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.