Have you ever thought about taking your link-building efforts to the next level? If the answer\u2019s yes, PR is the way to go. It\u2019s the only means for online marketers to get high DR links that would otherwise be unattainable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And it\u2019s not impossible to pull off either. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
By maintaining a good image, fruitful relationships with the media, and adding real value to your niche, you can leverage PR for high-quality backlinks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s see how.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well, one of the most important aspects of PR is content creation. From whitepapers and original research to news articles, PR is, at its core, based on creating valuable content and promoting it to the media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But that media promotion isn\u2019t like your average link-building outreach. It needs to be extremely personalized. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In our PR campaigns, which we have used to land extremely valuable backlinks from high DR media domains, we had three basic steps we followed:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As you can probably tell, this is not a numbers game. At least, not as much of a numbers game as regular outreach. Leveraging PR for online marketing should be a very targeted process, from beginning to end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most media institutions (and definitely all major publications) won\u2019t really care about a top 10 list of the best products in your niche. While that\u2019s a good commercial article for your affiliate campaigns, it won\u2019t help your PR efforts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For good PR campaigns, the content you\u2019re promoting needs to be top-notch. We don\u2019t just mean flawless writing, enticing headlines, or flashy images and infographics. You still need those, like you would for any article on your site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But on top of that, you also need something that a journalist, or big media institutions, would be interested in. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Instead of researching keywords in Ahrefs<\/a>, you need to research trends, the topics approached by journalists and media institutions, and create a good story<\/a> based on that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Here\u2019s a good rule of thumb to identify these topics<\/a>: when you\u2019re writing for your site, you\u2019re writing for a very specific audience that’s interested in your niche. If you want to be featured in journalistic articles, you need to write something that the general population would be interested in or something that the audience of that publication would want to read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s a notable difference. The audience you\u2019d create content for on your site might be very different from the audience of a publication. For example, the Daily Mail gets a lot of success with wanky puzzles<\/a>. That\u2019s probably not the first type of content you\u2019d want to create for your audience. But it works for the Daily Mail, so keep the audience of a publication in mind when creating content for PR.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s the first step. Then, while creating the content you want to promote, aim to have something original about it. Add your own research, survey, or valuable data that cannot be found anywhere else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, a few years ago we talked about ranking criteria, and what matters most in the eyes of Google when deciding where to rank a page. But we didn\u2019t just eyeball these criteria. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We created a crawler and\u00a0analyzed over 1 million SERP results<\/a>\u00a0to find the metrics that truly count. You don\u2019t have to spend so much resources on this – analyzing a million of anything can be time-consuming – but this is the general gist of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When you have a piece of content to leverage for media attention, it\u2019s time to identify potential partners to reach out to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n While the regular link-building outreach can be done with tools, and it\u2019s a numbers game, to leverage PR<\/a> as an online marketer you need to get in the trenches. You need to research individual media institutions, and even particular journalists, to see who\u2019d be most willing to use your content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The simplest way to find these people is to head off to Google News and search for your niche. Set the date to the past 6 weeks or so, and you\u2019ll find publications, as well as journalists that could be interested in your content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can use media databases to find the email address of someone after you know their name. Another great tool to find journalists to reach out to is HARO<\/a> (Help A Reporter Out). With HARO, journalists make requests for the content they\u2019d be interested to share with you, in exchange for a backlink.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is a platform you can also use for regular link building. But it\u2019s especially valuable to get in touch with media institutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\nProspecting Journalists And Media Institutions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Reaching Out To Journalists<\/h2>\n\n\n\n