Post your Digital PR Tips here

[BakerStreet]

This was vogue 4 years ago and if you did not sit down to learn and practice it, you're behind now I feel. Hence why I'm making this thread to share tips for noobs.

• Make sure your campaign has multiple angles. So if you create a "top 10 fattest countries" list, go and contact fitness journalists from each of the top 10. Don't contact journalists outside of those countries, as you'll be spamming them. I learned this when I created an index for all countries, but article content was only about 20 countries.
• Campaign topic must be something that's in the news. If you create an idea that's on-brand but not in the news cycle, you will get nowhere.
• Your pitch email is the most important thing and should contain exclusive stats, quotes, etc, that the journalist can put right into their article. You're giving them an article to post, basically. They only have 30 minutes to write a new story so do a lot of the work for them.
• I'm using Prowly basic and find that it is suited for 1 campaign/month for a small business but anything larger needs the pro or a suite with more contacts. 500 contacts and 1,000 emails/month is too short, especially if you are doing a large data piece targeting many countries.
• I'll also using Respona for contacting journalists. I'll set up an alert there for keywords that match my piece's topic.
• You need to write your pitch email in a way that's newsworthy. If a journalist doesn't think its newsworthy from the title, they won't click.
• I think the easiest way would be to look up data, create a data piece and have that be the pitch email, and send it direct to journalists who cover that topic. No posting on your site needed and you need to find the journalists first. I'm going to try that next.

So far 1 campaign, 500 emails, and 0 links.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I’d say that hammering emails is okay and effective. Many PR companies have laid the groundwork by building a list of contacts. Might be easier to just pay them to do that side of things.

Another cheaper option is to gain visibility where journalists gather their “stories” such as Twitter and Reddit. Wherever left-wing communities gather is where you want to be since that’s what journalists are. I’ve never gotten better links than the times I hit #1 on /r/all/ of Reddit.

The game is as you’ve laid out. You create very broad topics, but ones related to your niche. You present data in tables, images, present conclusions (do the journalists job for them), and have a sense of hysteria or sensationalism involved. Once you get links organically you have some social proof when you email others (we’re on the front page or top of Reddit, going viral on Twitter, and your competitors already covered this so you should hop on board fast).

 

[chubes]

You have no idea how many mass-sent PR emails these news sites are getting. I get dozens per day for my regionally-known music site, I can't even imagine what the editors of say Rolling Stone or the NY Times deal with on a daily basis. The vast majority of these emails don't even get opened.

I've had the best luck by building relationships with certain journalists, publications, and influencers over time. That way when you have something new and exciting, you can contact them directly, one at a time, and offer them access to the story before it is made public.

They love this because the news works in cycles and news outlets often have a set plan in the pipeline each week, in terms of published stories (aside from breaking news, which is often its own team).

You can build a relationship on social media, like Twitter or Instagram, wherever they are most active. Just get impressions on their content, reply to their Tweets with meaningful things, comment on their posts, react to their stories, ETC.

Then, when you reach out, you are no longer a stranger. And when you follow up, you are not just a spammer, but a real person who is trying to share something with them.

You still spoon-feed them the story, but if they know you, and they are actual journalists, they might ask you a few questions to get more unique information. You might even end up getting interviewed.

I have found this to be much more effective than sending mass emails to a media list.

 

[BakerStreet]

I’d say that hammering emails is okay and effective. Many PR companies have laid the groundwork by building a list of contacts. Might be easier to just pay them to do that side of things.

Another cheaper option is to gain visibility where journalists gather their “stories” such as Twitter and Reddit. Wherever left-wing communities gather is where you want to be since that’s what journalists are. I’ve never gotten better links than the times I hit #1 on /r/all/ of Reddit.

The game is as you’ve laid out. You create very broad topics, but ones related to your niche. You present data in tables, images, present conclusions (do the journalists job for them), and have a sense of hysteria or sensationalism involved. Once you get links organically you have some social proof when you email others (we’re on the front page or top of Reddit, going viral on Twitter, and your competitors already covered this so you should hop on board fast).

I feel reassured that you validated my steps, but I know there's a lot more details that I need to learn in order to do digital PR consistently. I talked to Fery of https://search-intelligence.co.uk/ and he *guarantees* 10 placements/campaign. Price is like 2,500 GBP/campaign when you buy 10 campaigns. With agency markups, I have a hunch that his internal costs are 800 GBP/campaign.

So if I learned how to do digital PR at his level, it will cost me 80 GBP/link, since he guarantees 10 links per campaign and I know he has like a 300% markup on his agency's labor.

That's a great deal, if I can be that skilled.

Also, to let everyone know, he has an agency of 70 people and makes 10million+ a year. What a baller! and he's super skilled in digital PR to be able to guarantee links! Inspiring!

You have no idea how many mass-sent PR emails these news sites are getting. I get dozens per day for my regionally-known music site, I can't even imagine what the editors of say Rolling Stone or the NY Times deal with on a daily basis. The vast majority of these emails don't even get opened.

I've had the best luck by building relationships with certain journalists, publications, and influencers over time. That way when you have something new and exciting, you can contact them directly, one at a time, and offer them access to the story before it is made public.

They love this because the news works in cycles and news outlets often have a set plan in the pipeline each week, in terms of published stories (aside from breaking news, which is often its own team).

You can build a relationship on social media, like Twitter or Instagram, wherever they are most active. Just get impressions on their content, reply to their Tweets with meaningful things, comment on their posts, react to their stories, ETC.

Then, when you reach out, you are no longer a stranger. And when you follow up, you are not just a spammer, but a real person who is trying to share something with them.

You still spoon-feed them the story, but if they know you, and they are actual journalists, they might ask you a few questions to get more unique information. You might even end up getting interviewed.

I have found this to be much more effective than sending mass emails to a media list.

I'm getting 4% click through rate on my emails to my study. So its higher than 0%.

Things I noticed:
* Give them more content in the emails to use in their articles that are exclusive to them. This will give them more stuff to copy and paste.
* Send emails during the working hours. I got a 10% CTR during working hours vs 2% during the middle of the night.

I get your comments w/ twitter and stuff but I'm overwhelmed and want to do 1 campaign/week. Even doing brief research on a journalist is time consuming. I think it might be good to find articles the journalist posted in the past and copy it, but then I'll be shooting a few targets/week, which would be super unscalable. Lets see.

I'm also going to try to copy other peoples successful campaigns and see how it works. Learning by imitation.

 

[BakerStreet]

First campaign resulted in one backlink

 

[BakerStreet]

Talked to Roxhill last week. They said their list is best for B2B publications. There's no max contact per month like Prowly. If you tell them you're a solo PR person and not a team, the price is $3,000/year.

 

[Strike]

The databases are not worth it, SI and others would probably just use internal ones and keep an eye on transfers. You need to research the person anyway, and then you can get their email pretty easily through name2email or off their Twitter.

You need to map out the person and their job to begin getting more consistent.

For example, you can learn when they have their content meetings. Pitch 30 minutes before it. Not at 3pm.

Once you deliver consistently, you become the source. Infinitely easier if your brand has a figurehead you can pitch with.

 

[BakerStreet]

I think my bottle neck now is the data source for the studies.

Surveys require at least 1,000 participants to be considered at all and at $2/respondent that's 2k. For tier 1 news sources, they want at least 4,000 participants. I don't have 8k to risk on a single PR campaign. I also don't know how to make a rigorous survey and has been asked by Psychology Today to send the the study. It was embarrassing to tell them that I had nothing since we made that survey up.

The only two data sources we can use now are data from SEMRush and Google Trends.

We can also merge two studies together for a meta analysis, if you will. But I"m not that experienced in this.

Anyone has any data sources that is cheap to do and is not propriatary data?

 

[Steve Brownlie]

I think my bottle neck now is the data source for the studies.

Surveys require at least 1,000 participants to be considered at all and at $2/respondent that's 2k. For tier 1 news sources, they want at least 4,000 participants. I don't have 8k to risk on a single PR campaign. I also don't know how to make a rigorous survey and has been asked by Psychology Today to send the the study. It was embarrassing to tell them that I had nothing since we made that survey up.

The only two data sources we can use now are data from SEMRush and Google Trends.

We can also merge two studies together for a meta analysis, if you will. But I"m not that experienced in this.

Anyone has any data sources that is cheap to do and is not propriatary data?

The truth is it's send like 10 pitches per campaign and hope one of them lands. New stats, new angle every time. The guys doing this are like sausage factories now. There are certain journalists who cover almost anything though so... learn who they are... think outside the box there. But I don't know if their links are really worth anything much. 1 year later graphs of a lot of sites that use big digital PR shops who do the obvious stuff don't really show it.

 

[Strike]

There are an almost infinite number of free data sources if you prefer to spend time rather than money doing this. For example FOI requests.

You only need 2k to reach sufficient statistical significance or 1k if the audience is already niched down, generally.

You can find providers cheaper than pollfish or whatever company is quoting you $2 per respondent. It should be about a third of that. Look at who your competitors are using.

 

[Ryuzaki]

1 year later graphs of a lot of sites that use big digital PR shops who do the obvious stuff don't really show it.

If they're not growing that sucks, but spending a pile of money to not have tanked as a content-based site is worth the spend, when anyone looking to compete under you were wiped out. Paying to stay in the game and have revenue flowing is worth it. Unless you mean they also tanked.

Aside from what I said above, @BakerStreet, one thing you can do is bypass the need for all the respondents and spend by using existing data like @Strike said. All you have to do is remix it, add 2-3 sources together, and form new, interesting conclusions. The conclusions is you doing the journalists job for them, which makes it faaaar more likely to get the article and link.

Also, if you're worried that they'll ask you about your data sources (don't fake it), you can point to governmental data or other large research companies' public data. And then, the real trick, is to shortcut the journalists mind by pre-validating the data with social proof. If you can push your article to #1 on /r/all of Reddit, which I've done multiple times, you don't even have to do outreach. The "journalists" are lazy and are just looking to have it curated and spoonfed to them.

Once you get ONE of them to bite, you can then use that in your pitches elsewhere. "This news source is covering our story." Then keep stacking it on. Because then the "journalists" will just rewrite the other stories, making their job even easier.

And no, I'm not talking out of my ass. I've done this several times. It all hinges on getting that first story, which hinges on going viral somewhere with a lot of eyeballs. Back-dating your story so you can go an "Today I Learned" on Reddit is good, then you can forward date it the next day once your story decays in the algorithm. But you gotta also learn how to reliably rank #1. And buying votes is not how to do it. There is a trick, and I won't share because I created it and I've never seen it mentioned online ever. But it works. Two days ago I ranked #1 in a target sub-reddit once again with a nearly 100% success rate of either #1 or at least top 3, no matter the sub. You can figure out the method if you sit down and think. It's not sophisticated, but it's clever.

 

[BakerStreet]

The truth is it's send like 10 pitches per campaign and hope one of them lands. New stats, new angle every time. The guys doing this are like sausage factories now. There are certain journalists who cover almost anything though so... learn who they are... think outside the box there. But I don't know if their links are really worth anything much. 1 year later graphs of a lot of sites that use big digital PR shops who do the obvious stuff don't really show it.

Not true steve. Look at preply.com/. Preply.com/en/blog/ is where they host their digital PR campaigns. They also localise successful campaigns to new languages too. In total all Preply.com/**/blog/ URLs have 46,000 backlinks. They did a shit ton of digital PR and scale it across many Geos. All in house too.

It's not that digital PR doesn't work. Its that, when you do find a story that works, you need to scale it big time.

 

[Steve Brownlie]

Not true steve. Look at preply.com/. Preply.com/en/blog/ is where they host their digital PR campaigns. They also localise successful campaigns to new languages too. In total all Preply.com/**/blog/ URLs have 46,000 backlinks. They did a shit ton of digital PR and scale it across many Geos. All in house too.

It's not that digital PR doesn't work. Its that, when you do find a story that works, you need to scale it big time.

I'll take a look at it, that's interesting. More interesting than the fake work being done by most of the famous 'digital PR only shops' out there ripping their clients off lol.

But you gotta also learn how to reliably rank #1. And buying votes is not how to do it. There is a trick, and I won't share because I created it and I've never seen it mentioned online ever. But it works.

I can also confirm this works though unlike Ryu I didn't invent it and have no idea how to do it But a client I had in the drug treatment space many moons ago had an agency who were virtually gods at this. Some of the ridiculous things they got to go semi-viral on Reddit were insane.