#323 – Digital PR Expert Reveals How To Get Links

In this week’s episode, Mark sits down with Gabriela Covay to break down exactly how her company, Bright Valley Marketing, landed Authority Hacker over 30 links – including some DR90 ones – in their full digital PR campaign. And they’ll give you a step by step on how you can do it, in any niche, for your website, too. 

A special thanks to our sponsors for this episode, the free webmaster SEO suite, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.

What Is Digital PR?

Digital PR is all about getting your website featured in major media outlets. It’s not just about increasing your site’s visibility or online presence; it’s also about boosting your site’s authority and trust with Google.

Creating a successful digital PR campaign needs the right combination of relevance, engaging news, and insightful data that journalists would be interested in covering. You need to understand trending topics and provide unique insights into those trends.

What Ideas Work Best

Some of the most successful campaigns typically involve rankings, such as “the top 150 cities for love”, or hypothetical scenarios, like “How much sleep are people willing to lose in order to look at social media?”

A prime example of a successful digital PR campaign that was discussed is the “Cubicle Comeback” campaign, which focused on how much extra pay would motivate individuals to return to office work full-time.

Gathering state-specific data is helpful, as it opens more chances for journalists to pick up your story due to its increased relevancy.

Staying in touch with the “mood of the nation” is critical. You don’t want to seem out-of-touch or offensive.

Supporting Data

To give your campaign a solid base, back it up with reliable data, which you can gather by running surveys.

Having about 2,500 – 3,000 survey respondents tends to provide enough legitimacy to your data.

Once you have this data, the next step is to create a great linkable asset by presenting it in a visually engaging way. Infographics, tables, or interactive maps are a few options for this.

Press Release

The next step is writing the press release that you’ll use to reach out to journalists. It should outline the key takeaways from your campaign, and give the journalist everything they might need to create a great story around your campaign article.

You can always provide a link to your article as well so that the journalists can find any other information they might need.

Being a Journalist’s Best Friend

Identifying journalists most likely to feature your campaign is important. Journalists can be tiered based on how likely they are to cover your story, from those who’ve covered a similar story in the past to those working in your industry or covering general news.

Remember, a journalist’s job involves creating stories that drive engagement. So ideas need to be captivating, unique, and spark debate. If you can stir up a debate while keeping your ideas relatable and enticing, then you’ve most likely got a great campaign.

Digital PR Tools

There are numerous tools to aid in prospecting for journalists, from Google and Twitter, to Cision, Muck Rack, and Prowly. Tools like Cision can cost around $10,000 a year, but there are more affordable options out there as well, like Prowly.

Ensuring Your Email Makes It

To make sure your press release emails land in a journalist’s inbox, use monitoring tools to track the open rate of your mail, and avoid using spam-triggering phrases.

Don’t follow up more than twice, otherwise your email will likely just be marked as spam.

And don’t be disheartened if you don’t hear back from journalists right away – some journalists might feature your campaign without responding to your email.

It’s also not essential to have personal relationships with journalists to create a successful campaign – your story should be good enough that any journalist will want to cover it.

It may take a few weeks to see coverage, but if there’s still radio silence after that, then it might be time to reconsider your approach.