlines that start with keywords such as data, study, research, things that show the journalist that the story we’re trying to give them is based on data research.
3. Listicle headlines: those headlines that are, that organize the results of the study by, uh, rankings or lists.
4. Buzzwords: headlines that include current events, any trends or celebrity names, and things that are happening at the moment and will grab journalists’ attention.

We analyzed this and compared the open rates between them to see what does well and what doesn’t and what tends to increase open rates and what doesn’t.

Are those headline types primarily what you all send at Reboot?

Uh, yes, I would say not only those, we do different other types of headlines, but we felt that categorizing by this would be good to kind of have a better idea of open rates.

What industries did you send to?

Yes, we, because we actually analyzed, uh, the headlines that we, uh, used in a specific amount of time. We included a variety of topics. So, from property, sector, lifestyle, and travel industry to motor, finance, and entertainment. So it was quite a big pull.

Why do you think subject lines with questions have had a 13 percent lower open rate than headlines without questions? 

Yeah, we found that interesting because it shows how headlines with questions are quite predictable and ambiguous.

So I think predictable in a way that, uh, you’re kind of asking the journalist for a response. You’re not actually giving them what they need. You’re asking for information. So, I think that this can potentially lead journalists to just skip opening the email because they already know the answer. So it’s pretty predictable.

You’re not actually giving them the data.

Could you give us an example of a question subject line?

Yes. An excellent example of a question in a headline, which we even gave in the blog post on BuzzFeed, is why Plymouth is the most haunted place in Britain.

So it’s a headline we used that didn’t get as many open rates as we had when we actually said Plymouth is the most haunted place in Britain or is amongst the most haunted places.

This is because we’re giving the journalist a sentence that we are actually, we know the answer, whereas the other one, you’re kind of requesting the journalist to think of reasons why, if that makes sense.

Yeah. I recall us having a rule at Siege where it was like, if that journalist could answer the question, no. Like that would get them to not open the email, you know, like, that’s not a good type of question. So if it was like, is Plymouth the most haunted place, if they knew right off the bat, like, yes or no. Then they’re, they’re just going to click through it, right?

Yeah, we say a lot at Reboot that there’s always the so what that we have to think about when, uh, not only in head, in subject lines, but also like the hook of the story that we’re doing or even like, um, the type of data we are searching. Uh, to get our data team, our, uh, data team is actually trying to find, we’re always trying to think about the, so what, so what we’re giving to the journalists is a, so what kind of a story or headline that they will look and say, not really interesting.

It’s not giving me anything.

So, if I were writing a post about, say, the 10 best beaches in the UK, what would a subject line question be?

The top 10 beaches you said in the UK are beaches. I think, like looking at our study, you can apply them four to the four categories that we analyzed. So we could look at, for example, no question mark and avoid maybe saying data or survey.

So it would be probably something more tailored to the region. So for example, go to the region that come up on top or the city that come up on top and say, X is the best, has the best beach in the UK.

It’s really important to understand the journalist you’re reaching out to when thinking about subject lines.

Analyze the type of subject lines and headlines they use in their articles and also the website and outlet. So, how does this outlet tend to be more positive or negative about the topic of your study?

You can approach that in the same language as they use because this will help the journalist feel familiar. The journalist is going to look at their inbox and actually see something they’re familiar with and they know. So this is really important.

Why do you think open rates weren’t impacted by subject lines with keywords like data, study or survey?

I remember the difference not being very significant. But I feel that it’s because of overused keywords. First of all, these keywords have become very common subject lines. So if many emails that the journalists receive use this keyword, they may not, and your study won’t stand out enough to actually increase the open rates.

And I think that even if important words like data study are there, uh, at the beginning, maybe the best part of your study, the actual hook is at the end. This means that depending on the length of your subject line, it’s going to cut off.

So the journalist will actually see data reveals or survey reveals, but won’t see the rest.

Did you test anything like including the word “exclusive”? 

Yeah. Journalists are always searching for exclusives—not all of them, but they are always trying to find a more unique story. So yeah, they do make the difference. We’ve never done any study on this. Uh, so I don’t have data to back up, but I think speaking from personal experience really helps.

And I think it is a good way as well to start building relationships with journalists as well, because when you offer exclusive, you’re, uh, you’re starting there a connection that you could benefit from later on and they will benefit as well.

Are there any other keywords besides “survey” or “data” that people should avoid?

Um, I think it really depends on the study, isn’t it? But I do feel that it is more of what you want. There are always spam keywords as well; words that the mail server will see as spam and won’t actually deliver will go to the spam folder, so this is something to be mindful of as well.

So, this is something quite good that can help. We constantly try to find and avoid them because they can lower the open rates.

Yeah, sometimes not even words, but how you write the press release. For example, if there are too many uppercase, it can go to spam. Not all cases, obviously, but things to consider when writing.

Can you clarify what you mean by a listicle subject line?

Yeah, we call them listicle headlines that have this type of ranking or list. For example, the top 10 beaches to visit in the UK, the 10 worst TV series finales, or the five best coffee shops in London—this type of list is something we’re quite used to seeing online. So, this is the type of headline that we call a listicle.

Interestingly, there wasn’t a huge difference as well. The open rates were just 1 percent above. But I think that, again, this type of headline can be predictable depending on who you’re sending it to. I think all of the subject lines are pretty relative. It depends on who you’re sending to and the context of your story.

But before, this type of headline can fall in the place of being pretty predictable because it makes the recipient feel like they already know what to expect. But if you give the hook, for example, as I was saying, the X beach, the banks, uh, Y beach in the UK, for example, this already gives the hook, even though it kind of shows that you have a listicle style of content, if that makes sense.

Why do you think buzzwords helped open rates?

Yeah, it’s funny. This one wasn’t a surprise when we saw the results. I think it’s because obviously, the news cycle is always urgent, so journalists are trying to find things that resonate with their audience.

But it’s also timely. It’s happening at the moment, so trends, any celebrities that are in the, in the news at the moment, they’re doing something relevant, or, uh, even like special dates, Valentine’s Day, Easter, summertime, for example.

So, any of these words that people are talking about are what journalists want to write about because they are relevant to their audience.

So I think that’s the main reason why this type of headline does well.

I think it’s also being smart enough in the way you phrase the headline again, trying to always find the hook that links to that specific buzzword to actually make it relevant in your study.

It’s not only the buzzword that makes it relevant; it’s also finding that hook in your study that will be relevant and give the journalist something new to talk about that person.

Because people or specific dates are in the news. They’re overly shared; there is so much content about them that you have to find a unique angle that will add value to what you’re doing.

Using our beaches example are you saying it would make sense to try to find some type of event or buzzword that you can kind of tie that to?

Yeah. Exactly that. Yes. I think, I think the beach one is an excellent example for summertime, for instance. It’s an excellent way to tie both. We did one recently, a reboot that was about Taylor Swift. Obviously, she’s everywhere, and her tour was everywhere as well, with people trying to buy tickets. And there were a lot of scams in the news.

We decided to do a study on tips to avoid being scammed when buying Taylor Swift tickets.

So we used the relevant keyword there, Taylor Swift, but added a unique angle that was tied into what was happening in the news, and it did really well.

Is it better to tie these keywords or buzzwords in the ideation stage, or do you find it doesn’t really matter?

Different people have different ways of doing it, but I would say that, at least personally, I find that it is a constant process.

So, first, obviously, when you’re developing your strategy and have your campaign idea in mind, you will search for keywords related to your campaign. Then, you will go online and see how the media reacts to this topic.

They will use headlines differently. So it’s good for you to have this knowledge before even writing the press release just when you’re doing your research and ensuring that the keywords that you’re using in your study are accurate.

It’s a constant process because then, when you write the press release, you can revisit it again.

Is there something else you clicked on when writing that you can add to your subject line?

So we tend to do exclusives as well, but not always.

You could contact the journalist when you know what you want to do in the study.

For example, in our case, sometimes, uh, it is extensive data sets. So we want to make sure that this is actually like we’re giving, we’re analyzing the best metrics to actually create that story.

So reach out to journalists and ask like, uh, have this study that we are working on. Uh, is that something that is of interest to you?

While we’re searching for something in a study like that, having that feedback early on so you can build up, and I think the subject lines are similar.

You can try it out with the feeler emails.

What subject line do you use for a feeler email?

In this case, yeah, you can either go with an exclusive and say, look, we are doing this. If it is of interest to you, we can give you an exclusive.

You could put the exclusive in the subject line, or you can add “upcoming study” as well. For example, an upcoming study on UK beaches. Something like that gives the journalists an idea of what we are going to talk about.

Subject lines need to be clear of what you are delivering, and I think given this, yeah, there are specific words that they’re going to look at, and they were writing to know what it was about. It’s the key.

Do you recommend brainstorming lots of potential subject lines before choosing the best?

Yes, definitely. With digital PR, it’s about trying out different headlines and comparing industries, countries, and different journalists. It’s about seeing what works and then always trying to improve and use the one that stands out the most.

At Reboot, we work very collaboratively, so we always try to help each other with this as well. We always write different headline options that we think are relevant for that specific sector and always ask each other what we believe works or not.

Is that in Slack or do you have a formalized process?

Yeah, it’s on Slack, so it depends if you can do it with your team or company-wide. We tend to do this because we already have a feel of what will grab the most attention from journalists, but I think every person has a different way of doing it as well.

A/B tests work well also.

Again, I think that is always trying to improve from what you kind of learned in the beginning.

Can you expand on what it means to tailor the headline to a journalist?

What I am trying to say is that journalists have different ways of using headlines and approaching topics.

So, I think it’s important to keep this in mind when you’re writing and actually reaching out to the journalist about your study.

I feel that researching journalists’ preferences, writing style, what they like to cover, and how they cover that will help your subject line be more relevant than others when they’re actually going through their email inbox, if that makes sense.

I think some journalists will obviously have stronger opinions about something.

Regional journalists, for instance, will obviously come from sometimes the region they’re writing about. So they will be more protective about the results of this study than like any other person.

How far do you get into personalizing per journalist?

I think that’s a huge part of what we do, actually.

We try to personalize emails as much as we can, making sure that we know who we are reaching out to.

I think that this is important because sometimes we forget that we are building relationships with this journalist.

This starts very early on when you write your subject line and ensure it is relevant to that person.

It’s essential to understand that journalists are very busy people, and we must also respect their time.

We need to respect their preferences.

Obviously now emails are the biggest preference but it could be even the time you reach out to them. Not not all of them will work five days a week.

So I think we should do everything we can to make their lives easier. This is what we want, and it ensures that they know that on the other side here, we know who they are.

So, when you’re talking about personalization, it sounds like you are talking more about understanding the journalist’s preferences or beat rather than calling out an article. Is that right?

No, I think you can do both. We talk a lot about writing personalized emails to journalists. But I feel that personalization comes from this strategy of knowing who you’re reaching out to and understanding how they write.

I think it’s a combination of everything.

Do you feel like there’s ever a time when you should definitely personalize vs not?

I have encountered these two types. Some journalists say that they don’t like it and prefer a straightforward email. I think you can do both; it depends on the journalist, and that’s why it’s so important to understand the person who’s behind it.

Journalists quite like to know that you’re researching about them.

It takes a long time to personalize every email. Are there tips that you have for speeding that up and finding out the information that you need?**

I think BuzzStream is a good one.  There are various ways to personalize the emails on BuzzStream, which we find are very useful.

I feel that our job is to make their lives easier and build these relationships.

I find that it will save me more time if I have a good relationship with journalists.

I will have them in mind when I write press releases. Then I’ll write to them or ask them if this is something that interests them.

Would you like to receive this? It guarantees a link without much effort. I know what they like and what is relevant to them. I personally used that strategy when I did a lot of digital PR campaigns, and it worked well for me.

Buzzstream is a good way to personalize emails, but I always do feel that bulk send is something that we cannot do and we should avoid as much as we can.

You can build good results and get links without doing this.

So, I prefer the personalized email.

Why is the subject line word length so important? And then what kind of tips do you have for cutting out some words?

Four words is tricky. I think it’s just, I think maybe for content, everybody loves to try things. We tried to see if it worked. And, yes, I think that’s where this four word headline comes from.

We tend to use between eight and 11. I think that’s kind of the best practice, at least for me. Shorter headlines help us be concise and clear and also help us look at the strategy part of it.

It helps that it’s more user-friendly for mobile as well, and it helps that you don’t cut off when you’re in an email inbox.

So it’s just a little bit of a strategy, and it shows that it works. The shorter ones have higher open rates.

So I think it’s just avoiding extremes. Going over, I would say, 12, 13 words or going too low, like, four words.

Any final thoughts on the study?

Something I would say again is that I think everyone has different ways to do this.

Apart from the buzzword one, as you said, there are no very significant ones.

So I think, again, it goes down to what we were saying: It depends on who you were reaching out to.

So I think knowing, knowing the person that you’re sending your email to and researching about the journalist is better and more strategic.

Did you ever experiment with putting the website name in the subject line?

I’ve never tried myself, no.

Looking at the findings and the analysis we did, it could come down to familiarity.

Maybe that’s why adding a website name in the subject line works so well: the journalist will recognize it as a familiar name.

So it brings that and, uh, yeah, it makes the email show appear more trustworthy or even more relevant to them.

I’ve seen people recommend using RE: or FWD: in an initial email to make it appear like you’ve had a conversation already when you haven’t. How do you feel about that?

We tend to take the long-term route. I think, personally, this may result in short-term results that will increase maybe open rates and even lead to coverage. But it’s not sustainable.

From my point of view, the FWD or RE approach kind of compromises the relationship we are trying to build with journalists and makes them not see you as a trustworthy source.

At Reboot Online, we tend to follow the more complex and longer route, which is pro-journalist and prioritizes transparency with them.

And I think this lays the groundwork for lasting collaborations with them and ultimately also contributes to our clients’ positive reputations. If they see us as a trustworthy source, they see our clients as a trustworthy source as well.

The post Optimizing Subject Lines with Helena Maniglia appeared first on BuzzStream.

I dug in a bit more to find that Mark has had a prolific career in digital PR. He’s been involved in some of the most clever campaigns I’ve seen, including one where he took out a billboard ad to help find a companion (or at least a date).

Again, the campaign is aptly named DatingMark.co.uk. (If you check out the site, you’ll find he was featured on huge news outlets like the BBC.)

He also has a course where he teaches everything he’s learned over the years called…you guessed it…DigitalPRCourse.com.

What stood out to me was a specific edition of the newsletter in which he discussed the “Warren Buffet approach to PR.” He went on to discuss finding the sweet spot for reactive PR pitching.

I don’t want to spoil anything more because this one is full of great tips and advice from Mark about reactive digital PR.

Main Takeaways

1. Reactive PR can be divided into planned (e.g., holidays, scheduled events) and unplanned (e.g., unexpected company layoffs, natural disasters) components. Prepare for both types to maximize opportunities.

2. High-media-interest topics are likely to get more coverage but are also more competitive. Low-media-interest topics might yield fewer but more targeted placements.

3. The window of opportunity can be very short, sometimes just a few hours. Being plugged into real-time updates and having pre-prepared comments can help.

4. For planned events, prepare different potential comments in advance and get pre-approval from clients. This allows you to react instantly when the event occurs.

5. Create a list of journalists who have covered similar stories in the past. This list should be updated regularly to account for their roles or beats changes.

6. Focus on sending high-quality, relevant pitches rather than mass emailing. Tailor your pitches to the journalists’ interests and recent work to increase the chances of coverage.

7. To ensure that the comments or insights you provide are authoritative and relevant, ask, “Would I (or your client) be comfortable talking on TV about this topic?”

8. Include relevant keywords in your email subject lines and comments. This increases the likelihood that journalists will find your past pitches when searching for sources on similar topics in the future.

How Do You Differentiate Newsjacking and Reactive PR? 

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a good question. I think they’re often used interchangeably. You know, if someone. Says newsjacking and someone says reactive PR often, they’re kind of talking about the same thing.

I think that there’s just maybe a very small difference. And I think that you know, if you were to look up newsjacking, it, it’d be something along the lines, you know, if you looked up a definition, something along the lines of, uh, piggybacking or inserting your thoughts or opinions into like a breaking news story.

So, something like that, and I think newsjacking is more about adding to or contributing to an existing story. So, if something happens, you add your thoughts or comments to it.

On the other hand, I think reactive PR is a bit wider in scope. I think it can include that. But it can also include, maybe there’s a breaking news story or something and creating a new angle or story off the back of that existing story.

So that might sound slightly confusing, but if I give you an example—um, it’s probably a really bad example—let’s say a celebrity couple gets engaged. I think an example of newsjacking would be getting a comment from an expert on the engagement.

If it’s someone in the royal family, you might get a royal expert or something to comment on that.

So I’d say that is kind of newsjacking.

Whereas I would say reactive PR would be if you had that same story, you would kind of find a new angle to it, which would be, um, maybe where they are going to get married and why, or how much is that engagement ring that they proposed with worth?

So that is a slightly different angle from that existing story. But I could also be talking absolute rubbish, but that’s how I would perceive it in my head.

Is Reactive PR a Big Part of Your Digital PR Toolkit Nowadays?

So it wasn’t initially, but I think as time has passed, it has become more and more of something I’m doing.

And maybe I can talk a little bit more about why that is, but yeah, I think, you know, if we take a step back and look at what’s been going on in the industry.

So, journalists have been being made redundant, you know, left, right, and center across the US and the UK.

And I think that, you know, I’m trying to remember the stats now, but I think there will be 8,000 journalists in the UK in 2023.

North America, including the US and Canada, was made redundant. Just this year, I think it was about a thousand in January 2024. And in February, I think it was another 600.

So basically, um, you know, this includes some pretty large companies as well, like PLC in the UK. You’ve got, uh, vice, uh, bustle. Um, LA Times, uh, business insider, they’ve all made cuts. Right. And I think when that happens, you have journalists that were, no, they’ve lost their job.

So they’re going to do a couple of things:

Some will maybe get another job in journalism. Some will become copywriters, but I don’t have any data to back this up.

I have seen, and it’s quite common, that journalists also do PR. So, you’ve got a slight imbalance.

You’ve got fewer journalists.

And now you’re adding to the PR bucket over here because some journalists are getting jobs in PR. And then you’ve also got some SEOs who, um, or, like, old school link builders or whatever you’d want to call them.

Also, having a go at doing PR, they’re having a crack at it.

So you’re adding that you’re adding those to the mix as well. With fewer journalists and more people doing PR, it’s become more competitive.

And what I think that has happened because of that is that you’ve got journalists working with basically like a skeleton crew, right? And if your story isn’t relevant now, then it’s not a priority.

So they want to be writing about stuff that is relevant right now. And a few years back, maybe you could get away with something if it wasn’t relevant right now.

You could cover that, but if you tried the same thing now, it might not work. So that’s how I see things play out.

And I think that is why, uh, across the board, you’re kind of seeing hero or creative campaigns become less effective because of a combination of all those reasons. Um, it’s not necessarily a fact, but it’s my opinion on the situation.

Have You Seen a Drop-Off in Getting Your Pitches Read?

It’s a difficult question to answer because I’m not a journalist. So I can’t, and I don’t have visibility into the inboxes.

But I can guess that there are more PR people who are sending the same or very similar stories to the same journalists or the remaining journalists.

So I think it has become more challenging to get, you know, to get cut through, which is why reactive PR is so important.

If it’s relevant now, then there’s a higher likelihood, in my opinion, that it’s going to get covered. Otherwise, it just goes to the, you know, just goes to the back of the pile.

The journalists may love your story, but it’s like, I’ve got all these other ones that I need to write right now.

You know, there’s a sense of urgency about these other ones. And they might like your story and return to it, but we’re all humans. They might also forget about it and something else might come up.

Could You Outline Your Reactive PR Matrix?

Reactive PR can generally be broken down into two components: planned or unplanned.

So “planned” is stuff that, you know, will happen, right?

You know, Christmas is coming, you know that pancake day or Mother’s Day or whatever is coming. So, you can plan reactive stuff in advance.

In finance, maybe that’s the budget in the UK or when the Bank of England will set interest rates. So that’s planned.

“Unplanned” would be things you have no idea will happen.

Maybe a company is going to make layoffs, or they go into an administration, or a volcano erupts, and suddenly there’s like travel chaos or, you know, anything like that, so that’s kind of planned and unplanned.

You may hear some people talk to them in a slightly different way, but they mean the same thing.

So they might mean, when they’re talking about reactive, they might talk about reactive and proactive. It’s the same thing kind of planned and unplanned.

But you can break that down further, into high or low media interest, which is basically just a way of saying how likely the news publications or whatever publications are to cover these stories.

If it’s a high media interest, lots of them will cover it.

If it’s low media interest, maybe some niche publications, like trade publications, will cover it because it’s very specific to them, or maybe regional publications will cover it because, you know, it’s happening in their region.

Would Something That’s Low Media Interest Yield Less Coverage?

I like to go for stuff that is maybe high media interest because I know there’s an appetite for it.

But, you know, conversely, someone might think that I’ll go for the, maybe, the low media appetite ones because I might be able to pick up one or two links there or pieces of coverage there because maybe no one else is kind of going for it.

The great news about planning is that you can plan for it in advance. So you can work with your client and maybe come up with comments from them in anticipation of an event that’s coming up, or you know, get sign-off and pre-approval on things.

It’s great because it’s planned.

The downside is that everyone else, all your competition, also thinks the same thing, so they can plan for it in advance.

Right. And it’s really interesting to see this play out because I’ll go back to the Bank of England interest rates example. Every month in the UK, the Bank of England sets the interest rates.

And they can either go up, stay the same, or go down. So, if you have a finance client, you might prepare three comments from them for each scenario. Then when the Bank of England makes the announcement, everyone is just sending the same thing: a comment from their client to the journalist.

I’ve seen the journalist kind of—I don’t want to say the word complain, but I guess, tweet about it and be like, Oh my God, the announcements just came out like three minutes ago, and I’ve already had 20 or 30 journalists contact me.

Screenshot below is from a journalist:

It’s really difficult in that situation to get coverage because they’re not going to be able to use all of those comments from all these different clients; they might pick one or two.

So, people are doing that and then maybe wondering why they’re not getting coverage because everyone else is doing the exact same thing.

And that is, that’s the downside to it. Right.

So I think because there is more competition now, you not only have to think about the idea that you’re doing and the execution, you have to be thinking, what is everyone else going to be doing, and you kind of have to think, okay, if it’s predictable and everyone else is going to do it, you maybe have to think, okay, we won’t do that.

And we will do something different over here. We’ll try this over here.

I mean, I would probably prefer to do something different. I like to operate in the unplanned high media interests sphere; there’s nothing wrong with any of the others.

It’s just, you know, a different way of doing it.

You just probably have to accept that you’re going to have a higher chance of not succeeding and getting coverage if everyone else is doing the same thing.

And I know, I know in the newsletter, I spoke about a baseball analogy, but for me, I see it as more of an H.I.T. class.

So I will be doing high-intensity interval training for a short amount of time.

Whereas maybe some of my competitors will be sending out more campaigns and emails to journalists to try and get the same amount of coverage. And maybe that could be compared to a marathon.

So I would much rather be doing the, you know, the hit class, so to speak, than the marathon.

Can You Scale Either Approach?

I think it’s tricky because you might see something that you can react to that may be low interest, but if it’s such a low interest, maybe no one is interested in covering it.

So, I guess one example is that whenever a celebrity couple gets engaged, someone jumps on and wants to talk about the value of the engagement ring.

So if the celebrity couple is more famous, that will be a higher interest story for the publications. And they’ll probably be interested in receiving those kinds of stories.

But if you go down the low media interest scale, maybe a celebrity couple gets engaged, and no one cares about how much the ring value is worth because they’re just, you know, there’s, there’s no media appetite for that. It’s low media interest.

So you might be able to, if you’re the only one doing it, you could, you could give it a go, and it might work.

But on the other hand, if there’s no appetite for that story because they’re just not, they’re just not famous enough; then it could just not work at all.

So I think that it depends where you want to operate really.

Still, I think if you’re doing something unplanned, you’ll automatically remove a lot of your competition purely because they’re not fast enough or unprepared.

I did, a reactive piece of a week, which is the one that I spoke about in the newsletter, which was when Ted Baker called in the administrators, and the life cycle of that story was so short, like, um, I saw the news breaking, got the comment out, and within about three hours, I got my client coverage.

The story has come and gone, and it’s over now, but something else happens later on.

Some clients will take days or maybe weeks to get a comment approved, and they’ll just not be able to compete there. The downside to this unplanned stuff is that you’ve got to be plugged in.

You’ve got to know what’s going on all the time. If you’ve gone out for lunch, you might be too late.

You might’ve missed, you might’ve missed the boat on that story.

So you have to be quick. And, by being quick, you know, that’s obviously like a competitive advantage.

Whats the Workflow For a Reactive Approach?

So I think that, um, it’s not going to work for all clients. It’s just not going to be possible because, like I said, some may have a really long approval process.

The way to get around that, maybe you could get pre-approval or you could maybe try and, um, if once you’ve built up enough trust, maybe you can help.

Or find an expert to help write the comment. And then maybe they would just have to approve it on their side or maybe, or maybe you just kind of work beforehand.

You develop a framework for how you would respond to certain situations if they occur, and maybe you could tweak it a little bit for when that event happens.

But yeah, it’s not going to work for all clients.

And if they’re not quick enough to respond, or they just may not be suitable at all, because maybe something doesn’t happen in their new cycle enough, as you know, I’ve got a Christmas tree, like a website, and doing reactive for most of the year is just not going to be possible.

It’s just not going to work. Right? Like no one will care about Christmas trees and March, April, or whatever.

So, yeah, some things are just not going to work, but there are some things you could do that, um, can maybe make it a little bit easier. One is if you’re doing it in-house.

Because automatically, you know, you might be able to just, uh, if you’re sitting next to the guy that needs to approve it, that’s easy for you to kind of, to do kind of that or yeah, pre-approval to do, you know, almost like free reign, uh, for, for the agency or whoever wants to do it from whoever that stakeholder may be.

Those are a couple of things that can help out a little bit.

What Tools Do You Use to Stay on Top of New Trends for Reactive Pitching?

Yeah, I think there isn’t anything out there that solves that problem.

I don’t think there is a one-stop kind of tool.

I think if there was, then, you know, it would make everyone’s lives easier to kind of do it.

I think it is just being plugged into what’s going on on social media and having the news on in the background.

I may be a little bit fortunate because I live in Spain, and often, the work I’m doing is for the UK. Now, I’m only one hour in front of the UK, but that one hour, maybe someone is in bed and they miss something.

Whereas I’m awake, it can help a little bit in terms of, uh, in terms of that way, even if I was to do stuff for the US, you know, just being, I think it’s like four or five hours in front of New York, um, that if something, if something breaks early in the morning, you know, I’m probably more prepared to kind of jump onto it.

Are You Basically Building a Mini Newsroom?

Right. That’s, that’s exactly right. Yeah. And I think it may sound a bit tricky, like, to begin with. And it’s not an easy thing to do, but I think if you think about 99 percent of the headlines that you see. I’ve kind of happened before. So I, for example, I bet you this summer that there will be an airline that goes bankrupt or something, and it causes some kind of travel chaos.

I’d bet you 10 that that’ll happen. And you know, let’s do it. It’s on tape here. Yeah. Or like, you know, there’s, there’s going to be a celebrity engagement or there’s going to be like a celebrity divorce, or a company’s going to go bankrupt or, A company’s going to make some layoffs, or there’s going to be, you know, uh, a data breach or a data leak.

These things are going to happen. So it’s just basically preparing in advance. And I think that that’s what a lot of it is. It’s unplanned because you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen and you don’t know exactly when it’s going to happen. But there are still some things that you can prepare in advance.

So I think it’s just a case of anticipating what will happen. Uh, you know, waiting for that situation to happen and then pouncing on it when the opportunity, you know, uh, arises basically.

Yeah. Yeah. And again, it’s, uh, getting back to that baseball analogy, it’s like, just waiting for your pitch, like, it’s exactly, you know, having, you know, exactly what, what, uh, talking points you’re going to have.

And you know, exactly like what specific news item that’s going to be the one that you jump in on exactly.

How Much Time Do You Have to Formulate An Idea and Pitch?

I think it will depend on how competitive whatever industry is.

So if we look at finance, um, I think that that’s more competitive, and I think it’s almost kind of instantaneous. Whatever happens, it’s just fast. It’s quick. Right?

So I think in finance, you’d have to be quicker wherever, whereas if it was pet health, you might have a little bit more time, you know?

It’s hard to put a timeframe on it, but I can tell you from the other week when Ted Baker said they were calling the administrators. The window for that was just a couple of hours. Meanwhile, for the pet health one, um, you might have a day. I don’t know. It depends on the exact story.

Or let’s just bring it back to like engagement rings again, like you, you probably, depending on how popular the celebrity couple is. It gets engaged to do the, you know, the valuation of the engagement ring, um, you probably would have like a day as well.

It depends on how I would just bring it back to how competitive your industry is.

Um, finances are very competitive; pets, maybe not so much.

So you might just get away with having a little bit more time. But it’s one of those annoying things where I’m just like, “it depends.”

How Do You Recommend Building a List of People To Reach Out To?

Um, I think that there’s kind of a little bit of a learning curve, just discovering maybe who the journalists are that you want to talk to or who are likely to cover this story. And maybe, you know, there’s going to be teething problems whenever then, there’s a new client. You’re trying to do this kind of stuff.

Maybe they’re just not quick enough, maybe the quality of if you’re trying to get a comment from them, the quality of the comment isn’t good enough, but this is part of the process. The second time, you get a little bit better, and then the third time, you get a little bit better, and then maybe by the fourth or fifth time, they’ve nailed the comment.

Now they’re quick, and you already know in advance who the journalists will cover because the first or second times, you’ve done kind of the research there that you know.

That means you’re able to get there kind of.

So it’s just one of those things is there’s a process, you’re going to get better at it, and then if you keep doing it as well, you can sometimes find yourself in the situation where journalists remember, “Oh, that, that person sent me a good comment when that happened last time.”

And they might find themselves in a situation where they actually contact you to get a comment rather than you having to go to them, which is a lovely situation to be in, but yeah, it just takes time, those types of things.

Is the Ideal Workflow: identify topics we want to be authorities for, identify key journalists, and establish media lists?

Yeah, you could do that. You can absolutely do that.

This is easier if I just give you the example that I did the other week. I did one with Ted Baker going into administration, but if I wanted to prepare that list in advance, I might look for journalists who covered a very similar story that happened a few weeks before that, which was The Body Shop kind of saying that they were going into administration.

So I could find all the journalists who covered The Body Shop story in advance and maybe use that for when it happened to Ted Baker.

Now there might not be some, there might be some in there that are irrelevant. For example, you know, Ted Baker’s fashion-related.

There may be some fashion websites that specific websites that are talking about that, that, um, that probably I wouldn’t get from the list and that, you know, from The Body Shop story, but there may be a core, uh, list of journalists that might be, uh, you know, that, that would cover both.

So you can do things like that, um, that, that might help, but if you do it too far in advance as well, journalists may, the journalists that you’ve kind of created for your list may move on to other jobs, or they may stay with it within that publication, but move on to like, you know, another division or, uh, or, you know, do another, you know, change beats or whatever, you know, so your list might kind of become out of date.

How Do You Validate a Prospect Before Pitching?

So I think that there’s kind of two way, two extremes of doing it. Right. So some people say like, you’d be, you should be reading all their last articles to make sure that, you know, uh, you get a really good understanding of, of what they’re writing.

But, if you were to contact, I don’t know, 50 journalists and each, each article takes you, I don’t know, like five minutes to read. I’m not very good at maths, but that’s an awful long time to be, you know, to be reading and, uh, to, to understand who you’re kind of sending it to. So I think that that approach is, is far too long.

And then you’ve got the other side of things, which is like, oh, let’s just grab a list from the media database and I will just like send it to all of them.

And the problem with that side of things is, well, there are a few problems, really, like one, not all the journalists in there, too, and they might not be categorized correctly.

And then three, like, let’s say you sending him to travel journalists or whatever. There may be a lot in there that are like bloggers, or maybe they’re like, you know, radio talk show hosts or, um, just completely irrelevant people. So, you have to realize that if, if that’s kind of the approach, then you’re going to get a lot of crap with it, you know, that there’s going to be in there.

So the middle ground for me is that I just like to read headlines, and I’ll maybe give the story a click to see, just to check, that it’s relevant.

So I’m often just using Google, using certain key phrases. Then I’ll go to the website and check the article. I’m not reading it.

I’m just checking the headline. Does this make sense? Is it in the right section of the website?

For example, maybe I’ve had this in the past, as I Googled finance experts to try and find articles related to, you know, finance experts. And I found one about Cristiano Ronaldo. Some finance expert was talking about him, and that would just not have been relevant.

And it was easy to tell when I clicked through, because one, I could see there was a photo of like Cristiano Ronaldo and two, it was in like the sports section of the website, you know, it was just not right at all. So it’s just, I’m looking at those little indicators. It’s very quick that I could see it, but that this approach is, it’s still more time consuming than kind of taking a list from the media database.

I’m getting a good idea of, um, whether I think someone is relevant. I understand who I’m sending it to and why I know why I’m sending it to someone, because I’ve taken a look at, you know, um, just very quick look at the, the articles that they’ve written.

Are You Formulating Lists Ahead of Time—on the Fly—or Both?

So in that instance, I probably, if I’m trying to prepare a list beforehand, then I would be doing it, uh, how I just said, you know, searching Google, trying to find like similar articles from the past.

But when you do it on the fly, you don’t have the time to go through kind of and make a media list like that. Yeah. So occasionally, what will happen, and this, this is kind of a dream scenario, really, but you just Google the story that has broken, and very often, journalists are in a rush to write about the story. They’ll just put a page up, which is just a headline.

And it kind of says, like, breaking story, more news to follow, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that’s brilliant because I know that they need content. And they haven’t got the content because they’re still scrambling to find some information. So sometimes when I’m doing offline, I see instances like that and I’m like, brilliant, let me send them a comment and, you know, they’re looking for information. They get a comment sent through. They’re probably so happy. T

hey just to have something that they can include on the article. So that’s great when that happens. And when I did it the other week, you know, Um, a journalist I’d never had such a quick response from a journalist.

They just was like, oh, thank you so much for this like, you know, it was almost like a sigh of relief from them that they had something that yeah, right.

So, yeah, they don’t have to do the work I guess right?

Maybe they’ll be searching Twitter, and you can sometimes see that.

So seeing the page where it says like, you know, this is developing news story or something along those lines. That’s excellent for me because I know they really need my comment.

And I find that this is the great thing about when you’re doing like unplanned stuff is that, um, kind of have a high success rate from, from what I found, because there is no competition or very low competition because people aren’t quick enough, but also there’s that sense of urgency. There’s a panic among journalists.

I need something to fill this page that has nothing on it about the story that’s just happened, you know?

How Do You Determine if You/Your Client is Relevant or Authoritative Enough to Pitch a Quote?

Uh, yeah, I think, I think it does matter. Yeah. And I think it’s just basically. I think it’s okay to broaden things kind of, um, a little bit.

So, uh, I’ll give you an example. So there’s this guy called Ash in the UK who sells car mats. And so his website is just about car mats.

And, uh, If he was to do any kind of story about car mats, I think he’s going to struggle.

There’s just nothing in the news cycle that would kind of, you know, warrant a story kind of, uh, about that. It’s just not, it’s just not that interesting.

But I think, uh, what would work for him and, uh, is basically broadening them, broadening that out a little bit.

He can talk about cars, maybe he can talk about automotive things that are happening, and I think it’s okay to do that because it’s, it’s, it’s still relevant.

You know, his site is about car mats, but talking about cars is, is not a problem. Um, I think you can do that and that’s one thing that can work, but sometimes there’s just maybe, I don’t know, maybe you’ve got, uh, a company that’s like a forklift hire or something.

There’s probably not going to be much in the news cycle about forklift hires or, um, or even anything. You know, it’s a little bit tricky, so you might have to ty and think of an angle that’s related to it.

Maybe you could comment on construction, like stuff, if that makes sense, or topics. So it’s just trying to find your angle and, um, yeah.

And you’re right, is it, am I authoritative enough or am I, or is it relevant enough? I think the answer would probably be, would you feel okay if you got invited on TV, like live TV to kind of talk about that?

Iif you were happy to go on there and kind of talk about it, it shows that you probably know enough.

And that’s something that can, that can happen. And, there are some instances where you see some comments that are just not relevant.

And I think, journalists, some of them, probably will take it because all they care about is the story.

But I think some journalists will be like, “Oh, that didn’t really make a lot of sense to do that.”

And they may pick up on it and kind of question you about it a little bit more.

But you do not want to be in a situation where, you know, you can’t, you can’t talk about the topic in further, you know, in, in more depth if, if you get asked more questions about it, basically.

Does Where/How You’re Reaching Out Make a Difference?

I don’t think the actual email address itself matters.

I think it’s just basically explaining, maybe why, the person who is giving that comment is giving that comment. So I would tend to be like, um, I would tend just to say the subject line, like. “Expert comment” or “travel expert” or whatever it is.

And then kind of put about like, you know, what is the story that’s happening now, the breaking story that’s happening so that the journalists can know what it’s about and maybe, you know, who the expert is.

And then when they open it up, they will get the comment. And then I like to put a little bio underneath just explaining who the person is, maybe what qualifications they have, what company they work for.

Any of those types of things will make the journalist understand that this person knows what they’re talking about.

I’ll also, and this sounds bad when I say this, but I’ll also kind of keyword stuff it a bit.

So what I mean by that is that, if I was doing it for like my, Christmas tree website, maybe I would call myself like a “Christmas tree expert” or something within the bio or “Christmas tree retailer” or whatever, because, —this happens to me the other day—at some point, the journalist may have another story in like three, four, five months time or whatever, and they’re trying to find an expert about that.

And they remember getting your one all that time ago, whether they use that story or not, and you know, they may search their inbox and find you.

So I’ll kind of make sure I’ve got some keywords, whether that’s in the bio, the, the, about, you know, in the email or whether I’ve got like a little about section about the company just to be on the journalist radar in case it comes, you know, in case they want to get in touch in the future, it makes me just more, um, just, yeah, it just makes me more, more findable.

Basically they’re using the. If you want, if you want, they’re using the email as like a search engine, I guess.

What Made You Decide to Create a Digital PR Course?

Yeah, so I think I just wanted to create something that I wish existed when I started, and that’s also what I try to do with the newsletter.

Check out Mark’s digitalprcourse.com

I really wish there was a newsletter like the one I had, um, you know, when I started out, or even now, if someone else created something similar, that that would be great. And I think. It’s, it’s been great for a couple of reasons. Like I like showing people, um, how to do things and I like it when they can go away and do it themselves and kind of get results from it.

But I also think selfishly; it’s made me better at what I do.

It took me maybe a year or 18 months to create this course. But after I’d done it and had to think about how to explain things to people, it made me just, um, Yeah, basically just better at what I do. And that’s now something that I see in my newsletter.

Um, so each week, uh, digitalPRnewsletter.com, you get sent a tip on how to do digital PR or something that will either make your job easier or help you get more coverage. And just by doing that, it’s just, it’s just made me better at what I do. I know that sounds selfish, but, um, but yeah, it’s, it’s for me, but also, um, For people as well.

I want to help people. So it’s kind of twofold there, really.

Where Do You Get Ideas and Inspiration For Your Newsletter?

I mean, is it just all personal anecdotes or, you know, yeah, I’d like to say, yeah, go ahead. Um, yeah, it’s very funny to say, I think, well, it’s anywhere really, to be honest with you, but, um, in terms of what I always tell people about ideation is that you kind of need to, uh, you kind of need some inputs in order to create those outputs.

Um, so really you need to be consuming stuff. You need to be reading things or watching things, or whether it’s in the same industry or something, that’s not a tool. And, you know, I’ll give you an example of that, but, you know, uh, you mentioned earlier, but the, the Warren Buffett analogy that just came about because I was literally watching a documentary about, You know, Warren Buffett, and then I thought, Oh, that’d be interesting.

What if I took that and I applied that to, you know, PR and then there we go. That that’s one idea for, for the newsletter then I thought, you know, what he said was a really good way to kind of explain what to do, but. Sometimes. And also because I know I have this newsletter and I know that each week I need to kind of find some content for it.

And yeah, you know, it goes out every Monday. So some Mondays I’m kind of panicking and I’m like, Oh my God, what am I going to, what am I going to put in there this week? So I have that, but I’m, I’m taking note of what I do during the week. If I just do something a little bit different, um, that works, or if I just discover something completely new, I’m just like, Oh, actually maybe I could put that in the newsletter.

Sorry. It’s coming from anywhere, really. I wish, um, I wish I could give like a, a good like source here. I’ve just taken these ideas from here or there or whatever, but it’s just kind of where it’s come about, really.

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With the Helpful Content algorithm update, AI Overviews, and all of the other changes in the industry, I wanted to reach out to Aaron Anderson, who owns and operates a link building agency, Linkpitch.io, that is deep in the trenches building links every day.

I had the chance to join Aaron’s podcast as a guest a few years back, and what struck me was his unique approach to link building.

It was a client-first, intentional, content-driven approach that drove results.

In our conversation, we discuss strategies that work (or not) and how you should think about your link building in 2024.

So, without further ado, here’s my conversation with Aaron. (Or if you’d like just to check out the takeaways, here they are below:)

Main Takeaways

1. When ideating content to pitch for link building, the content needs to be appealing to those who can actually give you links (not just appealing to your readers.)

2. The free tool or freemium model in SaaS is an effective link building strategy.

3. When pitching, never lie. Stay genuine. If you haven’t read an article, don’t say you did.

4. The better and quicker you can evaluate whether a site is a link farm, the better off you’ll be.

5. It’s generally OK to pitch to sites that accept guest posts or contributors, but avoid sites that advertise “write for us” all over the site (e.g., in the main navigation or footer areas).

6. Broken link building works because it gets you a wide variety of links from different pages and sites.

7. Aim for consistency rather than stressing about the ultimate power of each link.

8. When determining the link strategy, it’s essential to understand the risks and decide which risks are worth taking.

9. Although his agency doesn’t specialize in link exchanges, he remains open to opportunities. He’s seen that sites doing the best job with their SEO are typically the ones most open to link exchanges.

10. For those new to link building, learn about the different types of link building that you can build and try to understand what would work best in your industry.

11. When engaging with a link building agency or consultant, ask: If this is the only way we get links, why aren’t we getting links in other ways?

12. Aaron prefers (and recommends) that you invest in building links to pages that Google is already ranking at least on the first few pages of the SERP.

Below is my slightly edited transcription:

What’s the best content approach you’ve seen lately?

I can’t think of any examples kind of right off the top of my head, but generally the approaches that I prefer are companies that just recognize that content is, where links are going, and that you have to have good content to build backlinks.

Because I get so many people, sometimes they come to us and say, “Hey, just let’s build links for our site. “And it’s okay. “Well, what do we have that people are going to be interested in and that people are going to be willing to link to you?”

And sometimes, if you don’t have that, you’re limiting your options as to how you’re going to be able to build links for your site.

What happens if a client wants links but has no content to pitch?

I just have to be honest with them and say, if you want to go pay for links, that’s one option. That’s not an option I generally do too much with.

And, if you don’t have anything to link to, you can always just pay someone to link to you in some way. But if you want to earn the backlinks, you have to have something valuable to those who can link.

What’s a value to other site owners or those in your industry and how can we have some valuable things? I think there are things that you already have that you could better utilize or sometimes it’s thinking, okay, we could change something temporarily and give something for free for a while, and maybe we’re charging for now so that we can garner links with it or something.

For example, a SAAS product—you know, there’s debate about whether it should be freemium. But from a link-building perspective, I’m like, well, being freemium definitely helps because it’s a free tool, and people love to link to free tools. So, if you have a different approach, would you consider changing to a freemium model?

Because that’ll help you on the link-building side. So I think some of it is just thinking, you know, what do you have, and is there something that we could change or adjust so that people could find more value in sharing and talking about your product? What do you have to offer?

Is there a cost-benefit analysis for link building for SaaS companies building a freemium tool?

I’ve never run the numbers like that. I think it’s, it’s hard to quantify sometimes what you’re going to get and, and, and how,  Can you predict, you know, how successful it’s going to be? But, you know, at the core, it’s just like, okay, do you have something of value? If you don’t want to do the freemium model, that’s fine, too.

But what types of tools or resources can you build in your niche that could be valuable for other people? If you don’t have anything to pitch to others, then it’s just hard to get started.

What is the link building strategy for a freemium tool?

So I think it really depends on the niche, and a freemium model could make more sense in certain niches than others. But you know, as a free tool, the first thing you kind of look like, let’s just say, an SEO, if you have a free tool.

You know, it’s like, Oh, there’s probably list posts out there that are like, Oh, the best free tools in SEO or the best, you know, whatever. And so you can compile those together and look for those, um, any types of pages that are like resource pages that are for people in your industry.

And if, if your tool is helpful in those situations, those could be good opportunities to, for pitching your, your tool.

We’ll say, Oh, you know,  like you have a. A page dedicated to helping people learn SEO and say, Oh, our tool is free. And this certain way, and it’s helpful for doing research. And so that’s a pitch you can do. So you just kind of find,  and then you look at other free tools in your space where they getting their backlinks from, and then you can kind of see, Oh, they’re getting that from these list posts or these resource pages or wherever.

And then you can kind of mimic. Okay, let’s find those types of pages because I see these other free tools are getting links in this way.

How would you define content that’s valuable for pitching?

I think sometimes people come to me and they say, “Hey, I have this great piece of content that’s going to work really well.” And I say, you know, “this is a good article and people could be interested in reading it, but the people linking to the article aren’t maybe necessarily the people that are going to be consuming the article.”

So you have to think in terms of link building. Those who can give the links, what are they going to find valuable because that’s really your market?

You can have content targeted for the consumer or your client, but maybe that’s not for a linkable asset. Maybe that content isn’t that interesting for those who can add links.

So you have to think of it in terms of who can give links and what’s valuable to them. And so yeah, maybe it is, maybe there’s some sort of tool or something that would be interesting.

Maybe it’s content, sometimes content like they’ve mentioned this topic, but they haven’t expounded on it. And so like your content can be valuable because it’s expanding on something that’s kind of complicated that they haven’t, they just met briefly mentioned their content, that topic or something. So yeah.

It’s a lot of different things that it could be. Um, but yeah, you have to generally think of it more like the site owner or the person you’re going to outreach. What would, how would they perceive it being valuable?

What do you think about content relevancy in link building?

Yeah, I find the mismatch greatest for B2B industries. If you’re in a B2C industry, there’s a lot more interest in content that appeals to consumers.

And so there’s usually an easier overlap between what drives links and what people are interested in.

But in B2B, it’s a very specific niche, and sometimes, it can be difficult. For example, let’s just say you have a vacation scheduler tool that HR teams use to schedule vacations.

Well, talking about vacation scheduling as a topic is not very interesting, but vacation is something people love to talk about.

So, you can create content that’s very interesting for consumers, whether or not they’ll convert.

The vacation scheduling tool doesn’t necessarily matter because you can get those backlinks by focusing on topics that overlap with consumer interest.

So that’s how I think of it: What, where, and how can you get topics?

These overlap with what people would be interested in, and generally, you can find those somewhere. Um, but in some niches, it can be harder to find things that are more relevant.

What are some of the main reasons that you think link building fails?

I have certain rules that I like to follow. One reason it fails is that you’re not reaching out to the right person.

So many people try to automate this. They’ll download a list from a link building tool like Hunter.io or whatever, and they do all this manually because you really want to be sure that you’re finding and thinking through: Okay, who can add a link on this specific page?

And some people I’ve seen, they say, Oh, you know, we first try to find the editor, and if not, like they, they automate the logic.

And I think that’s really hard to do. So that’s really important. You have to find the right person. Cause if you don’t, you’re going to lose. The second thing is, don’t lose people on the pitch.

If you write too much text, if you don’t get straight to the point you give them fake flattery and they just roll their eyes immediately.

You have to be short straight to the point. Just be very upfront with what you want. Don’t do fake flattery, all these kinds of things. Um, the pitch can lose it for you. Yeah, there are probably many other reasons, but those are a couple of ones that come off the top of my head.

What constitutes fake flattery in link building outreach?

Um, so I don’t do a lot of pitching journalists, uh, very little, so I’m not as experienced in that.  But what I constitute fake flattery is saying something that you don’t mean, um, which would be something like, Hey, I loved this article you read, and you haven’t read that article.

It would be like, Hey, I’ve been following you. You don’t follow them. Anything that you say to like, try to like build a connection, but it’s fake because it’s not true.

How specific do you get when personalizing?

If you’re going to reference a post, you don’t need to say that you love the post. You can say like, “Oh, I came across this post. This is something like you just speak specifically to what you’re talking about.”

If you haven’t asked, just get straight to the point, and don’t beat around the bush.

It depends on the type of outreach you’re doing, of course. If you’re doing highly targeted outreach, it might make sense to get into the weeds and define touch points, but just be real about them; don’t make them up.

What does your workflow look like from start to finish for link building campaign?

First, it’s just identifying the strategy that you’re going to pursue.  And then, uh, based on that strategy, you’re going to have a specific way of kind of finding the prospects. So, for example, if I find a broken link.

And I’m going to do a broken link campaign. I will use the prospects from that broken link as my prospect list.

So, based on the strategy, you’ll have a prospecting process that you’ll have to follow to get your prospects. Then, you’ll have to manually go through and ensure that all the pages you’re reaching make sense according to that strategy.

And then you’ll make sure you find the right person to reach out to. Sometimes, you know, we’ll find maybe two or three people, depending on what kind of outreach we’re doing who could be the right people to reach out to. Then, um, yeah, and then you put together the template, which can come before, during, or after; it depends.

I guess you usually need to have a template in place while you’re kind of choosing the fields like the, the text fields are going to put in the,  um, the pitch and whatever.  Yeah, and then just send it out. And manage the email communication.

What do you look at when you’re evaluating a site?

Yeah, everyone might have different criteria. We want to ensure that it’s a legitimate site run by real people and has been active somewhat recently.

But wait, how do you how can you tell if a site is run by real people?

It depends on the type of site you’re looking at, but for example, if you’re looking at a small business website, can you see who’s behind it? You know, sometimes sites, sometimes people try to hide who’s behind it, and sometimes that can be harder to determine if it’s a legitimate site.

So there’s certain, there’s different things that can give you like signals.  Metrics can help, you know, are they getting actual traffic? Um, you, you know, you can get a sense for, there’s like from link farms, the farms that sites exist just for the purpose of selling links.  There are certain things you look for to exclude, like if they write about everything and you know, there are certain templates It’s just immediately once you’ve looked at them enough.

You’re like, oh, yeah I can just tell that this like looks like a link form. So you gain some of those things over time, But it’s looking okay. Do they cover a specific topic, or do they, cover in-depth that topic where they’re trying to write about everything? If they’re writing about everything, have you ever heard of this site before?

It’s really a lot of it’s about trying to identify if it’s a link farm or not because at the end of the day, link farms are trying to look legitimate. Can you, you know, identify them and exclude them as, Yeah, as quickly as possible?

How do you feel about sites that advertise “write for us”?

Accepting guest posts, even if they have a right for us page, I don’t mind.

If the Write for Us page is linked to from the main navigation, yes, that to me is a big deal.

If they’re being very blatant, if it’s like from every page, you see the right for us page, generally speaking, I would say that that’s a bad sign. Uh, but having a contributor page or right for us page isn’t necessarily a negative.

It’s all about how open they are, like pushing it.  So yeah, that’s, that’s something I would avoid.

Has Helpful Content changed the way you build links?

Yeah, I think our strategies haven’t changed that much. Yeah. But we haven’t, we don’t do a lot of like guest posting, so we don’t, um, I’ve always been against the idea of Like a lot of guest posting companies or agencies. Um, it’s like, let’s get the lowest quality content that we can have accepted by the target site.

And so if we can get away with writing with AI, if we can get rid of writing with a cheap, for me, I’ve always been like, If the content doesn’t read well enough that I would read it, I don’t want to junk up the internet more. So, I only believe in higher-quality guest posting. So, as a strategy, it’s not one that we generally employ.

So, our strategies, like, we do a lot of old school strategies. Like, like, broken link building. This is like the OG link-building strategy they did in the ’90s.  Still works, and we still utilize it. So I like doing things that I think have staying power in terms of strategies. So you don’t have to keep adjusting your approach based on, you know, it’s like we have an approach that works and we get links that, that  I think, stand the test of time.

And so based on any updates, you know, I hope I don’t have to keep. Like redoing everything because the links are now being ignored that we were building before.

Are you doing link insertion?

Link insertions are generally used for pay linking. Is that how you use the term?

Vince: I would say just like finding a specific keyword or something on someone’s site and saying, hey, you know, you talk about content marketing strategies, and we have a post here about content marketing strategies. Would you be interested in adding that? It could give your users more context, however you frame it.

These days, a lot of those are paid placements just because that’s how the market has gone. But yeah, I don’t think they necessarily have to be.

Aaron: Yeah. We do some of that. Generally speaking, those tend to have lower conversions or you’re just getting most people say, yeah, this is the price for that.

And the types of campaigns that we run with that, usually it’s when the more specific you can be, it’s not like, Hey, you just mentioned this. It’s like, you mentioned this exact phrase.  And we have a topic on this exact phrase and you didn’t like to talk more about it.

So this could be a helpful addition like if you can be really targeted in those campaigns, that’s where I see the best success with it. Yeah, so we do it sometimes but generally speaking you get a lot of paid people wanting money when you run those campaigns in my experience

Does broken link building work?

Well, broken link building is great because you get links from a wide range of pages. So, let’s say we find a broken link, and then we’re just looking at all the pages that are linking to that broken link.

So, some of the pages and links might come from resource pages, and some might come from within content.

I mean, I’ve gotten links from the New York Times and Parade and, you know, like many really great sites, uh, with broken link building. So,  and lots of different types of sites. So I like it because you,  when you do resource page link building, you’re getting links just from resource pages. When you do like, okay, content, you’re getting links, just in content.

When you’re doing broken link building, you’re getting a wide variety of links and lots of different pages because it’s just how people link to that page. So, that’s one of the things I like about it: it’s very varied.

And does page depth matter?

Like, okay, do links vary based on where they are on a site and how deep they are?

Yeah, there’s definitely a difference in value—just like there’s a difference in value of a link based on how many outgoing links there are on a specific page. But if you really did refine your criteria to no more than this many outgoing links, I mean, you can really drill down and only get links from pages that have traffic.

You’re just going to have such a few prospects; it’s a numbers game. And so the more you narrowly define your criteria, the more likely you are to have to pay for the links that you think are most valuable, find a different approach, or do relationship link building to get those links that you think are most valuable.

So yeah, there’s always a difference in value, and my approach has always been to try to go for consistency rather than stressing about the ultimate power of each individual link. Go for consistency over time.

If you want to go just for the links and get you the most value, you know, that’s probably a relationship.

Link building is going to probably get you the best, highest-quality links, as far as that goes.

What do you mean by relationship link building?

By relationship building I mean link exchanges or, yeah, or knowing people and that can say, oh, Hey, I can, or ABC link exchange, or like, I’m doing guest posting on this.

You’re exchanging something.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a direct exchange.

What’s your take on link exchanges?

So, my broader take in terms of what strategy should you or shouldn’t use to me? It’s not like, oh, you should or shouldn’t do different strategies.

It’s all about, well, what’s your risk? How do you view risk and link building, and do you understand the risks? And then which ones do you think are worth taking?

And some people, people look at this differently. Some people are like, I don’t want to do anything that’s against Google’s written, uh, TOS and other people are like, I just want to do what works and, you know, Google keeps changing, and I’m just going to do it, you know, so,  so what you choose is all based on your risk profile and so however you’re comfortable, like to me, I’m okay with it as long as you just kind of understand the risk.

I do a lot of outreach, um, and you know, when we get clients, we always say, “Oh, are you open to guest posts?” “Are you open to paid links?” Are you open to, link exchanges?”

Those are the three we kind of like want to clarify.

In my experience, the sites that are doing the best job with their SEO, that are like the biggest sites on the internet, are the ones that are the most open to link exchanges.

They’re not interested in your content because they care a lot about their content quality and have really high standards.

They don’t want a random person getting their content, and they’re not interested in getting money for you for a link either.

But they see the value. If you’re a good site and you’re reaching them, they see value in getting backlinks and trading backlinks.

So the sites on the internet that are doing best do link exchanges, and they’re smart about it. They do it with the best sites that they see the most value in. And so that’s when I don’t have a problem with it. Some people have built entire agencies just on link exchanges.

It’s not such a part of what we do. It’s, it’s just like if we’re doing outreach and we come across as opportunities. It fits our criteria, we’ll, we’ll look at them, but you know, just, From my experience, the people that are doing best in SEO, they all seem to be okay and comfortable with it.

Yeah. And like big names that you’d like, oh wow. They do like exchanges?!

Even the back and forth, like if you think of a healthy site. They’re getting a lot of links regularly, maybe hundreds of links, a one-off exchange going to like a priority page that it might be hard to get links to, you know, where you’re getting maybe, or even just a supplement like we’re doing a lot of natural link building where people are choosing their anchor text.

So one off, okay, let’s have some input on the anchor text. Um, you know, those things can make a big difference. It’s not necessarily negating because, okay, maybe just domain to domain, it’s not a big deal, but you’re getting.

You’re linking to my priority page and I’m linking to your priority page and we’re both like really good sites that have a lot of authority, a lot of traffic, like you’re both going to benefit from that.

So yeah, I’ve done a lot of back-and-forth, not like a law, but I’ve done plenty of those where people exchange links directly. It’s just such a small part of your overall linking, and I don’t think most people worry about it from a risk standpoint.

Are you seeking out link exchanges in those cases?

We only do it when we’re doing normal outreach and if someone presents us with the opportunity.

We don’t run link exchange campaigns.  I would be nervous as a site owner if I ever saw my site on a list for anything.

Editor note: Here’s an example of a list of sites:

So from a risk perspective, I would not want to be part of like networks or lists where like, you could bank on me always to get a link, you know, so I would be nervous about that.

I think the smart site owners, they’re just, okay, well we get an excellent opportunity from an excellent site. Just doing it when it makes sense. And we were really like controlling it.

But again, it all comes down to your risk assessment, and how you perceive that.

How important is it to diversify your link strategy?

What I always like to try to let clients know is, even so, what we’re doing, you’re hiring me to build backlinks for you, but that shouldn’t be the only way you’re getting backlinks.

You should be getting some links naturally and you should be getting some links based on the quality of your content and stuff like that.

When you’re hiring, you have to think of it more holistically. Okay, how do we get backlinks? Okay, we hire a company for backlinks, but is that the only way we’re getting back? If it is the only way we’re getting backlinks, why aren’t we getting backlinks on other, any other ways?

And why aren’t we getting links naturally or passively? So, I always want to be like a small part of a larger, uh, pie of like how links are coming in.

And if, you know, if I can help clients think, okay, if you built this content and we can get this to rank, okay, then it can start linking, getting links naturally over time.

Cause you want to, you want links coming in various ways.

So, yeah, if you just have one approach and you’re getting one type of backlink and you’re not getting links any other way, yeah, there’s probably some risk associated with that.

Um, but again, it also depends on where the links come from in your industry.

And if that’s where the links come from in your industry, um, and your competitors also have that similar, they’re all getting links in that same way, then. Maybe it doesn’t seem as much of a risk.

How do you approach a new client?

So yeah, one thing is one way to look at is okay? You need something to build links to. And if you don’t have something to build links to, like you get, you have to get some links differently. So sometimes when people come to me and say, “Oh, you don’t have much”, I would suggest HARO-type link building because you’ll get homepage links.

It’ll help you build some of that foundational authority. I want to see how Google responds to your site when you have some initial backlinks. Are they going to start liking your content better? Sometimes, when you have a brand new site, you don’t know anything about it. Does Google like me?

Do they like the content I’m writing or whatever? So, okay, maybe you need to build some foundational, uh, links. So I might say, you know, that’s what I would recommend to start. Build some, just some good homepage links, and get some authority. Then the second way is like, do you build links to pages that aren’t getting traffic already?

So I prefer to build links to pages that rank somewhere. So, for example,  you come up with a brand-new website. I say, okay, let’s start building links. And then we built links for six months and still those links never had an impact. Well, because Google wasn’t sending you traffic before we built a bunch of backlinks.

And then, even after all the backlinks, they didn’t send traffic to you. So my approaches. I like to make sure that Google likes your content first. If Google likes your content without backlinks, they will like your content better with backlinks.

But if Google doesn’t like your content currently, like you’re not ranking on page three or four, like you’re not even in the top 100, you’re nowhere.

And I build backlinks to that page that it may do nothing.  So I like to get cues first. Like, so that’s the risk when someone’s brand new, they come to me and say, we can build backlinks. But like it may have nothing to do with the backlinks we’re building. It’s just that Google isn’t indexing your content and putting it somewhere in the top 10 pages of Google.

Maybe it doesn’t see it as relevant. Maybe there are technical things going on that you want to fix first. And once you see, okay, we’re on page 5, we’re on page 4, we’re, like, Google likes our content somewhat. Okay, now we build links to it, and now Google likes it better.

To me, that’s a way to de-risk your link building, is to make sure your content is being liked first before you start building links to it.

Do you think Google uses any quality or relevancy metric when looking at a backlink portfolio?

You see some people doing pretty weird things that sometimes seem to work. And if there were some sort of relevancy metric, you would think it would catch those things like sometimes using like expired domains that have no relevance.

NOTE: Since recording on this podcast, Google has started hitting some of these sites practicing expired domain abuse.

And it’s, I think, they said they’ve included in this recent update.  Um, but you see some weird things. And so you question, I’ve always been one to try to focus on relevance.

It makes sense, just from a logical perspective, that if you have on this topic and these people write about it, it would benefit.

I’m sure they try. Yeah, I don’t know exactly how well they’re always able to implement that as a criteria. Y

eah, I mean, I get, and the reason I ask that is that, you know, thinking about what you’re saying about a brand new site just starting out and making sure their content is on point first and Google knows their site.

Do you always need content first before starting link building?

Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, it’s a cart before the horse kind of question, or the chicken or the egg. Do you build links first to build up some of this authority so that your content will rank, or do you, you know, make sure that your content, like Google, likes your content before building a bunch of backlinks?

In my opinion, you should always start with content first. Content is really where you should focus your site.

You should really focus and make sure because Google will find and tell you what it thinks. I mean, and maybe to build some foundational authority.

Build some homepage links and, you know, build some, just like building your social profiles and these kinds of things like these, just to show you, I gotta have some semblance of a brand.  And then if you can build some like HARO backlinks to your homepage and build a little bit of authority, you can get some gauge.

I like doing that because I’ve had clients in the past, and they were brand new. Then we’ve built links for a long time, and they were like, maybe it was a cool tool.

I thought it was great, and people liked it, but from an SEO perspective, you know, there were question marks if Google was ever going to rank it for anything.

And then after, after working with them, I’m like, Oh yeah, maybe I should push back in the future because I feel bad if I build backlinks for people like six, 12 months and then I don’t see any traction for them.

So I want them to like, you know, get value from their money and make sure that they’re, And, and I think the best way to do that is generally try to focus on your content first and make sure that Google is liking it and then invest in link building.

And you can do some link building, mostly like the homepage, to build some initial authority. But, um, that’s kind of what I prefer cause it makes me feel less, um, just in terms of managing expectations, too. Like you, you can see, I can see the path of how links can benefit, you know,

Is your podcast Let’s Talk Link Building still going?

Yeah, it’s a bit of an unfortunate end; it may be resurrected at some point, but I had to stop Let’s Talk Link Building after about 30 or 35 episodes.

What are some of your biggest link building takeaways or tips from your podcast?

The biggest thing I really gained from doing the podcast is a much better understanding of link building as an industry, all the different approaches that there are, and how different approaches fit different situations.

Sometimes when clients are like, well, I need links, let me find someone that will give me links.

And they kind of view it like a commodity.

There are lots of different strategies and approaches, and those strategies and approaches may not always fit every situation.

Some types of link building are better in different situations, and not everybody is good at every approach.

And so it’s actually a much bigger industry than people recognize. And they want to commoditize it as they like “ I need a link. Oh, a DR 80. Okay. That’s good. Let me get the link,”

And, and it’s, you know, way more complex than that.

And so, yeah, if you’re looking to do link building, you know, understand a little bit about the different types of link building that you can build with PR, you can build it with guest posting, and try to understand what would work best in your industry and for your site.

I think it’s good to take some time before just jumping in and just saying, I need links, and let me give money to the first person who says they’ll get me links.

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The post Traditional Link Building Approaches that Work in 2024 with Aaron Anderson appeared first on BuzzStream.

However, I connected with him when he offered a free run-through of his new tool, Positional, on LinkedIn before its launch. I saw an extremely passionate and knowledgeable founder of an SEO tool who was putting in the extra hours and sweat to build the content strategy for his tool (while also serving as CEO, brand ambassador, and many other hats).

I realized it would be silly not to have someone as experienced as Nate on our podcast.

I also had the opportunity to chat with Nate on his podcast, Optimize, where we discussed building links in 2024.

Positional is now live!

Resources Mentioned:

1. Glenn Allsopp’s article on who controls search 
2. Cyrus Shepard’s Study on Internal Linking
3. Nate’s LinkedIn
4. Nate’s Twitter 

Main Takeaways

1. Internal linking is one of the least appreciated jobs in SEO.

2. You need to be internally linking to pages you care about on your site, which sends an important signal to Google that this page is important and matters, and it should rank.

3. You don’t want to use the exact same anchor text on every internal link. Mix in natural anchors, partial match, random and sometimes even naked anchors.

4. One study found that the optimal number of internal links pointing to a page on your site is seven or more. Google only cares about three, but five is twice as good as three.

5. The team at Positional has seen that adjusting internal links to pages can often result in 10—20 percent traffic lifts — and that’s without any new content.

6. To get your money pages to rank, build links to relevant pages, and then shift authority through to your money pages with internal links.

7. Positional started its SEO strategy by building a foundation of content on the site. Then, when it built backlinks, it was like adding fuel to the fire.

8. One effective link-building strategy that worked for Positional is creating a podcast. Guests will usually link to their episodes from a website or newsletter.

9. Nate posts on LinkedIn at least 2-4 times a week, which has impacted the business. They get a new customer from LinkedIn every single week.

10. In terms of using social platforms to be a knowledge leader, building your brand within a marketing category is like building equity in yourself that you can then take forward to whatever’s next.

Below is a semi-edited transcription of our talk.

Icebreaker: What’s a cool piece of content you’ve seen that’s inspiring or super creative?

But before I do, when I just throw out like a little icebreaker, I know you’re a man of content out there in the business, what do you like? What have you seen lately? What’s a really cool piece of content you’ve seen that’s an inspiring or super creative. That’s a good question. I, one came to the top of my mind immediately, you might have seen Glenn Ops recent report that he did.

I, on the, I think it was 12 brands that basically own Google search. He did this really interesting analysis of the, like 12 companies that.  own collectively like many hundreds of websites and he found that they are totally dominating and owning the search results and often ranking, multiple websites for the same keywords across many different SERPs.

And that was probably the most interesting piece of content I’ve read lately. Nothing surprising to us. SEOs who have You know, I’ve been in the affiliate space, for example, but Glenn put some really great data behind it. And that would be my favorite piece of content I’ve read lately.

Yeah, that’s cool. I’ll link to that in the show notes that I did. I think I saw that actually from you tweeting about it first. Yeah. I love to see all those kinds of visualizations  that show you where everything comes from. I think I saw one about like major food brands once it was really cool. Nate, let’s get right into it.

We talked about this before. You’re running up against the clock here. The Positional launch is coming up. So I want to give you some runway here to talk a little bit about Positional and just tell us what Positional is and let the BuzzStream listeners know about it.

What can you tell us about your new SEO tool, Positional?

I appreciate you giving me a podium to tell the listeners more about what we’ve been building for the last 13 months.

And I’ve wanted to start Positional since  2019. I’ve been doing SEO for most of the last 10 years building large organic search channels for my own websites. And I’ve probably bought just about every SEO tool you can buy at some point or another. And. There are a lot of SEO tools and content marketing tools on the market.

But my co founder, Matt and I,  the reason we started Positional was to to do two things. And just for all the listeners, Positional is a content marketing and SEO tool. And the reason we started this company was because at all times we were using like five or six different tools to do our job as content marketers and SEOs.

And at the same time, like we had built a lot of tooling to serve some of the very specific problems we had that it was just not available on the market. And so even back in like 2019, Matt and I had. Thought like, Hey, there’s an opportunity for us to build something in the SEO tooling space.

It just ended up taking me four years until I was in the exact right position to do it. And so with Positional, like I mentioned, in some sense, we’re trying to round up what is like a very fragmented tool space and give, our customers and myself the tools we need to do.

The tools we need to do our job. And included in that, like we’ve got tools for keyword research tools for keyword clustering tools for content optimization. But where I think Positional is quite unique is that we also have tools for. Heat mapping and content analytics. We have a buyer journeys product to help you map the different user flows that users are navigating through on your website.

We’ve got a couple of different tools for social media. And so we try to take you from like ideation or like keyword research to like ultimately like tracking. User journeys and conversions across your website. And so we’ve tried to build that end to end tool set from idea to actual dollars and all in one workflow.

So that way you’re not having to switch from, a keyword research tool to a keyword clustering tool, and then to a content optimization tool and then to a plagiarism detection tool, and then to an internal linking tool. And then to a heat mapping tool, you can do all that in one workflow at Positional.

And so it’s just been so much fun building this tool set over the last 13 months.

Does Positional have analytics capabilities?

Yeah. And I started my career in the lead gen affiliate space. And so I spent, six, seven years essentially marketing consumer financial products. And so as like an affiliate lead gen person, like I was always so interested in like how Consumers were navigating our site, how they were converting, where they weren’t converting.

And we spent so much time and energy trying to identify like those drop off points and those critical pages on our site that maybe are not as obvious. At least initially. And I agree with you. I think like Google analytics for it, it’s definitely, it’s challenging. I think it’s the right time to be building alternative tooling to a GA And I can’t say that Positional is like a full blown replacement for GA for today.

Even something like what should be simple in Google Analytics, like customer journey mapping is incredibly challenging, really hard to set up and hard to maintain. And so our pitch with our buyer journeys product is that it is an out of the box tool that gives you the insights you need without any sort of.

Time spent actually configuring it. Besides adding a small script to your site. And this is like a big step in this direction for us. We are launching our conversion tracking product pretty soon. And I think long term we do want Positional to be a full blown replacement for something like a GA in the toolbox.

I think we have a lot of work to get there, but that, that is one of our goals in the year ahead.

Could you tell us more about Positional’s internal linking tool?

Yeah. So our internal linking tool set is called internals.  And it’s actually my favorite tool set in our toolbox because personally I’ve spent hundreds of hours internally linking blog posts and pages together.

At our first company, we had at one point, something like 2,500 blog pages on our site. And when you’re dealing with that size of a website, like internal linking becomes really challenging.

Like when you publish new content it takes a lot of time to go back to existing content and figure out how to internally link to it.

It also even takes a lot of time to internally link from a new piece of content to an old piece of content. I had always done cite my domain and then inserted the keyword I was trying to find to figure out like what page I could try to link to.

And that would even take 15 or 20 minutes sometimes to Internally link a new piece of content that we were about to publish.

And so with our internals tool set, we’ve really built like two tools in one. We have a tool set for identifying missing internal links in your existing portfolio of content. And so for someone who’s like coming to a new role, we have. Where, they might not know every page on that website that exists.

Like it can be helpful in terms of getting your bearings and finding a lot of opportunities very quickly where like we could go back and we could add pretty targeted internal links across our website to other pages that we care about. But then it also works in like the new content creation process as well.

So you’ll give us the content. And we’ll use what we call our keyword approach to find internal linking suggestions where you could internally link to other pages that already exist on that site. So it’s both before and after in terms of internal linking.

And in my opinion, like internal linking is Is one of the least appreciated jobs in SEO.

I think it’s so important giving Google that context in terms of, what your website is a good resource on which pages you care about most.

I think anchor text and how you use it when internally linking is really important and critical and can have a big impact. And I would say that like for the largest.

Customers we work with, like they can often get pretty meaningful gains for certain pages or the entire site by just taking a hard look at internal links and like how they’re using them without any new content or really any substantial content changes.

And I would encourage like all SEOs at some point this year to to take a hard look at our internal linking strategies.

What are some best practices for internally linking in your site?

The older I’ve gotten, the more I listened to Google and I, I know Google always says do what’s best for the the reader or do what is best for the searcher.

And so I tend to approach internal linking from the perspective of what’s best for the reader first.

And so I think at a high level, like internal links are just helpful for navigation across your website. And so if there are opportunities in a piece of content to give a reader a much bigger piece of content on a related topic that we’re referring to within another piece of content.

I think that makes for a more helpful experience for that reader.

And I think it’s just generally helpful and important for them.

But for Google, like internal links I always like to say that internal links create like a connected spider web of tissue, especially for new websites that are just getting started.

I think internal links are really helpful to show Google like what your website is a good source of information on and which pages you care about the most.

And so of course you want to be internally linking to pages you care about on your site, and I think that sends an important signal to Google that this page is important and matters and it should rank.

And Google also gets all of that surrounding context around the anchor and from the anchor itself to know better as to which keywords that page you are internally linking to should rank for.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that you don’t want to use the exact same anchor text on every single one of your internal links.

A lot of people will exact match every single one of their internal links. And I think there’s a place for exact matching.

I read a really interesting report the other day from from Cyrus Shepard and he did an analysis of internal linking anchor texts and the impact on rankings.

And he found that we should be using exact match anchors I think it was like, 20, 30 percent of the time on our internal links. However, the pages that tend to perform best in search actually have quite a bit of variance in the anchors on those internal links.

And so not only do we want to be doing exact match anchors, we want to be doing partial match anchors. We want to be doing random anchors.

And it was even a little crazy.

Cyrus found that we should even sprinkle some naked anchors in there too, or at least the pages that were performing best had those characteristics.

So you want to keep anchor text in mind. A lot of SEOs will, stress or they’ll worry about like over internal linking. Like we don’t want to be internally linking to like too many pages.

As long as in my opinion, you don’t have a wall of hyperlinks, like the user isn’t staring at all blue links, I think we’re okay.

Like you don’t want to do anything that’s like disruptive or distracting for the reader in terms of having too many internal links.

But I’m not that worried about it.

In my personal opinion, as long as the UX UI isn’t disruptive for a reader, I’m generally of the perspective that we should be internal linking whenever it is helpful for the reader. And if it’s helpful, let’s do it.

I’m not worried about having too many internal links from a page to another page, another area where I might disagree with a lot of SEOs in terms of internal linking is like cross cluster internal linking.

Like back in 2015, 2016, we heard a lot about like site silos and like hub and spoke. And you didn’t want to internally link from one silo to another silo. Cause it could confuse Google. And it blows my mind that SEOs are still thinking this way.

“Oh, we don’t want to internally link one category to another category.” Now I think that’s just silly. If it’s a good opportunity for a reader or it’s helpful, I should say for a reader to have that internal link in place, even though that internal link is going from one silo to another, we do it.

I think you’d be stupid not to. So a controversial take at least in some SEO circles.

But, the last thing I’ll say before I’ll stop talking here, Vince is you’ll often hear too about like link sculpting trying to shift like page authority, like strategically and, maybe not shifting page authority to certain URLs on your site.

And I would say that it does make sense conceptually that like the, the more pages you internal link to maybe the less page authority you’re passing to them.

But it’s not something that I tend to worry that much about. I just want to be internally linking to my most important pages and also to any pages on my website that have accumulated a lot of links to them from other sources.

I want to make sure that from those pages, we are internally linking to the pages we care most about.

So those were a few tips, a couple of controversial statements. Hopefully it was helpful.

How many internal links should a user have to each page?

I don’t have like a target in mind or like a minimum that I need to implement. But I had Ethan Smith from Graphite on my podcast.

And he actually did a pretty interesting analysis in terms of the number of internal links that you want pointing to a given page on your site.

And he found that with the clients they work with that the optimal number of internal links pointing to a page on your site is seven or more.

And like the minimum for Google to really care is like three, but five was twice as good as three. But then seven is where you really start to see that impact at least.

I don’t know that we need to be internally linking exactly seven times to all of the pages that we care about on our site, but it’s clear in the research that, Ethan did that the more times you’re internally linking to a page generally the more powerful that signal is to Google and the better that page will actually perform in search.

Let’s make sure that we’re linking to our most important pages. I understand that we can’t link internally everywhere, all of the listeners, I’m sure have five to 10 pages on our website that are really mission critical to our business’s success.

The first thing I would do is look for opportunities to add internal links to those, five or 10 pages that, that we really care about and matter.

Does internal linking have a measurable effect on ranking?

As far as driving the point home, like why it matters, I’ve seen from my own experience and anecdotally with our customers that you can often get like 10, 20 percent lifts in terms of traffic to given pages just by revamping and restructuring internal linking to them—and that’s without any new content.

That’s without any substantial content changes other than internal linking.

And so you can certainly drive more traffic to a given page and your entire domain, just by refocusing on the internal linking structures across your site.

Can you talk a little more generally about PageRank sculpting?

Yeah, I think simply put my stance here is that if you’ve got pages on your website that you’ve built or accumulated a lot of links to those pages are going to be the most impactful to the pages you’re internally linking to.

And so I do think it is important on the pages where we have accumulated a lot of page rank that we are then passing that page rank via internal links to other pages on our site.

I don’t think that is to say, though, that we should remove an actually helpful internal link for a reader just for the sake of trying to shift page authority or page rank to another URL on our site.

I think you’d be doing the reader a disservice in that scenario by like potentially removing an internal link for the sake of trying to manipulate page rank.

And so that comes back to my stance of trying to do what’s best for the reader.

I’ve certainly heard through the grapevine, you’ve got companies like Red Ventures, which is a major player and a whole bunch of different categories, including consumer finance. They own properties like. BankRate, ThePointsGuy, CreditCards.com, things like that.

I’ve heard that they do have an internal tool which is essentially like a page rank calculator. And you can use it to like dynamically like test and then make predictions in terms of how Page Rank shifts via internal links, impact rankings.

I’ve also heard that Expedia has a similar tool that they’ve built internally.

And somebody I talked to there who used to work at Expedia swore that it was incredibly impactful for them.

And so some SEOs will disagree with me on this. I just would say that you can get 90 percent of the way there by just at a high level, just remembering the internally linked to the pages you care about from the pages that have the most authority on your site.

Yeah. And last thing I’ll say here is we, given I’ve spent a lot of time in the affiliate marketing space, is that it was often like very hard for us to build backlinks to like our money pages or our pages that we wanted to rank for a certain head terms.

And so we very actively went out and built links to like related relevant pages that were closely related to our money pages knowing that we could then shift that authority to the pages we actually cared about with internal linking.

And so from a backlink building standpoint and then to internal linking standpoint, I think, all of this kind of works together.

What should digital PRs know about internal linking?

Yeah I do think digital PR is is a great link building strategy. It’s one that I’ve had a lot of success with in my career doing surveys and studies related to the different topic spaces we were trying to rank in. Our methodology was always let’s create one of these pieces of content for digital PR.

And then within that page, we’re accumulating backlinks.

The let’s make sure that we’re then internally linking over to the pages that we actually make money from with relevant anchor text.

And to go a little bit deeper, if we are trying to diversify the anchor text that we’re using across our internal links, I would say that I would save those exact match anchors for the internal links.

I think you can use exact match anchors when internally linking from a page that you’ve used for digital PR or link building to those other pages you care about.

And then maybe it’s through the rest of the website that we actually try to diversify our anchor texts a little bit more.

How did you ideate content at LendEDU?

Yeah. So the way that we thought about it at LendEDU— that’s where I spent the first like six or seven years of my career—and we started in student lending—that is what we did.

But then we eventually added on like multiple different product lines to our website. So we had product lines for personal loans and home equity loans, and we got into insurance and within insurance, there’s many different categories.

And for example, if we wanted to build out a business line in homeowners insurance, we knew like very quickly what the keywords we’d want to target in homeowners insurance were, and we’d go out and create non-digital PR-related content to serve those keywords.

But then we also knew that we had to build like topical relevance and topical authority like within those new categories or product lines that we were launching on our website.

And so if we knew that we wanted to get into homeowners insurance, we would do that with content, but then we would also do that through digital PR.

And so we would start with like the broad topic of homeowners insurance. And then we would, every Friday you like me and a couple other guys from our team would have like our weekly ideas session. Like we basically just locked ourselves in a room for an hour every Friday and just try to come up with ideas.

What we were seeing in the news, like what was relevant, keeping in mind the new product lines we wanted to get into. And we would see what interesting data could we create or find that were related to this new topic category where you’re, we were trying to build relevance in.

And so in like homeowner’s insurance, for example, like we might have done like a survey of homeowners and ask them like how much they spent on their homeowners insurance this year versus last year so that we could create like a data point on that.

Cost increases of homeowners insurance this year, which is something that’s happening today with inflation.

And that could be an interesting like storyline because like inflation is something that every reporter is talking about, or a lot of them are.

And homeowners insurance is broadly applicable to a lot of Americans. And if we could tie together that theme of inflation and homeowners insurance and create an interesting report or narrative in that topic space, like that would be a piece of content that would go pretty viral and do well, like in the media.

And the result would be that we would build a lot of backlinks to it.

And then we would shift the authority that we built to that page, which was a survey or a report onto the other pages on our site, which we cared about.

How different is your link building strategy in the SaaS space?

Yeah, I just really don’t have time for that much link building at Positional.

Our site’s doing well, like it’s it’s on a nice trajectory, but I don’t have the resources or bandwidth right now to like really spend as much time on link building as I want to.

And so what we’ve been most focused on at Positional is just like, building a great foundation of content on our site.

So that way, like, when we do have the resources to like pour fuel on the fire and invest a little bit more in digital PR or link building we’ve got like a great foundation to then pour that fire on.

But I look for, select opportunities when they present themselves.

Also, I would say our most effective link-building strategy these days is an accidental one; it’s actually through our podcast. Given that we have a weekly podcast, oftentimes, these guests will link to the episodes from their websites. They’ll often get shared and linked to in different newsletters.

So, I wouldn’t say that we’re actively out there trying to build backlinks, but we are just naturally earning them. It’s through our podcast primarily right now.

How much traction do you get from LinkedIn these days?

Yeah. LinkedIn it’s been a an awesome channel for me over the last year. I like, I knew I was onto something when I would go home for the holidays and like extended family would say I see you on LinkedIn all the time.

And I’m like, all right it’s working. Or like when I see my wife’s friends and they’re like, we see Nate on LinkedIn every single day. I’m like, okay, it must be working because people are starting to tell me about it. And I actually posted for 14 days straight the last two weeks. I had been posting like two, three times a week, but I decided to run an experiment and just see what would happen if I posted every day for 14 days.

And my theory was that  you would see like a drop in engagement. If you’re posting every day that was my theory at least, but that was not the case.

I actually found that by posting every single day it actually led to a lot more engagement and visibility.

And trying to get back on that daily grind here pretty soon.

But at a minimum, I post on LinkedIn, like two, three, four times a week every week. And it’s just been so impactful for our business. We get a new customer from LinkedIn every single week.

And it’s one way in which a lot of people hear about us.

I think when I look at our lead sources, LinkedIn is I think it’s like our fourth most important customer acquisition source.

And and it’s also free it doesn’t cost any money to post on LinkedIn and you can do it as much as you want. And so as long as you have something interesting to say it’s free.

And so on, we’re a small startup without like huge advertising budgets. And so we have to look towards those things. Those free channels. Maybe the last thing I’ll say is LinkedIn is a little bit like SEO. Like it takes some time to get off the ground. And it’s one of those channels that compounds over time.

And so like the first a thousand followers you get on LinkedIn, it’s a lot harder to get those. Thousand followers than it is to go from 8,000 to 9,000 followers. That’s actually very easy. And it’s similar to SEO in the sense that you have to it’s going to feel like you’re like shouting into the wind for three months but then it starts to work.

Is LinkedIn something you recommend investing in for founders, CEOs, and leadership?

I think it’s important for anyone. You’re just making yourself more valuable. Whether you’re an employee at a company or you’re starting your own company, you’re building a brand for yourself, and people will buy products from people that they think are saying intelligent things that resonate with them.

For an early-stage startup, it’s a marketing channel, but it’s also a way to build relationships with a lot of people. And that’s why you and I are on this podcast today. But even for employees who work at companies, I think building a brand on one of these channels will make you a more valuable employee in your next role because you have an audience that you can lean on.

Maybe it’s not applicable for all types of employment, but I would say that most of the listeners of this podcast are probably in marketing.

And so if you can build your, yourself a brand within a marketing category, I think that is something like you’re building equity in yourself that you can then take forward to whatever’s next.

Nate, I know you’re a busy guy. I really appreciate you coming on the podcast today. for having me. Like I said, by the time this is out, Positional will have launched officially. Nate, tell people where can they find Positional?

What do they do to sign up? Yeah. Vince, thank you for having me on this podcast episode. It was so much fun. And for any listeners that are interested in learning more about Positional you can check us out at Positional. com. There is now, I assume a Sign up link. So if you want, you can get started and play around with our tool set.

We’ve got a free trial and I’d love to hear what you think. You can always email me at Nate at Positional. com with any feedback or questions about our tool set. Yeah, please don’t spam Nate. Don’t send them your, unrelated pitches, but he, he’s very open on email. Nate. Yeah. Thanks again so much.

Good luck with the launch next week. Can’t wait to see Positional in action. Thanks Vince. Take care.

The post The Power of Internal Linking with Positional’s Nate Matherson appeared first on BuzzStream.

However, I’ve always felt that the US had much to learn from the UK. From creative ideas to strategic workflow, they seemed to be years ahead of the U.S.

So, I set out to find someone to talk to about the differences in digital PR between the UK and the U.S.

I also wanted to see what insights I could glean from UK teams with much more experience in the field.

When I learned that search-first creative agency Rise at Seven had appointed Will Hobson to lead growth in the United States, I jumped at the chance to chat with him.

And I was not disappointed.

In this podcast episode, Will shares his expertise on how digital PR has evolved and the critical differences in digital PR practices across the Atlantic. He offers invaluable insights for brands and agencies aiming to launch their own digital PR campaigns.

(Below is a slightly modified transcription.)

Where did the term digital PR come from?

Yeah, that’s a big question to start off with, which is great. I’ve been in the industry for just over 10 years now, and when I first started, I felt like I was working in a search agency in the UK called Branded3 at the time. And when I first started in the industry, I felt like it was probably the start of the change.

So a lot of people like, if you think back to like pre like Panda, et cetera, Penguin, like pre to all that, they would kind of find different ways to buy links and to kind of almost manipulate Google in certain ways.

When I joined, that was straight after those algorithms would roll out, and everyone would see a lot of penalties. So they were looking at different ways to build links.

And I think what they’d notice at the time was, okay, great. This is how we can build links: by creating interesting stories online, like through PRs.

My background is traditional PR. Before I started in digital, I worked in traditional PR agencies and with charities and all sorts of different things, where I looked at the reputation side of things and storytelling from a brand point of view that wasn’t necessarily to have benefits online.

It was just more storytelling to that brand.

So then that shift kind of happened by 2014 where people were trying to build links naturally.

To me, digital PR means creating an interesting story online that will impact a brand and also benefit search engines.

So it’s not necessarily just building links for a link sake. It’s creating interesting stories that are relevant to brands, that they’re actually going to drive something that’s super, super valuable to the bottom line or to the wider centric kind of brand metrics that might be looking into as well.

So it’s really about kind of creating that interesting, compelling story for a brand that’s super relevant and also has benefits online.

So how I look at digital PR is kind of creating great content with benefits online too, is kind of almost like a secondary.

It’s still about that PR story, that PR tactic and that relevancy to a brand, because I think you can get linked by just creating interesting stories, but it has to—for me anyway, and what I believe it —has to be super relevant to the brand; it has to be fitting to what they’re talking about to actually have that wider value as well.

So, really generating demand and being able to kind of really resonate with the audience of that brand, I think, is super important.

Is it still considered digital PR if there are no links involved or no SEO?

I think the line between digital and traditional is just becoming more blurred.

I’ll give you an example. One of our clients is a pet brand. They sell all sorts of different clothes, food, and other things for pets, specifically dogs.

And we landed one of the UK TV shows, which is like Good Morning America.

When we landed that piece in that show, the amount of traffic that came to our site and the amount of purchases that we made impacted our bottom line and revenue.

So, although if you don’t get a link, I don’t think that’s the end of the world from an SEO point of view because although great, we want those links back to our site.

But if you’re also getting print coverage, if you’re also getting everything else, from a TV broadcast point of view, it’s going to have that benefit and that halo effect online for you as a brand.

So I’d say it doesn’t necessarily matter if we don’t get that link.

Obviously, we’re going for it, but I just want people to be talking about the brand because that’s going to have an impact on the brand specifically.

How do you quantify non-linked earned mentions (like TV spots)?

When someone brings up the cost per link, I usually say to our sales team that it’s a red flag.

I’m like, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

And it’s not because I’m trying to avoid a difficult conversation or anything like that.

It’s more so that I want to be talking about wider things, like, “How can we help from a traffic point of view, a revenue point of view, what is our wider strategy?”

So the way that it works from our point of view is like the digital PR and the link building side of things, they usually sit within wider search strategies.

So, any account that we have—whether it is just a PR strategy or if it’s like full service—that we’re talking about, like SEO content, technical, everything,we’re always looking at like, well, what are we trying to achieve?

Are we trying to increase rankings for this keyword?

And how are we going to do that?

And how can we report that back to an increase in revenue?

So it’s trying to tie our goals with the wider business goals that we’re working with for our clients.

So it’s not just looking at, okay, we’re going to get you on USA Today. And then that’s sorted.

It’s more about, well, what is it? What is that wider goal going to be?

And, I’m also very transparent about, okay, not every campaign is going to work. That’s why we want to necessarily have several different kinds of strategies working at once so that we can kind of have almost a press office that happens like every single month that we’re doing more smaller reactive stories.

Then we’re having like more of your campaigns activities. So we’re doing those bigger brand moment pieces.

We discuss it around that situation, making sure that our goals aren’t just about that; they’re actually also looking at the wider strategy, so we can report back on that.

What are the main differences between digital PR in the US vs the UK?

I’d say in the UK it’s quite established ’cause we’ve had it for, we’ve been, like I said, I’ve been working in digital PR for 10 plus years now.

So I’d definitely say it’s more well-established.

I do think the US view of it, and this is my opinion, so people might wanna shoot me down, but I think it’s, it is a little bit of a different approach.

I think they see it as a little bit more, not as bread and butter as we see it in the UK.

And what I mean by that is like in the UK, it’s kind of like a given, like the teams are really clients really open to it.

It’s really kind of open and they know what it is.

It’s earned. It’s all about kind of traditional PR tactics for a digital spin.

Like I think they’re so used to it was, I think we’re so at that early stage in the US where it’s kind of that cross between link building and digital PR. So it’s not necessarily just about a certain tactic.

It’s more about the strategy of PR.

What we’re bringing to the US is, well, “how can it be pulling different teams together?”

“How can we work with the brand team?”

“How can we work with the social team? Like, how can we work in with various parts of a business rather than necessarily just the search team that we’d be working with?”

So I’d suppose in the UK, I feel like we’re, we’re quite far along that journey.

And a lot of our clients will speak to the SEO team, but we also speak to the brand team. Whereas I know it’s in US teams, we tend to just speak to the SEO team at the moment.

I feel like in the next, like, five years, we’ll be, it’ll be kind of where the UK is now, really.

So, that’s kind of how I see it from the industry perspective, a little bit further, like, a little bit less developed, a little bit less known, and I just think that’s purely because of the size of the US.

Just because it’s so big.

I feel like the, because the UK is a lot smaller, I feel like it can just travel quicker, like quicker through throughout the country versus the U. S., because it is literally, I’m just guessing, scratching the surface of how big the U. S. is.

What takeaways can the U.S. learn from how to sell digital PR in the UK?

Yeah, I think definitely from the results point of view that we mentioned earlier, but I think it’s also showing the wider teams, how we can help.

And what I mean by that is, say you were to go into a brand and it’s like an e-commerce brand, retail brand, and we’re like, okay, great, “Can we give them data from a search perspective and a trend perspective that’s going to help with sales?”

“Can we start to pull different teams together? Can we show the PR team how we can support them?”

Like if they’ve got a collaboration or any interviews coming up with a certain like. I don’t know if, say, it was a retail brand and they had a collaboration with a certain star or something like that. It’s like, how can we support them?

So I always think the way that we’ve like expanded our relationships is by making our clients jobs easier. So if we can do that with like any U.S. brands, I would definitely recommend that. And how we can almost make ourselves indisposable really as a brand ourselves to help educate theirs teams, help pull them together, help their work lives go a lot smoother, really.

So I think it’s all about showing them how you can help as well as showing them the return on what you’re doing and making sure that that fits within their strategy.

Should digital PR teams communicate directly with traditional PR teams?

It depends on like the length that we’ve been with them because obviously it needs to be over a good amount of time.

But at the beginning when we work with the brand, we want to meet those wider teams and pick our key stakeholders and to make sure that we’re going and building a relationship with them, finding out how we can work with them better, and then also reporting back on what we’ve done.

So for an example, say we’re working with a new brand and they might include some of those PR metrics, even though we’re not reporting them, not them to our key stakeholder, we’re showing them different metrics in terms of like, okay, this is where your rankings have improved, this is where your traffic’s improved.

And then we’ll say from a PR point of view, this is how brand sentiment is; this is how X, Y, Z.

So it can kind of include what they need as well. And I think it’s good when, our clients are lifting our decks and then using them as a wider kind of showcase to the rest of the team.

So again, making that job easier, I think is the most important thing.

What are some differences between pitching and ideating in the US vs the UK?

I think one of the biggest things that I’ve noticed, working in the UK versus the US is kind of like lead time on press, which I think is taking a lot like in the UK, you could outreach a story like on a Monday and get pick up on Monday afternoon or pick up on Tuesday if it’s like a really good story.

Whereas like, I’ve noticed a lot longer lead times in the US.

So I think you definitely have to tailor something to that and also tailor your strategies to that.

We actually outreached a story for a beauty brand that we’re working with in November and I think it got picked up like last week. So that was like, took like four months.

I was like, “Is this a joke?”

We also work with a really big health brand. We know the lead time on health is much longer as well, with a lot of approvals.

So, definitely tailor the story to the market. That works in every market, not just the UK versus the US.

It’s the same internationally; it’s the same kind of across Europe. Every story doesn’t necessarily land.

So, I recommend noticing what stories are working within your market, how the media is different, and how the landscape is different.

And then just kind of making sure that, like, is that strategy going to work?

So, for example, if you’re doing a creative campaign, like a Spice Girls piece, it’s like, well, “What makes that relevant to that popular culture moment now that’s happening in the US?”

What is it that’s relevant now?

I think it’s about consuming the media as well.

I noticed that when I’ve lived in the US., I tend to have much, much stronger stories in my mindset when I’m constantly consuming US media versus U.K. media.

What I mean by that is just watching the news stations in the morning, watching the adverts that are constantly on Twitter.

I just think it’s so much easier when you’re actually in that country.

When I’m in the US, I’ve come up with much stronger ideas than when I’m in the UK trying to consume US media.

You’re just walking down the street, and you’ll see a billboard or you’ll see X, Y, Z.

I feel like you get so much more inspiration when you’re actually in that country and seeing what’s happening there and in that moment versus trying to do it remotely from another country.

So it’s kind of about consumption and then being able to replicate something.

I wouldn’t necessarily just copy and paste from country to country; I would make it really, really tailored to that country.

This Spice Girls piece was huge, and they’re huge globally, huge in the U S as well. But, for Royal Mail, the reason why that one works so well is because, Royal Mail is so historic here. Though, not at the moment because they’ve just had a huge scandal, so we won’t be talking about them much longer.

But it’s perfect for them. It’s quite a historic brand. People love the Spice Girls because the partnership works really well. So just be kind of having something equivalent in the U.S. and making sure it’s really tailored to that cultural moment at that time in that country.

Do you have to think about lead times differently in the U.S. vs the UK?

I think it depends on the story, because we’ve had some really good reactives in the U.S., and I think it just depends on who it is and what it is and what type of journalist takes that.

Entertainment writers go fast and like anything about celebrities. We’ve done a lot of things within the fitness industry. When Miley Cyrus released her flowers music video last year, we basically broke down the workout that she did within it.

We just said, like, this is how you can get the workout from home, added commentary in from like a couple of like experts that were at the brand that we were working with.

And then I reached out, and that went everywhere, like People magazine and Women’s Health, touching loads and loads of different niches.

And that one was really quick.

We also do reactive strategy for the healthcare brand that I was talking about. And that could take months sometimes, but we get it, and the publications are kind of worth it because you get in on places like Healthline, which is really kind of authoritative.

So it’s kind of like, yeah, this is going to take a while, but they are going to be worth it in the end.

So I think it’s kind of like a mix and making sure that if you’ve got a big campaign, try not to tie it to something.

I’ve done that in the past because sometimes they’re the best ones. You’re like, “great the Super Bowl’s coming up and we want to do a campaign.”

But then you’re like “oh my god it’s like three weeks, left two weeks left!”

And then you’re like “oh it’s gone!”

So it’s kind of like having a mix of those types of campaigns, but don’t do every campaign with a tight window because you’re making it very hard for yourself.

Does local news in the U.S. make it easier to do those city-ranking pieces?

Yeah, totally.

I think in the U.S., that’s what we tend to do. We do those rankings as well, but we tend to mix it for an account. We’ll probably just do like one or two of those maximum a year.

But then it’s like, “Great. What other things can we touch it?”

We’re huge on popular culture, whether from a film or TV point of view or anything from celebrities, anything that we can tap into that everyone’s interested in.

I just feel like probably the most recent example that was really banged was something for a Marvel film.

So we work with an education brand, and they do online tutoring.

When Marvel’s Eternals was released there was a there’s a deaf actress in there, and we noticed that demand for sign language courses had increased around the premiere of the film.

So, we then released this as a story.

We just did a small story that took the stats that we had on site, released them as a press release, and it got in every publication, including ScreenRant, IMDB, and all these huge film and TV publications.

And then all the actors started sharing it and then posting it on their social channels and like stuff like that and it got engagement.

So anything popular culture wise, we kind of like try and weave it into our brands.

When we have a travel brand, we’ll look at Barbie destinations or similar things.

Or there’s a Netflix show that’s going huge in the UK at the moment and the shop featured in the Netflix show uses our payment brand system.

So we’re then able to kind of like get them involved in that as well.

So I think it’s like popular culture is definitely a huge, huge strong point.

How do you ideate for tough brands like B2B or brands in “boring” industries?

I actually love B2B brands. We don’t necessarily talk about a lot of the B2B brands we work with, but I still think you can get popular culture in there.

I’ll tell you why.

Obviously, it won’t be as heavy as you would do on a lifestyle brand. But, one of our B2B brands that we work for is a payments brand and they do card machines and terminals for small businesses.

They found they were featured in the Netflix show because we’d gone in, and we literally sent people from the team to the store to see if they used our card machine.

And we were like, they do. Great, we’re going to release this as a story.

And we’ve done loads of different things about that.

So it’s kind of like, again, finding an interesting story. It’s more about the storytelling.

I would say finding a really interesting story.

Another one that we’ve done for them is when were looking at booking systems.

So, if you want to get a reservation—like Rezi—that type of thing. If you want to get a reservation, you can book through them.

And we basically then released a story that was looking at which restaurants had the longest reservation wait list.

And it went global because we just did a story about a small restaurant and pub in Bristol, UK, that had a four-year waiting list for a dinner to literally get a Sunday roast—which is huge in the UK.

It went everywhere.

The New York Post and CNN were covering it.

All because this is the restaurant where you won’t be able to get in for four years.

It’s more about storytelling that you can tell because I often think that when you see a B2B brand, people think, “Ugh, it’s so boring. I don’t know what to do.”

But then I think it’s when you can get the most creative because usually, with B2B brands, you’ve got a little bit more freedom.

There aren’t huge PR teams doing these huge global campaigns.

So you can kind of be like, “right, great. How can I find an interesting story?”

So my advice would be just strip it back.

You need to look at the audience, what they’re interested in, and what they’re into.

Find something that’s an interesting story and then tell that. So it’s kind of making sure that you’ve got something really interesting.

Another B2B brand that we have, for example, offers insurance for utility bills, such as gas and electricity, for small businesses.

And what we do for them is look at which small businesses are driving the most amount on TikTok and looking at influencers.

There’s this one guy on TikTok who’s called the Pool Guy.

All he does is go around and clean everyone’s pool, and it’s so good.

So we look at things like that, and then it’ll be interesting as a story.

So my advice would just be to find something relevant to your audience, but it might be like taking a bit of a step back, looking at the wider pieces, and then finding an interesting story.

So don’t just stick to stuff that’s safe; try new and different things.

But it also has to be relevant to that brand.

How do you communicate expectations to a brand or client who wants to drive conversions from a digital PR campaign?

I think as long as it all fits within the wider strategy. For instance, although that link that we got might not necessarily drive conversions, it did help rankings that then drive conversions.

That’s how we would definitely look at it.

Like, okay, someone might not have clicked through after going on our piece and bought your service or bought your product, but then this is helping the wider strategy to make you more visible.

So they then buy your products.

So I’m definitely looking at it from that perspective.

Some say links from digital PR campaigns don’t do anything to help rankings. What’s your take?

It doesn’t always have to be like a massive number of links that makes an impact.

We’ve done things in the past—that’s probably some of our best work— where it’s more about the strategy behind it than necessarily the number of links.

I’m just thinking back to when we were working with a retail brand that sold beds.

We created a story when The Watcher was out on Netflix. And basically, we noticed that a lot of people were searching for like “how to sleep,” “nightmares,” “how to get rid of nightmares,” and things around that when The Watcher was out.

And our strategy was to increase rankings for TV beds (beds that had literally a TV at the end of them came up), and we created this story and building three or four links into the TV bed section had a massive increase in their rankings.

Obviously, we’re doing like onsite technical recommendations, content, etc around that.

But we got some links from that, like IMDB, Collider, and Screenrant; a couple of really relevant ones within TV and film.

And because we got them directly into that bed section, they had a massive impact.

Do you use tools in different ways based on location?

The only one I would say that is a little bit different maybe is the media database sometimes. The one we use in the UK is not necessarily the best globally.

I’m obviously, I’m not going to say who that is, but I’m just going to say, I’d probably recommend getting a few different ones and looking at your different services depending on the country.

We’ve got a good one at the moment that I’m happy with, but I probably wouldn’t look to use it in the U.S.

I’d probably look at like MuckRack or like a few of the different things like that.

BuzzStream obviously we use globally.

I’d say all the rest of the tools we can use globally.

Buzzsumo.

We use a really cool tool called Glimpse as well. It’s like a plugin for your Google Trends. And it basically can show you anything that’s trending now, but kind of gets it before it’s on the rise.

You can see a lot of trends that might be becoming a thing. It’s sharp. And you can set alerts and different things like that.

So, really, really good for speed.

But now I probably say we use more or less the rest of the tools globally.

I wouldn’t say anything works better in the UK versus the US. (Though I might change my mind in like six months at once I physically get in the US) but, no, not really.

What are your tips for brands or agencies transitioning services into the new country?

I think my biggest thing is to speak to people who are in that market and go and spend some time physically in that market.

I think that’s the biggest thing.

People think that because we’re in such a world where we can just jump on a Zoom call and do anything anywhere, globally, people are like, “Oh, yeah, it’s fine. I can understand that market.”

I honestly don’t think you fully understand it until you’re in it.

As I said, I consume media walking, or on the Tube in London, or if I’m in New York, I’d be going to the subway. And you’re seeing what’s on the Subway, on billboards, in newspapers, everywhere.

Listen to the radio, listen to the news.

Listen to the different stations.

You see what people are talking about, and you see different things—even to the point where my Twitter is global in terms of who I follow.

When you’re on American time, you’ve seen everyone who’s American at once.

If you’re on UK time, you’ve seen everyone who’s in the UK.

So, I think being physically there is my biggest advice.

And I know that isn’t always the best if you want to start it remotely, but I do think it puts you an advantage if you are physically there because you could just pick things up a lot quicker.

How do outreach tactics differ in the UK vs the US?

I’d say our outreach tactics are very universal that we do.

I think I’ve tried different things, and I’ve seen different people’s tactics from different agencies in the US and the UK and we tend to have one that’s globalized, and it’s just about putting the story first.

And what I mean by that is that we write as if we’re a journalist.

We don’t write like, “Hi, I have a press release for you here that’s below.”

Just go straight to the story.

We say, “This is the story that we’re thinking. What do you think?” And nine times out of ten, that is a success.

And tailoring it to that journalist.

So, I’m not writing the same press release, email, or outreach email to a People magazine journalist as I would to the Wall Street Journal.

It’s going to totally depend on who I’m going for, everything that would change.

So I think it’s just making sure you’re tailoring it to that actual journalist and how they write.

So, they’re more likely to read your email if you write headlines in the same way they write their headlines.

Everyone tailors to their own areas. So, if you tailor it to that journalist, you’re more likely to make it into their inbox.

Can you discuss the story or storytelling in your ideas and pitches?

What is the headline? That’s what I mean when I say a story.

I think a lot of times what can happen is when someone comes up with an idea, they go through and develop it and it can sometimes change as you’re going through that development.

So you have to protect that story. And that’s what we say within Rise.

We’re like, if you’re if you’re in charge of that story, you’ve got to protect it.

What I mean by that is that as you’re taking it through the business, if someone says, “Oh, we can’t get that data,” it’s like, “Oh, well, that story doesn’t work then.”

Because if you allow it to allow that story to change, you’re not going to land it in the end.

So, I think it’s protecting the PR idea and the PR hook.

When I was in traditional PR, you used just to write headlines, headlines, headlines.

Like, what is the story and what’s going to be this headline; into that hook?

It’s what a journalist says.

We’ve had a couple of journalists say to us that they’ve stolen our headlines.

They’re like, ‘I love your headlines. We just copied it.” I was like, “oh, great. Love that. Great compliment.”

But when I get coverage, I tend to look at what the journalist has written as a headline and then tweak my headline a bit.

Once I’ve got pick up, you start to then just keep mimicking the story.

So, it’s just really thinking like a journalist and not too broad focus because that’s what I feel like a lot of people do.

They’re like, “We’re this brand, and we’ve got this brand new launch,” and it’s like, “I don’t care.”

It should be like, yeah, what’s the story? Right.

And do those headlines make it into the pitch as the subject line?

Yeah, usually, yeah.

We put that as the subject line, and again, within our emails.

I just get straight to the point.

I wouldn’t necessarily be like, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, all this stuff.

I’d just be like, alright, this is the story.

How much do you personalize emails?

Well, it depends on what we tend to do.

We’ve had a big beauty launch because we do a lot of product PR as well.

And we had a big beauty launch, like two weeks ago, and it was a spin-off of one of the products that was really fast-selling. So I tend to go back to that journalist and say, I know you love this story.

So, we’ve come out with it again, and we’ve done this, and that way, there’s a new product…and things like that.

Random tactic, but I thought if I was in a thread with a journalist, I’d stay with them and just keep going back to that thread and talking to it.

I feel like once people know they’ve opened your email, they’ll come back to you and come back to you rather than have to cold outreach again. Again.

How can people leverage trending topics?

So, one opportunity that we’ve seen—I suppose it is a trend—is that basically, someone, an influencer, posted on TikTok, a content creator, said she was an ex-air hostess. And she said, look, “If you want an upgrade, this is what you need to do.”

And she just said like, “take a box of Krispy Kremes to the air stewards and just like, say thank you for the flight” and she’s like, you will get upgraded.

They will do something for you.

So we basically just took that content—because we work with a lot of travel brands—of that TikTok story, and then we got the headline of like, “New TikTok reveals, this is how you can get an upgrade.”

Then, put that into an outreach email, seeding list, then just started to like outreach that.

So that landed on like IndY 100, New York Post, Thrillist, and a lot of like travel publications and more like lifestyle pieces as well.

So it’s kind of just like spotting opportunity, creating a story and headlines around it, offering commentary from your client within that, and then outreaching it.

How important is the speed for leveraging trends?

So I definitely think like speed is obviously useful.

It doesn’t work for everyone.

If they can’t be fast, I would pick and choose what you do with them and do more planned, smaller campaigns rather than actual reactive pieces.

But it could just be literally spotting a small thing. It’s usually happened in a media moment.

So if it’s happening on social media, it could be that Beyonce announced that she’s got a country album.

So we’re like, great. We could do some country trips, like road trips for a car rental brand that we work with.

So it could just be anything, or it could just be the weather.

Like, could there be snow in New York?

So it’s like, okay, what to do when it snows, like how to de-ice your car, and things like that. So it’s just like spotting the media moment, adding a bit of insight to it, adding thought, leadership, and commentary, and outreaching it.

So just keeping it really simple, but moving with pace.

So that doesn’t necessarily obviously like work for the bigger, like tent pole pieces that you’re going to do.

Do you leverage trends for large tentpole pieces?

Yeah, it depends on what it is. I think it just depends if it’s big enough. Let’s use the Super Bowl as an example.

We know it’s a huge event coming up—like a certain date—and then we’ve got a certain amount of time to do it—just have a secondary backup angle.

So, say you were doing a stunt for the Super Bowl. Also, look at something that’s got data within it that’s a bit of a backup in case you miss that window.

So it could just be looking at something like, within that same campaign page, you’ve also got something like, the most expensive beer in every single stadium across the U.S. or something like that.

I’d just recommend having like secondary angles and third and fourth things really in there to support you.

Do you recommend that agencies always have a presence in the area they are pitching?

Yeah, I definitely think it’s more advantageous to have “boots on the ground”.

I don’t think you necessarily have to do it in every single country.

For example, Rise at Seven also services different countries within Europe. From our UK offices, we serve Spain, the Netherlands, France, Germany, et cetera.

So I think it depends on where you are going.

But the U.S. market, just because of its size, I think you do need boots on the ground there.

I think you can do bits from the U. K., but it’s so much easier to then have actual US citizens that are working for you and having people that are actually from that kind of area, just from a cultural point of view and just like, just fully understanding the market.

Is hiring from that area a shortcut to having a physical presence?

Yeah, for sure. I think if you’ve got a U.S. team but no people from the U.S. in it, then I have a worry.

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The post Digital PR Strategies in the US vs UK with Will Hobson appeared first on BuzzStream.

She’s been in the digital PR game for over 15 years, formerly of Verve Search and Distilled. She now works as a creative consultant and trainer for companies and agencies as the director of Worderist.

Hannah has even written about writing media pitches on our blog.

In our initial conversation, we talked a lot about email personalization. I have always advocated personalizing every email you send. But Hannah made very compelling arguments about how you should think about personalizing (or if you should be doing it at all).

So, I thought it best to invite her on our podcast to chat it out so that others can learn more about what she had to say.

We also discuss content ideation, pitching ideas, and the true power of digital PR.

Editors Note: Below is a transcript of our talk, slightly edited for readability.

Should you personalize your emails?

So, it really depends on what you mean by personalization, doesn’t it? Ultimately, so I think, when I hear personalization, what I’m really thinking about is like one to one personalization.

So, for example, in the past, I’ve definitely seen advice like, if you are, pitching a journalist, you should mention or reference some specific articles that journalist, that you’re emailing, has written.

And I feel strongly that that’s not necessary.

For a bunch of reasons, right?

Firstly, I just don’t believe that journalists are that interested in hearing that you’ve read or that you loved a bunch of their articles.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, it can sound a bit insincere, I think is part of the problem. It can kind of feel like a bit of an empty statement. But also I think that you’re potentially clogging up your pitch with fuff, right?

So, journalists are incredibly time poor.

Their inboxes are flooded. What they really need to know is what is the story that you are pitching?

That’s what they need to know. And they need to know that as quickly as possible.

And I think that they are more than capable of reading your pitch and determining whether or not the story is a good fit for them and their beat.

So, I just think it’s unnecessary.

I think it’s kind of a waste of time because it’s incredibly time consuming, right?

If I’m pitching a hundred journalists, I spend 15 minutes finding articles for each of them. That’s 25 hours work. Probably not the best way to spend my time, I would argue.

I think it’s incredibly easy to get wrong as well.

So it’s very easy to say something like, “Oh, I recently read your article on this topic, and so I thought you’d love this pitch, which I’m about to tell you all about.”

And in the journalist’s head, they may not think the two things are similar.

So I might see an article about a particular topic and go, “Oh, that’s just like this thing. I want to pitch you” and the journalist might feel like, “do you know what those two things aren’t the same and now I’m sort of annoyed by you, Hannah.”

“I’m just kind of turned off and I don’t want to read the rest of your pitch.”

So I kind of, I don’t like it personally, I think, and maybe I worry about this too much.

I try to avoid alienating journalists. And I think it’s one of the ways, unfortunately, you can alienate them, by accident.

So even if you do, even if you do your research really, really well, you could still get it wrong ultimately. And so I think that’s, that’s why it’s something that I personally don’t do.

Are there any instances you would personalize?

There are instances when I would personalize a pitch. For example, and I’ll be honest, like I don’t do a ton of this, but if I was pitching one of the experts that I worked with to appear on like a TV show or to appear on a podcast or something like that, then I would send like a fully personalized pitch.

Do you know what I mean?

That would be a one-on-one interaction with the podcaster or broadcaster. Right?

And I guess in a similar vein when we are responding to requests from journalists for expert commentary.

So lots of people use HARO. Now it’s called Connectively. Or Qwoted, or just responding to stuff on like journal requests on Twitter, anything like that — those would be entirely personalized.

That would be one-to-one.

So, I would specifically seek to answer the specific things that the journalist has requested.

I guess the stories where I’m pitching a number of journalists essentially the same story, I don’t think you need to take the time to personalize.

You need to make sure the story’s relevant for them.

I’m guessing we’ll get into that a bit more later, but I don’t think you need to personalize.

Does personalization and relevancy get confused sometimes?

[Editor’s Note: This question was in reference to this Muck Rack 2023 State of Journalism Report.]

So I mean, it sounds to me based on, you know, what you last said that maybe there’s just that the wording here is, is the difference here is lack of relevance and not actually personalization.

I don’t want to cast aspersions on the Muckrack study. I just think potentially what, what happened there.

I think conceivably it could have been a semantic issue.

So, a journalist is saying “lack of personalization,” and bear in mind, with most of these surveys, it’s like a box ticking thing. So maybe personalization was an option. And relevance wasn’t conceivably.

Editor’s note: Since our initial podcast recording, Muck Rack released the 2024 State of Journalist Report in which they listed “lack of relevance” as the number one reason they reject pitches.

Great job Muck Rack team!

What’s the main reason journalists reject pitches?

I think, I think the main reason journalists will reject pitches is just that they’re irrelevant to their beats.

And it’s not really so much about personalization, however, I could definitely imagine that some journalists would consider relevance and personalization to be the same thing.

Do you know what I mean? So they, they kind of feel like, well, if you’re sending me something that’s irrelevant to my beat, this is not a personalized email.

Like that’s, that’s also fair. Semantically it’s fair.

I’m keen to reference Surena Chande because she is a journalist. And something that she said, on the webinar, she said that she said, saying that you loved 10 of my last articles or whatever makes no difference at all.

I can only cover a story if it’s well researched, a good fit for my desk, in terms of what we cover.

What I care most about is page views. If it’s not going to get any views, I can’t put the time into writing an article.

So personalization isn’t important in my opinion, but sending pictures which are relevant to my beat really is.

And I suspect that many other journalists feel similarly to Surena.

Why do you think it’s bad to over-personalize emails?

It really depends on your perspective, right? As I say, like, I feel that, and perhaps this is something I worry about too much, I feel like it’s potentially a bit patronizing. It’s kind of why I, it’s like the other reason I don’t like it.

Like, the journalist knows what articles they wrote, they wrote them. Like, do you know what I mean? Like, they don’t, they don’t need you to tell them that. And again, I do think that, sometimes, and again, this is just my, like, personal point of view, but I think that sometimes, people think they need to, like, “sell the story”, more than they actually do.

I just don’t think that I understand that.

I think a lot of this comes from things like maybe people have read a bunch of books about the art of persuasion and they’re like, what I’m doing here is persuading the journalist, but I’m like, in my experience, journalists are so time poor, right?

They don’t need to be persuaded what they need to, what they need to understand as quickly and easily as possible is what is, what is the story that you’re giving them?

And just let them figure the rest out for themselves, because they’re more than capable of doing that.

And as I say, like, I do think the downside—which isn’t talked about very much—is the extent to which this can be a potential turnoff as well.

As I say, it’s much easier to get wrong than get right.

And I say so because I’ve seen it myself – which is one of the benefits of being s freelance consultant: I’ve read an awful lot of people’s pitches.

And actually, this personalization bit is the bit they most commonly get wrong.

Like, I see it, and I’m like, these two things are not the same. Don’t say to a journalist, “you should cover my piece because you wrote about this piece once.”

Like, these two things aren’t the same.

And, sure, maybe the journalist would just ignore that statement, maybe it wouldn’t hurt at all.

But it just sort of makes me feel a bit icky, and I’m just like, I don’t.

What do you think makes a good story pitchable?

I’m gonna fall back a bit to relevance again, right? Because I think that, I think that a lot of people, and I’ve worked with a lot of people, who have very good intentions, but it doesn’t matter how good their intentions are when their energies are misdirected.

So, for example, lots of people that I work with, they’ll be like, “I need you to create a killer pitch template for me,” and they think that if I can create them, this magical press pitch template, all of their problems will be solved.

And, and, and I’m just like, yeah, that’s not, that’s not going to work.

I can make you a press pitch template if that will comfort you or make you happy, but there are still so many ways you can get this stuff wrong.

And I think the most common way is that people will send the most beautifully constructed pitch, but essentially to the wrong person.

Since I’ve just written an article for you, I thought it might be fun to kind of give some concrete examples.

So, in the article I just wrote for you, I spent a bunch of time talking about what our approach to pitching a piece called On Location was.

So On Location was a piece we created at Verve Search, and we dug through several decades worth of IMDb data in order to uncover the most filmed locations on the planet.

And within that post one of the core angles we identified were just the top ten most filmed locations worldwide.

I wrote up that pitch. It’s in the post. People can look at it if they want. And, you know, I’m biased, but I feel like that was a pretty good pitch. So, the most filmed locations worldwide pitch is pretty strong.

But, here’s the problem.

If I’d have sent that very strong, pitch to Madeleine Marr at the Miami Herald, she would have ignored it.

Doesn’t matter how great the pitch is, because she doesn’t cover worldwide stories. She only covers stories specific to her region.

So, if I want her to write up my story, I need to create a pitch about the most filmed locations in Florida.

And until I send her that, she will ignore me—and rightly so. And be annoyed with me.

But even, kind of, You know, polluting her inbox, because it genuinely is, I’m just polluting her inbox at this point.

Now, of course, this pitch about the most filmed locations in Florida, that won’t just go to her. I’ll actually send it to, a bunch of other journalists who also work at other regional publications in Florida too.

So this isn’t a personalized pitch, right? It’s just a relevant pitch for this segment of journalists.

And I think that, really, for me that’s what makes a good pitch. Like, it’s relevant for that subset of journalists.

So you don’t have to go to the extent of like, making this a one-to-one exercise. It’s not the case that every single journalist you contact needs a unique pitch.

Instead, you need to segment your journalists sensibly so that you’re sending segments of them the most appropriate pitch for them. That’s the thing I think people often miss.

I’ve also probably leaned on Surena again because I prefer her words to mine. So, I thought something she said about pitching was really interesting, really relevant.

She said, ” Think about your pitch structure and what you’re including. Give me the story in the first line. Tell me how and where you sourced your data, if it’s a data piece. Give me expert quotes. Provide images if you can. Keep everything in the body of the email. Don’t send me attachments. Provide Dropbox or Google Drive links so we can download things like full data or images.”

And I think it’s, it’s, it is bearing in mind things like that.

So the other space where I feel like people sometimes go wrong is they’re not giving the journalist everything they need to write their story.

Again, journalists are under incredible time pressure. Many people don’t realize the extent to which this pressure is real, right?

They’re expected to write maybe anywhere between six to eight articles in a shift. Their whole shift isn’t spent just writing articles; they’ve got to go to editorial meetings, and they’ve got to do other, do you know what I mean, other stuff in their day as well.

So, like a nice rule of thumb—which I tend to try and just keep in my head—is like, I’ll look at my pitch and I’ll be like, could the journalist write this story in 15 minutes just using my pitch?

And in reality, sure, journalists probably have longer than 15 minutes to write their stories, but, that’s a good thing to aim for. And I think, sometimes, I’ve even gone so far as to actually try it. So, take my pitch and go, I’m going to turn this into a story. 15 minutes, go.

And wherever I get stuck, that tells me, oh, this is something the journalists need, right?

So if I get a paragraph or two in, and I’m suddenly Googling trying to find some sort of stat or some sort of other reliable bit of research, I’m like, “oh, I need to reference that in my email then.”

I need to let the journalists know about that.

Similarly, if I suddenly find myself referencing a recent news story about the pitch to the story I’m writing, then I need to reference that in my pitch as well.

So I do think  things like that.

One last thing I do want to point out. Somebody asked me a couple of weeks ago:

Should we, should we write the story for the journalist and send them that? And, and my answer was absolutely not. Absolutely not. But, I can understand why it sounds like I’m saying you should.

Again, I feel like that would be rude, right? “Here you go. I’ve written your story for you. Because I know you’re busy”.

No, I’m not suggesting that.

Give them everything they need to write their own story. Don’t actually write the story for them.

How do you ensure your ideas aren’t lost from ideation to creation to pitching?

Somebody referred to this idea almost like a North Star.

So you might say, ” This is the piece I’m making, and this is directionally where I want to go.” Some things might change along the way.

As a person who has created a lot of PR campaigns over time, I know how much they change.

Returning to this original intention, this original North Star idea, can be really helpful throughout the process. Because stuff goes a long way from the point at which you ideate to the point at which you have the finished thing.

And you can lose your way really easily.

So I think it’s really important to kind of have those guiding principles and refer back to them frequently. So you’re like, are we still doing the thing that we said we were setting out to do or have we gone wildly off track?

And sometimes going wildly off track is the right thing, right? Like, sometimes that might be absolutely the thing to do. But not if you’re just doing it by accident because you just kind of lost track.

As you’ve shifted to another better North Star. Although the whole metaphor falls apart because we have many, many, many North Stars, or just one, just one last time I checked.

How do you ensure that the outreach team kind of captures the essence of a story?

Here’s the way we handled it at Verve. So, obviously, we have quite a big team of people at Verve. We have a team of PR folks and then also we had a production team who were largely responsible for the content creation. But the PR team would come up with the ideas. It would then go into the production team to be produced.

Then it comes back to the PR team for the outreach to journalists phase.

Obviously, it’s not, it’s certainly for us that wasn’t going to be scalable to be like a one person, one idea, kind of a vibe. So, what we tended to do—or what I instituted at a certain point as the team grew and we were producing an awful lot—was every campaign had what I referred to as like a PR lead.

So there was a PR lead. And then there was also a creative lead.

And so the PR lead on the campaign, their job is to ensure that from a PR perspective, this thing is going to retain the resonance or like be resonant as resonant as possible, and also retain the breadth of appeal that we originally.

And then the creative leads job is kind of like creative and production excellence.

So, the PR lead’s job is to ensure that we’re ultimately creating something that will be of interest to journalists.

The creative lead’s job is to ensure that the thing we’re making is creatively excellent.

Sometimes those two things can fight. And I think part of the reason that those two things wind up fighting is you never have as much resource or budget as you would really like.

So inevitably, when you kind of come up with an idea, it will almost always be like bigger and more encompassing than the eventual idea winds up being because you run out of time, you run out of budget.

And so basically, what the creative lead and the PR lead were there to do is really work together to say, okay, we’ve got to drop some elements of this idea. It can’t be what we really hoped it would be.

So, which of these elements is likely to be the least interesting to press?

So, which of these angles or stories can we legitimately drop and still have a piece which is likely to be of interest to journalists?

I think the other reason that’s important is that these things rarely work out the way you’d hope, right? So, any data-led piece is, by its nature, risky because until you analyze the data, you don’t know what the stories are.

So you’re going in, and you’re like, we’re going to do this data analysis, and we are hoping that it’s going to give us all of these stories. Then you do the data analysis and you’re like, “Oh, we were hoping for like 10 stories coming out of this. And we are actually now sitting on two. What do we do? What do we do?”

Again, like that’s sort of where the PR lead would come in and be like, okay, “What other stories can we create with this? What else needs to be in the piece?”

How do you make sure a story will stand out?

Yeah, so I tend to think about ideas.

I tend to think about three core things.

So the first one is resonance

Resonance encompasses a bunch of things and means the power to provoke an emotional response.

But I think sometimes there are—depending on the client and topic—things that are more resonant than others.

Perhaps a nice example is back when I was at Verve. We did a piece called Highways to Hell, which looked at a whole bunch of publicly available data sources to determine which roads were the most congested in the UK.

Now, this is a story which I think has reasonably high resonance, because if you drive, you care about traffic, because it’s frustrating to be stuck in traffic.

Even if you don’t drive, you probably still care about traffic because you’re stuck on a bus in the traffic.

Trraffic is a thing that affects an awful lot of people.

Also, I don’t know if this is a typically British trait or not, but certainly, for us Brits, there are two things we love to moan about traffic and weather; we never tire of moaning about those things.

So, whilst this is a topic like where are the most congested roads, on the face of it as a topic, I can understand people thinking, well, that doesn’t sound very exciting.

But I think it’s important to know the difference between exciting and resonant.

So I don’t care so much about exciting. I care a lot about resonant.

I care a lot about things which other people care a lot about. And particularly, I’m interested in, like, I refer to them as, like, Hot emotions.

So anything that makes people angry as a PR, I am so interested in.

Just thinking something is cool or interesting is probably not enough. There’s not enough heat in that emotion.

So the things which I think about in terms of resonance are things like that.

So it’s not necessarily that the idea needs to be exciting, but it does need to be about a resonant topic.

The other thing I think about is what I refer to as breadth of appeal.

Breadth of appeal just means the total pool of journalists we can take this to.

And so, in terms of breadth of appeal, this story had reasonable breadth of appeal because I’ve got a national story for the national journalist.

I’ve got a story for every single region because I can tell them.

These are the worst roads in Manchester. Like I can go down to that granular level. So, it has a reasonable breadth of appeal, too.

So because of that, I will be potentially reasonably confident in this idea.

And I think you can use these two factors—resonance and breadth of appeal as a useful way of thinking a little bit more critically about ideas.

One of the challenges for all creative people ever is that we fall in love with our own ideas.

So there’ll be an idea that we’re really personally interested in and that clouds our judgment sometimes.

Because, for us, we’re like, “This is so interesting. This is perhaps the best idea I’ve ever had.”

And we’re so caught up in our excitement for the idea we forget to think about resonance? How many people does this really affect? Like it’s just affecting me at the moment, that’s not necessarily gonna be strongly resonant.

And again, breadth of appeal: how many journalists can I take this story to?

How many journalists are actually writing about this topic right now? What are they writing about this topic? What are they writing about when they write about this topic? How does this thing I’m making feed in or enrich the stories they’re already writing?

And so, yeah, that’s kind of my approach to evaluating ideas.

What’s the difference between assetless pitching and content led pitching?

Editor’s note: This is in reference to Hannah’s blog post on Worderist.

Asset-less digital PR, what I mean by that is literally only a press release or media pitch is created.

So, there’s nothing live on the client’s site that a journalist could link to.

Often, but not always, this is like a reactive digital PR activity or a news jack.

(In the bad old days, we used to call them news jacks. I don’t think they’re called news jacks anymore. They call it reactive PR.

That’s fine. We can call these things whatever people want to call them. It doesn’t matter.)

Quite literally, there’s no asset live on the client side.

On the other hand, you’ve got, like, some people call it hero or content-led digital PR.

And the difference is just that something is created that a journalist could link to on the client site.

For my money, that could be anything from a blog post. It doesn’t need to be a big, expensive, flashy thing.

It can be a blog post, just written content, or it could be a fully interactive piece. It could be anything within that.

So assetless, there’s literally nothing a journalist could link to, and content-led, there is something a journalist could link to.

How do KPIs or goals change for content-led vs asset-less?

So potentially, I think it’s probably fair to say if that is, if there is nothing for the journalist to link to the most obvious place for them to link to will be the homepage.

But that’s not always true, right?

Like I’ve definitely seen examples in the past where, essentially it’s a reactive piece of PR, but it’s linked to a product.

For example, my friends at Yard Digital many moons ago did a reactive bit of PR based on—I’m probably going to get this wrong, but it doesn’t really matter—a necklace that Victoria Beckham wore to her son’s wedding or something.

(So, you know, this is heavy journalism. Very serious journalism.)

Yard was working for this jewelry company, and what this jewelry company did was they got an expert from the jewelry company to value the necklace that Victoria Beckham was wearing.

It cost an awful lot of money. (I don’t know how much, but they’ve got plenty of money, so that’s fine.)

And then the other cute thing that they did, which I thought was really nice, was highlight a bunch of similar necklaces that you could buy if you didn’t have, you know, Victoria Beckham’s credit rating.

What I thought was really nice about this story was that it was a bit of reactive PR.

It was assetless. Do you know what I mean?

They didn’t have anything live on the client’s site, but what they’d done was kind of connect the dots.

So by providing the journalist with a valuation for Victoria Beckham’s necklace, the journalist was also seemingly pretty happy to talk about the other necklaces that this particular jewellery company had on offer.

And so they got a link, if I recall correctly, not just to the homepage, I think they actually got two links.

They got one to the homepage as “this jewellery company’s spokesperson”, etc, that was linked to the homepage. And then they also linked to this page of necklaces similar to Victoria Beckham’s; it may have been a couple of different product pages.

And so I think it’s worth saying that assetless PR can do that too.

It doesn’t always, right?

Like, I always feel like a technical SEO. Everything I say winds up being, it depends, but there is a bit of an, “it depends” in there, right?

So, asset-less digital PR often results in links to the homepage and depending on the nature of the asset-ess, digital PR may also result in links to product pages.

If that’s relevant.

Or category pages in some instances, if that is relevant.

I feel like that’s, that’s like broadly, broadly true.

Now, obviously, you might argue, well, if they’re linking to a product page or a category page, is it truly assetless digital PR?

At which point I’m just going to lose my mind.

I don’t know. I can’t tell you—I’m not clever enough.

In short, sometimes that will result in that.

But I also think it’s often the case, again, not always the case, when you do like hero or content-led digital PR, that often results in links direct to that piece of content that you have created.

But again, not always, right?

I’ve definitely been in a situation where despite, in the media pitch, I’ve asked “if you’d like to use this story, please credit, here’s the link to this beautiful piece of content that my team have created.”

And instead the journalist has linked to the homepage.

And in those instances, I do nothing at all.

I’m not going to be a journalist saying, “please can you change this thing?”

Like, that’s just not my jam. I’m like, it’s fine. It’s fine. I have appropriate credit.

I think they have enough to do without updating links to pieces that they’ve very kindly written.

What is your take on getting homepage links vs product page links vs content links?

I do think like all of this stuff, again, we wind up in, in “it depends” territory.

My feeling on the whole thing is, honestly, is it contextually relevant?

So if you’re mentioning my brand and I’ve not given you anything to link to, I’ve given, you know, like research or study to link to, it contextually makes the most sense for you to link to my homepage, and I’m totally comfortable with that.

If I’ve sent you a particular product and you’re talking about a particular product I sell, probably contextually, it makes more sense for you to link to that product.

I wouldn’t personally be too tied up and not say for this stuff.

I think people get too worried.

I think also like, I’m just pretty mercenary about this stuff now.

I’m like, do you know what? My job as the PR is to get you linked coverage. You want improved rankings. That’s a technical SEO problem, right? If you’re site architecture is so messy that you’re not able to like, channel that authority. Yeah. If you’re not able to channel that authority appropriately, that’s not really, it’s not really for me.

I’m not, I’m not best placed to tell you how to optimize your site architecture.

What you want to do is speak to a technical SEO.

I have many friends who are technical SEOs. I can put you in touch with someone.

How do you speak to clients when a digital PR campaign doesn’t do what they thought it would do?

Honestly, a bunch of this has changed genuinely. So, I feel reasonably confident in saying there was a point in time, say back in 2010, 2011, something like that, where essentially, if you’ve got enough good, high authority editorial links from, you know, major news outlets, rankings would improve, even if, technically, the site was not that great, right?

So, even if pages were imperfectly optimized, even if maybe the site architecture wasn’t that great; maybe even if there were a bit of duplicate content issues going on.

If you could do enough good PR and generate really high-quality linked coverage, you would see rankings improve.

Of course, what’s happened just over time has changed. That’s genuinely changed.

And I’ve definitely been in situations where we’re doing great work for this client objectively, but their rankings aren’t moving.

And I think that sometimes, certainly in some circumstances, it’s been as simple as look, you said that you had this technical stuff sorted, but you don’t.

Your site’s not indexed.

Large, large chunks of your site aren’t indexed.

So, you know, this particular page that you want to see ranking improvements for is not in-depth.

So, you know, this is not something I can help you with, right?

This is, this is a technical issue.

So there’s definitely that.

I think the other thing that people often don’t fully consider is that none of what we do happens in a vacuum.

For example, if you were in a very competitive niche, So like something like insurance, insurance is a very competitive niche.

Even if you are doing really, really great work for your insurance aggregator client, it’s probably true that there are a whole bunch of other agencies or internal teams doing really great work for their different insurance aggregator clients.

And at a certain point, there’s something in velocity, right?

So if another player in the space, if a competitor in your space, is investing 2, 3, 4, 5 times the amount of resource into this activity, and therefore building 2, 3, 4, 5 times the amount of linked coverage as us, it doesn’t matter.

You’re still not going to go anywhere,, do you know what I mean?

Someone else is doing better than you.

And I think that’s also a factor that maybe sometimes people, people don’t consider.

We’ll talk about competitor analysis, but in my experience, very few agencies track things like their competitors’ link velocity.

So we’re all doing digital PR now, but have you looked to see what their velocity looks like versus yours?

Are there industries where links matter more than others?

I think the other thing as well, that sometimes what we’re doing is like running fast just to stay in the same place.

So I feel like, if you’re in a very competitive need, you probably ought to be doing PR activity just to stay in the same place.

So just to stay, for example, at position five for a set of competitive keywords, you probably need to do a lot of digital PR activity just to stay there.

And if you did less, you’d see yourself dropping.

And, and again, this is something which isn’t necessarily kind of taken into account.

I recognize that this stuff is difficult. It’s much nicer to work in a niche where you do some good work and the client’s rankings improve and everyone’s like high fiving.

But if you’re in a competitive niche, that’s the absolute dream.

I you’re in a competitive niche or if there are technical issues with the site, that just will not be the case. That won’t be the case.

Everybody is running really fast at the moment.

I love using the example of insurance. Because the truth of the matter is that like, one person’s car insurance page is no better than any other person’s car insurance page, right?

Once you get to the top, especially.

They all look the same. They all do the same thing.

It probably doesn’t matter which car insurance aggregator that you go with. It doesn’t matter; you’re going to get the same levels of service.

You’re probably even going to get the same insurance product, right, from all of these different people.

And so I think, in spaces like that, it’s possible at least that Google can’t rely on on-page stuff at that point, right?

Because everybody’s page is well-optimized. Everybody’s page is reasonably fast.

It works well on mobile and is accessible.

So all of that baseline SEO hygiene stuff.

Google still has to decide. Well, someone has to be first, someone second, someone third, and someone fourth. How do they decide?

Probably it’s something that looks like brand, and how do you decide who is a brand and who isn’t online?

Probably some of the stuff that looks like digital PR plays into that.

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The post The Art and Strategy of Pitching to Journalists w/Hannah Smith appeared first on BuzzStream.

I first came across Brian Dean via his Backlinko site around 2014. I ended up taking his course, SEO That Works, and I credit what I learned in that course with helping me get my first real content marketing job with Siege Media.

Since then, I’ve been an avid reader of Brian’s work, consistently inspired by his writing, SEO, video tips, and Exploding Topics.

Interviewing Brian about link building and SEO was an amazing full-circle experience.

We got to talk about Exploding Topics, link building, data studies, and of course, the skyscraper technique.

Do you pay attention to algorithm updates?

Yeah, pretty much. I especially feel like more and more I’m nowadays spending less time on algorithm-related things.

Like, there’s like the helpful content update…there’s all these updates. I don’t really, you know, look at them. I don’t really pay attention to the winners and losers. I used to pour over that stuff.

There was an update and someone did a winners and losers analysis like I used to look at back in the day.

I would be like, oh, okay, trying to figure out the connection between this site that was good, this site that got hit.

And it’s kind of fruitless because even if you were able to see the algorithm, like say just Google is like, here you go, here’s all the ranking factors, here’s exactly how it works.

You’d probably do the same stuff because there is not like ranking factor 18 is some loophole that you can exploit, right?

It’s, you’d still have to do the same amount of work. Like they’re gonna say, okay, we’re really, authoritative trustworthy websites, we want brands. Like, so one of the ranking factors, let’s say in a way is like, you know, your brand, then you got to go build a brand.

That’s not easy. That’s really hard to do.

So whether and plus you should do it anyway, whether or not it’s a ranking factor. So for me, I don’t spend a ton of time on the news of like, what’s going on with Google.

And I feel like that’s yeah, my approach is basically create the best content for the user and build an authoritative brand and the rest will sort of take care of itself.

Is link building a ranking factor? Let’s start there.

Well, yeah. Links are an important ranking factor for sure. And I think Google, for many years, has wanted to get away from them because they are easy to spam.

They’re easy to game. You can buy them. You can manipulate your rank. You can build a private blog network.

There’s a million things you can do to game that signal.

But, they haven’t been able to find anything that’s better. Because when you’re, if you’re able, what I think they realized is, if you’re able to filter out the junk from that, then it’s an awesome ranking factor.

And before link building was a thing, like in the golden days of Google, it was the best ranking factor because no one was even gaming it.

For example, when Google first started, the link graph was just natural.

It’s mostly natural now, I think, to be honest, but it was 100% natural because no one was really trying to game the system.

So that was 30 years ago, almost.

So they really have always tried to get away from that as a signal because of all the reasons that we mentioned.

It’s not just like the number of links.

There’s so many ways you can slice and dice the value of a link from page, old school Page Rank to the relevancy of the site linking to you, the relevance of the page linking to you, the anchor text content around the link, link velocity where the links are on your supporting to your site, are they all to one page, certain subset of pages, the entire site like this is just like a couple things on top of my head.

There’s hundreds of ways you can slice and dice that one ranking factor and get value out of it.

Versus like social media, which is just like an S*** show where with signals and posts and likes and comments and you don’t know what that means. How do you interpret that stuff?

So, I really strongly believe Google still uses links as a ranking factor and I don’t see them getting away from it anytime soon.

Do you do much link building these days?

Not really. I mean, we do link building in the sense where we publish content designed to, not designed to get links, but we publish content that will hopefully generate, you know, people will link to us.

But don’t do any like link building per se.

I know that’s something you’ve long preached is creating great content that will kind of naturally get you links.

Where do you stand on buying links?

Yeah, I mean, I always discourage people from buying links. I’ve never been a fan of that. I’ve never really done it. Except back in the day during the pre-Penguin like…you know, wacky days where everyone’s buying links.

But since then I never really bought links.

And the reason was two-fold:

One is that you can get caught and people do get caught with manual penalties all the time for doing it.

Also, if you can just buy a link from a site, then anyone can. So those domains tend to get degraded over time if they aren’t already.

So what happens is a lot of times they’re like, no gambling, crypto, CBD, blah, to make it seem kind of legit. And then they eventually allow like a borderline one and then it’s a free for all.

And then your link is all of a sudden goes from like, Oh, this is really nice link to like on a spammy site with bad neighborhoods as I used to call it.

So I, so for those reasons, I never really, I thought the upside wasn’t really worth it.

It’s kind of like, um, making money. It’s easier to rob someone that’s walking down the street than it is to like build a business or work hard. So it doesn’t, this gets easier doesn’t mean it’s better.

How do you get links if you are just starting without buying?

With Exploring Topics when we first launched, we got tons of links before we even had a blog because people were linking to our tool because it was useful in that way. That’s just one of many examples.

You can also do a PR campaign. You can have a story.

One of the things we did in the early days for Exploring Topics, to give you ideas of things we did and we had no authority, was my co-founder Josh.

I actually bought the original version of Exploring Topics from him, which was an acquisition, you know, a small scale acquisition, but still an acquisition.

So for him, he went on all these Indie Hacker podcasts and websites like IndieHackers.com. He was on Andrew Warner’s show. He was on the Product Hunt podcast.

And he had no one knew who this guy was, but he pitched them and said, hey, “My name’s Josh, I built this thing. It got acquired like, I don’t know, four months later. And I’m here to tell my story of how I did it.”

So he was able to get links, not buying them, not paying for them, not guest posting, being creative.

And I think there’s still a world of opportunity there if you don’t have any authority yet.

Is digital PR valuable for new sites?

Oh yeah, for sure. And that, if you can do that on day one, then why would you ever buy a link?

Because you can get tons of coverage without needing any authority.

Because if you have something interesting, especially data or a story or both, then you can get coverage and they’re not gonna be like, wait, your domain authority flat, like they don’t care. A news outlet doesn’t care. So they’ll link to you.

So I’ve…done PR and I’ve had success with it, but it’s not like I’m like some ninja where on day one can do a launch. But if I could, I would do that because it’s faster.

But yeah, if you don’t have any experience with PR and you want to try it, do it and then you’ll that’s the best way obviously to get experience.

What are some other ways to build links just starting out?

Building some tool is really helpful or telling a story of how you achieve something with your company or in your life because there are podcasts that they need guests.

Like a lot of these podcasts are weekly and they don’t just want to have and recycle the same guests either.

Tip: (Interested in joining the BuzzStream podcast? Reach out to vince [at] buzzstream.com)

So if you can come in and say, Hey, you’ve never heard of me, but I got a story to tell and I know your listeners are going to find value in this. And that’s a tactic you can use to just get those first couple of links. And usually from there, the world is your oyster.

Is the skyscraper technique still a relevant link building technique?

I would say kind of, not the way it was originally written in 2013, 11 years ago.

Gary V said, “marketers ruin everything.”

So that is no exception. Uh, so yeah, it’s, if you were, if you’re like, I have this brand new website, I’m looking at the top 10 for this keyword. I’m going to create the ultimate guide. I’m going to email people and hope they link to me. You’re going to be in for a world of pain.

That did work. Doesn’t anymore.

So that’s actually why I wrote on the back link, go blog, this skyscraper technique 2.0 post, which was kind of a more refined version of the original, which was really focused on search intent and finding out what people want.

And sometimes they, searchers want an ultimate guide.

Sometimes searchers don’t want ultimate guide. They want something shorter.

Sometimes they want a list post. Sometimes they want whatever.

And the better you can match that, the better you’re gonna perform rather than trying to create some mega guide, 8,000 word monster just for the sake of doing it.

So, it’s a little bit more nuanced because much easier to say, okay, you know, everything is 2000 words. I’m going to create 4,000. Like everyone can kind of understand that and implement it.

It’s harder to be like, okay, I’m looking at the top 10 for business trends. Um, you know, there’s McKinsey, Deloitte. How can we create something that’s similar to these?

It has like a lot of the same beats, all the same structure, but is objectively better without just making it twice the size.

And that requires like a kind of like x-ray into the searcher’s mind.

And anyway, if you want to learn more about that, I have a whole post in the back link, a blog called skyscraper technique 2.0.

You can read about that, but yeah, the OG version, I mean, it’s. It still has value in that sense.

Like that’s a good way, I think still to approach content rather than starting from scratch. If you have a topic rather than just being like, Hmm, how should I write this? Should it be a list? Should it be blah, blah.

Just look at what’s already ranking that gives you at least a clue of what searchers want and then going with the flow.

What are your tips for people who want to create data studies as a link building tactic?

The first thing would be you should have a budget for this. It’s very expensive to run these studies. Even the simplest ones are pricey.

Because to do them right, you need to have a data analyst do it.

Like you can’t, unless you have that experience yourself, you need a Python coder, and then you need to actually run the data, find it.

So you hire someone to actually do the analysis, and then you need to put all the data together into charts and graphs and visuals, and then write it up and then promote it.

So it’s sort of a huge process.

In fact, I created an entire course around this called back in the day called get press every month, which was a way to just scale these up.

Cause I did figure out how to scale them and you can find a version of that on this in the semrush Academy.

So when they bought Backlinko, they took that course and modified it and put it on there for free so you can check it out now if you want to, if you want to learn more about it, but yeah, my number one piece of advice to be like, this is not a cheap tactic.

It’s expensive. Even the cheapest one I ever did I think was a B2B blog analysis.

So what we did was, we looked at B2B blogs, and I forgot how many, a couple hundred. And I literally had someone manually look to see, you know, like the average post length, whether they allowed comments, whether they had social sharing links.

And the idea of this wasn’t to correlate anything. It was just to see like the state of B2B blogs and see how many had like a pop-up, how many had a lead gen form, things like that.

And that was the simplest thing you could possibly do. And that was still like a couple of thousand.

So, you know, and some of mine have costs like, you know, $15,000, $20,000 to do.

So they could be really expensive if you’re running massive data.

So now some of these were our own, we had to set up our own stuff in it, doing millions of results.

The other thing was, would be to find a partner if you can. So that’s something I learned later on. I was kind of like, why am I, we building custom scrapers to go out to the world to do this stuff when you could just email like Buzzsumo in one of our cases and just be like, “you have this data sitting around. Do you mind just like partnering up with us?”

Or Pitchbox was another one that we teamed up with. “You have all this data, like on your open rates. If you could just make it anonymous and correlate it together into big chunky data and send it over”

That was a game changer because it made everything easier.

A little harder if you’re first starting out because then you’re gonna cold email, like BuzzStream for example and say, “hey Vince, what’s your average open rate?”

Okay, so then it’s probably not gonna wanna partner with you. But, if you have some authority and you wanna do these like a little bit more streamlined then having a data partner can definitely help. Y

How would you go about choosing a co-marketing partner for a data study?

There’s two ways that we did it. One was beginning with a study in mind. So say we wanted to get an idea of one of the most successful we did was with Buzzsumo, which was, content marketing, like success factors basically.

So, you know, what correlated with content getting more social shares and more links, that’s basically what we looked at. And it was like, who has the best data on this?

Well, BuzzSumo, right?

Because they have an index of like millions and millions of pieces of content and they track links and social shares in every single one.

For some others, I had relationships with the tool, either the co-founder or someone there. And I would think, hmm, if we could partner, what would they provide that would be helpful to do a study?

And what’s in it for them, if you’re asking, is exposure from a totally different audience.

So a lot of software tools are good at software, but not so good at marketing.

So if you could say, “Hey, I can send you like hundreds of visitors and all this stuff.”

It’s like a PR campaign for them, but they don’t have to do the PR. They just have to provide you some data, which for them is easy.

The part that’s hard for you is easy for them and vice versa. Right?

The hard part for them a lot of times is getting the word out and for you that’s easy.

So it’s definitely a fair trade and something that you’d be surprised how receptive brands are to doing.

What happens if your data (or other studies) refute a common practice/belief in the industy?

It’s a good question. It’s a tough one to answer because I did so many studies.

I’ve experienced on both sides where I produced them and gotten absolutely crucified for certain things and read some that I thought were brilliant read some that I thought were complete crap.

So to answer your question, I wouldn’t read a study and just be like, okay, guys, gather around. Here’s what we’re gonna do from now on. That’s stupid.

But you also shouldn’t just dismiss results because it doesn’t fit with the narrative that you think is true.

A good example is one of the biggest studies that we did that was super controversial was that we found no correlation between site speed and rankings, which at the time was like blasphemous because everything was Core Web Vitals like Cumulative Layout Shift and stuff.

I mean, people were obsessing over these metrics.

And we found they basically didn’t really like, we didn’t look at those core web files specifically, we’re just in general, sites, we didn’t correlate with rankings of people like this is like crazy.

This is like, some people said it was dangerous to share this stuff.

And come to find out, it’s not really an important ranking factor.

And Google has even said since then, it’s not an important ranking factor and actually going to to get rid of Core Web Vitals.

So there really weren’t, and then I did another study which was a case study, because people were like, well, you only looked at this, because we only looked at the site in general, not this specific page, which was due to the limitations of millions of data points.

It was easier to look at the site’s loading speed.

But I didn’t think that was a huge deal because usually, a site loads pretty consistently across the site. It’s not like one page is super slow, and one is fast.

And then I did a case study where I took a post from Backlinko that was loading really slowly because it had these big images and it wasn’t really optimized and I had a developer go in and just like clean up the code— like do basically take it from a WordPress page to like an old school HTML page—so it loaded super fast.

I forgot exactly the difference in loading speed, but it was dramatic. And rankings were exactly the same.

So people freaked out on that because then they said, “Well, that’s only one example. There’s not enough data there. It’s only one case study.” Which is true, but for me, that has more value than a statement from Google because it’s actually showing like it’s an experiment.

It’s not perfect, but it’s at least an experiment.

And again, this isn’t to draw conclusions from it.

And even with my original study that found site speed wasn’t a ranking factor. It’s not like, oh, you should make your site load slowly on purpose.

But it’s showing that maybe it’s not the big deal that people are making it out to be. And it turned out to be right. It was just a lagging, there’s a lagging indicator because Google took so long to come out and basically confirm that it’s not really an important ranking signal.

And then, but if you just looked at the SERPs at the time, and even now, there wasn’t a big correlation between it.

There were sites that were super slow that loaded, that ranked well, and there were sites that were fast that didn’t rank.

Like it was one of those things that had no correlation.

So anyway, my point is that, especially nowadays, I definitely wouldn’t even pay too much attention to these studies because it’s stuff you should be, like at the end of the day, what are you gonna do differently?

You know you need to build links, you know you need to create your content, you know you need to have a fast learning website, not necessarily due to SEO, just in general.

Is it important to take big swings with your data studies (even if you miss?)

Yeah, I think you should always, if you feel like you’re proud of it, you should publish it and how people react, you can’t control that.

But it wasn’t, I was never like trying to be a provocateur that published stuff and was like, come at me, I was never like that, I’m just not like that.

But I also was never letting the mob run my business and say, okay, well, we have this study, it’s really interesting, but man, people are gonna be upset about this finding because it’s just data.

And if you don’t like it, I don’t know what to tell you. And that’s really what it came down to with a lot of the studies.

The other thing that was good about taking the swings is that I was consistently wrong about what studies would do well and which ones would do poorly. It was always almost the opposite of what I thought.

So by putting them out there and just…trying, you never know what’s going to happen.

Like we would work so hard on some of them and they would fall flat and they would put out one that was like, yeah, it’s all right and then it would do really well.

So the important thing is just to like, if you can scale this process, try to do every month.

That’s why I had that course was called Get Press Every Month, because if you have a dialed in process with collecting data, ideas, a good writer, and finding data partners, you can easily do one of these every month.

These studies were by far the best content perform like by performance in terms of any metric you want to look at traffic, shares, links. It was always a study.

More than the skyscraper technique or any case studies, it was always that.

And a good example of like anyone can do it and you don’t necessarily need a huge budget is when voice search was starting to take off.

We did the first voice search ranking factor study.

And to do that, we literally had someone from the team get a Google home and just literally ask it questions and record the results, um, and then go back and see where they got those answers from.

And it wasn’t always the number one result in Google. And why? And we looked at different factors that correlate, like site speed or whatever.

And it was interesting.

It was something that anyone could do.

And again, that was a perfect example of like, don’t necessarily see this study and start changing your content because of it.

But it can at least start the conversation and be thought provoking about how does this even work? Because if you wait for Google to come out and hand you the algorithm in a scroll, it’s not gonna happen.

So you gotta do some like experimenting and see what happens. And that was one that did really well, partially because it was also like a new trending topic, which helped a lot.

And it was the first of its kind.

But it was also like, anyone could have done that. When I did it, I was actually worried someone was gonna do it first.

And I kind of underestimated how lazy people are with content they’ll never do. They’re never gonna ask Google Home a thousand questions, record the answers, and analyze the results.

So you don’t have to worry.

If you’re willing to put in that little elbow grease, you’d be surprised what you can accomplish with this sort of stuff.

How and why is it so important for digital PRs and link builders to take advantage of trending topics?

The number one reason is that everything will work better that you’re doing if the thing is trending. If you did the same exact campaign, the same email, the same people and created the same content, but it’s six months later, a lot of times it won’t perform nearly as well. The timing is key for this sort of thing.

And if you can get at the right time where journalists are paying attention to the space, they’re already writing about the space, and you can insert yourself into an existing conversation, then it’s so much easier.

Everything just works better. It’s a force multiplier.

So that’s the main reason.

It’s not to say everything you do needs to be on a trend. That’s not the case. Like a lot of our studies were just things that weren’t even necessarily on this trending up at the moment.

But the best-performing studies generally were on some sort of trend.

Imagine you’re a writer for Forbes, like an actual writer (not a contributing author) like a legit reporter, and you’re writing about AI or covering Chat GPT and all these different AI tools. Then someone emails you and says “hey, we just did a like a study on LLMs and we figured out which ones have the most tokens (just totally random example.)

And we ranked all the tokens of all of them. And this is proprietary data. Like no one’s really done this.

You’re much more likely to get coverage doing that than just being like, hey, “I have some study on which of the smartphones have the best cameras,” or , “which smartphones hold the germs the most germs”.

You’re going to get that person’s already writing about this stuff.

So, if you can get on that trend, everything works better.

It’s not to say they won’t cover the smartphone thing, but they’re much, much more likely to cover anything related to AI if they’re right about tech.

And that’s the same if you’re in the beauty space. If you get in front of journalists who cover the world of beauty and you say, okay, “I have data on like 10 beauty products that are taking off right now,” you’re much more likely to get coverage doing that than saying like, we did an analysis of 100 beauty products to see which ones are the most natural or which ones contain toxic ingredients.

I mean, that’s still an interesting study, but it’s not necessarily on a trend.

So, basically, the story is journalists are obsessed with trends; they love writing about trends.

And if you can just ride the trend, it’s so much easier than trying to push a boulder up a hill.

Can Exploding Topics uncover topics in a quick enough way for digital PRs?

Oh yes, absolutely.

I mean, we have tons of digital PR customers.

What sets us a little bit apart from Google Trends in general is that we’re more focused on longer term trends, not fads.

Both are actually helpful to know if you’re in digital PR.

So, if you want to know what’s happening like today, this exact moment then Google Trends or X is really good for that.

But if you wanna know like trending, things that are trending now that are a little bit under the radar, but are really gonna take off in six months, then that’s really what our specialty is.

So they’re kind of different ways of looking at trends.

Like I always say Google Trends should be Google Fads because it’s really just like the news of the day. It’s like some celebrity thing, some political thing, right? That’s not really a trend.

By the time you would create a study on that or something, it would be old news.

But, an actual trend like generative AI—that’s a trend that’s likely not gonna go away in six months. It’s probably only gonna be bigger.

So that’s really what differentiates us.

So that way, if you are on digital PR, you can feel confident that if you just discover a trend today, you can create multiple campaigns around it before it sort of starts to dip down.

How do you recommend digital PRs pitch to stakeholders for trends that don’t have search volume yet?

Well, yeah, I mean, the number one thing I would do is rather than trying to say like, this will be the next big thing— which is very difficult to prove— is show other metrics of the topic being popular.

Right? So if something shows up in a tool with zero search volume, then it doesn’t, as you know, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s zero search volume.

So, you can say that to the stakeholder, but they’re going to be like, OK, but it still shows zero there.

But if you can show that this many posts on the videos on TikTok, or even one video on TikTok, has a million views about this topic, then all of a sudden you have some data to back you up.

And especially if you show that discovery process.

I discover something on social media and then I Google it to learn more. Then you’ll say, well, this is really strong indicator because on TikTok it’s already kind of a thing.

So pretty soon, people are going to be searching for it in Google with enough numbers, in enough quantity, where these tools will start to pick it up.

So, I would just go in and say, look, zero search volume doesn’t mean zero search volume. It could be huge.

Usually there’s something you can rely on data wise to show them that this is actually a thing.

Now, the real opportunity is that it’s going to be likely even bigger in the future.

Where can traditional link builders get value out of Exploding Topics?

If you’re doing resource pages sort of thing, not really. It’s a little overkill for that job function.

What about passive link building?

For that approach, it’s really helpful. It’s actually necessary really, because if you want to do that, use this the strategy of creating content that is designed to get links.

If you are late to the party, it’s going to be hard to get into that flywheel because someone else is already in it, right?

Or multiple other sites are already in it.

So you, a first, that is where like weeks can make the difference between that succeeding or failing.

So for sure, we use it internally all the time. Some of our best content when it comes to this sort of passive link building or trending or related to trends.

To give you an example, we know we found Clubhouse early on (remember that social network?) And on Backlinko, I wrote a big piece, which was like Clubhouse User Stats, like how many users they had, how fast it grew, anything that we could find on it.

And like the next day, I got a link from the Guardian.

Didn’t do any email or just boom, like that.

And that got a lot of links actually over the course until a Clubhouse obviously declined.

But, for a while it got a lot of links. And the only reason was that we were first.

If I published that same thing like a month later, that Guardian piece would have cited somebody else and then that somebody else would have ranked and been in the flywheel and I would have been in the outside looking at.

So that’s super important to be on top of these trends.

Why is it important to catch a trend before it peaks?

Especially when it comes to that passive link building, because the trend is also the journalist searching for this stuff. And with something like Clubhouse, that didn’t last very long.

So that was one where it got a lot of links in the beginning and then it went to zero.

So it’s still a success, but ideally you’d be writing a topic for years, right? And it would still be trending.

If you kind of capitalize on a fad, you can get a couple links from this sort of like outreach, getting journalists to cover your thing.

But then it’s old news very soon versus if you publish, if you’re covering things that have long term traction, you can, journalists will be searching for data sources for years and find you and link to you over the long term.

And that’s where those real like 1% pieces come along that you publish it and it just kills and crushes over years.

Businessofapps.com is a good example of this. They published some early TikTok user stats and are getting like thousands of referring domains to it.

It’s well done, but I mean, it’s disproportionate for what it is. It’s literally just a collection of stats and has like 2,000 referring domains, something crazy like that.

So, and that’s because they get in on the trend early. They were the one of the first to do well with it. And then it’s still going.

Like TikTok’s still a huge thing. So they’re still getting links every single day to that piece.

How do you recommend people think about these trending topics and their own site’s relevancy?

Yeah, I think I think it can hurt you if you get too far from relevancy, honestly, like brand wise and SEO wise, because you’re building up authority in this unrelated topic.

Like remember back in the day, people did those scholarship links.

So that hurt a lot that probably hurt more sites and it helped in the end because sites got absolutely hammered for doing that eventually.

And that’s because they didn’t care where they were getting links from; like the Toronto School of Auto Repair, or getting a link to a restaurant, like they didn’t care.

So for me, I always try to air—like a Clubhouse is kind of probably the most I would stretch now in terms of relevancy.

It’s not directly related, but it’s indirectly related.

If you go one more degree outside of that, I think it’s not good.

So for example, Exploring Topics, we published a few months ago, a stats page on texting and driving, and all the dangers of texting and driving and like, all that stuff.

And then eventually I was like, you know what, this doesn’t make sense. This is stupid. So, we deleted the page.

And it was one of those things where you could like wrap your mind in a pretzel and say, well, it’s texting, which is technology and we cover technology and you know what, you could do that like craziness.

You could justify anything is related to anything if you really try hard enough.

But common sense wise, I was like, this is this dumb to have on our site. So we just deleted it.

And I’ve done that for posts on Backlinko, I’ve done that for posts on Exploring Topics where you get all excited, you justify it, and then when you see it live, you’re like, this doesn’t look right.

It’s like, doesn’t feel right, so we deleted it.

So I would say definitely stick to relevancy, but the problem with relevancy is that, like you said, Vince, how do you measure it?

You can’t, there’s no objective measurement for how one topic is related to another.

It’s all up to your own judgment and discretion and how liberal you are with that.

So for me, I’m more as I do this longer, air towards the sides of things being very relevant. Because I think it just works better, it’s better for your brand, and I bet all the stuff works better for SEO if the content pieces you’re publishing are related to what you do.

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The post Mastering Trends and Data Studies for Link Building w/ Brian Dean appeared first on BuzzStream.