#348 – How We Build Digital PR Links In-House

Digital PR is the hot new thing
in link building right now.

And honestly, what’s not to love?

You get those super high quality links
from big news sites that Google

seems to be drooling over lately.

Plus, you’re getting your name
out there with recognisable brands,

which boost your own brand’s credibility.

And here’s the kicker.

Because it’s real marketing, When
your campaign really takes off, it can

boost things like brand searches, which
many SEO veterans agree Google is using

these days in the recent algorithms.

But here’s the thing.

A lot of people get cold feet
when it comes to digital PR.

They think it’s this big, scary monster
that only the pros can tackle.

Well, today we’re going
to bust that myth wide open.

We’re not just going
to tell you it’s possible.

We’re going to show you
how we’ve done it ourselves.

We’ve been in the digital PR game
for a while now, and we’ve snaglings

from pretty big names.

We’re talking like Market Watch, Yahoo
News, Fortune magazine, and even Forbes.

So whether you’ve never dived your toes
in the digital PR waters or you’ve tried

and struck out, this episode is for you.

We’re going to break down what works and
what doesn’t and how you can land

your first successful campaign very soon.

Now, this ties nicely with our brand new
course, Link Builder Academy,

which should be hitting the shelves right
around when this episode drops.

The strategies that we teach in it
are the real deal and can seriously

impact your SEO ROI.

Using them, we’ve been able to
build high-quality digital PR links for

just $132 a pop, guest posts on the R 60
plus sites for just $75, and linkable

asset links for a measly $8 each.

If you care about links at all,
and let’s face it, who does not in SEO?

You’re going to want to pay attention.

But here’s where we’re
switching things up a bit

compared to our regular launches.

Instead of trying to sell you
the course right now, we’re just

going to give you a taste for free.
That’s right.

If you’re watching right now
to thank you for your loyalty,

you’re getting a full module and
a custom-built chatbot that will help you

snag high authority, newspaper links.

Our hope is that you’ll see how awesome
the course is and you want to buy

the full training after checking it out.

To get your hands on this free module,
just head over to authorityhacker.com/high-dr-links.

I repeat, authorityhacker.com/high-dr-links.

You’ll be able
to put your email and get instant access.

If you’re thinking digital PR
sounds great, but you just don’t

have the time or resources
to do it yourself, don’t sweat it.

Just check out today’s episode’s
sponsor, Search Intelligence.

They can help you build incredible digital
PR presence without lifting a finger.

We’ll dive into what they offer
a bit later, but for now,

let’s dive in the episode.

Hey, everyone.
Welcome to the Authority Hacker Podcast.

In today’s episode, we’re actually
going to be going through real-life

examples of digital PR campaigns
that both other people have done

and have done really well.

And we’ve done that done
both well and not so well.

Because I think one thing that’s quite
interesting about digital PR is it’s the

biggest craze in link building right now.

That’s why we wanted to have
a big module about this

in the new link building course.

But people imagine that
normal people can’t do this.

It’s sacralized and
only certain agencies can do that.

But actually, you can do this yourself
and you can get press coverage

on your own by running small campaigns.

We wanted to show you examples
of campaigns you can do today or at least

attempt to do and how we’ve done it
and the results that we got.

Did I summarise it?

I think that’s fair.

I think part of the problem And certainly
when we first got into digital PR,

I was expecting each campaign
to have hundreds and hundreds of links.

But then I got told, actually,
those are the exceptions, not the rule.

But those exceptions just
happen to be the ones that everyone

talks about at conferences or uses as
case studies on their agency website.

So you have to be a little bit careful
when you’re getting started with this.

Yeah, it’s the same for everything.

It’s like everyone talks about
social media and they show you posts

that get millions of views
and same for YouTube and everything.

I guess the same happens for digital PR.

These things happen the same way
as a viral post is going to happen to you

once in a while on social media.

But for these to happen,
you just need to go through a lot

of reps and you need to do it a lot.

One of them is just going to take off.

The problem is people have these high
expectations, never really get started,

never really do it,
and they get stuck to maybe lower-quality

guest posting or things that seem to be
a little bit more predictable for link

building, which also, let’s be honest,
does a little bit less

well than digital PR does.

Digital PR is the Holy Grail
of acquiring links these days

if you want to do well in SEO.

There’s this perfectionist angle to it.

You have this saying done
is better than perfect.

It’s very, very true for digital PR.

I want to show people today
how to actually just get started and

do some campaigns to get some results.

I have a question, though.

Before we get started, when I hire
an agency, a popular agency that does

digital PR, is it the same for them?

Do their campaigns only get
a few links most of the time

and only some of them really take off?

Most digital PR agencies will guarantee

a minimum level of links, and usually

you’ll get quite a bit more
than that, but they can’t really

control how many links they’re getting.

Sometimes a story hit, sometimes
it will flop, but they usually have

enough experience to be able to reangle
a campaign and get you what you need.

Okay, so it’s like you
should check that out, basically.

Okay, let’s jump into the examples.

As we go through the examples,
you’re going to show us the archetypes

of campaigns that people can follow.

Yeah, so I want to start with that,
though, because this is really important

to understand what types
of campaigns can be run in the way

they’re structured differently.
There’s two types in general.

You’ve got the content first approach,
which this is a term we came up with.

This is when you’re looking at some news
related to a medium to long term trend.

So what’s going on in the world this year
or this quarter thing, as opposed to

a specific news story you’re reacting
to, which is the other type

that’s called news jacking.

So let’s take a look at a few examples
of content first approaches.

The first one we’ve got here
is from Writer Buddy AI.

They created this really interesting
and really successful piece,

Analysing the most visited AI tools.

And this really gets
to the heart of human emotion.

And you’ll notice that through a lot of
digital PR stories as it taps into this

competitive, popularity, contest vibe
that people have within them.

And they’ve targeted AI.

Obviously, they’re an AI tool,
but AI has also been a really hot trend

over the last two years or so.

So they’re hitting it
from both of these angles.

If you’re listening to this podcast
and you’re looking at the writer buddy

blog here, you’ll instantly
be able to see how they’ve done this.

All they’ve done is they went to Semrush,
looked at the traffic traffic of the

most popular AI tools, and that was it.

That was the extent
of their research there.

Was it on his search traffic then?

Because Semrush only reposed that, right?

Maybe something like…
Really?

Does it?
Yeah, that was it.

I looked at their search traffic.

I looked at how popular they were,
and then they ranked them.

And they made a nice little infographic
at the end to visualise it,

and it puts the size of ChatGPT
compared to all the others.

It was into perspective
there, but that was it.

That was about the extent
of of what they did.

They got 473 referring domains from this.

And I think it worked because they hit
this topic at the right time and because

it really taps into that, I wonder who’s
the best, I wonder who’s the most popular

emotion that a lot of us have.

Moving on to the next example,
we’ve got Crossword Solver here, and they

are in a boring industry, to be honest.

And it’s a problem a lot
of companies have, us included.

Seo is not the most interesting
industry to a lot of people.

It’s hard to make videos.

You ask someone in the street
about SEO and nobody cares.

That was an idea I had, actually,
stopping grandmas and asking them

SEO advice for a YouTube video,
but I guess we’ll never do that one.

Got overroled on that one, unfortunately.

So what they’ve done is they
have done this big data analysis

of the most popular emojis
on Twitter in every country.

And it’s very, very clever
the way they’ve handled this.

And you’ll see this in a lot
of digital PR campaigns, is they

are comparing something in different
regions, states, or countries.

The reason they do this
is because it means they can then

outreach to journalists in every country,
every state, every region,

whatever the campaign is covering,
and hit all of the publications there.

Everybody wants to know,
how do I or how does my country,

my state, my region, compare to
our neighbours to the next country?

It’s just a spark’s curiosity
in a lot of people, and I think that’s

why this campaign did really well.

They got 154 referring domains from it.

One other thing that’s very clever
about this, I just add, is that

they used emojis, which is very visual.

So even if you don’t speak English, then
you can understand what’s going on here.

So hence they picked up links.
We can engage.

Exactly.

Hence, they picked up links in Japan,
in South America, in Spanish sites,

and many non-English sites as well.

So very clever campaign there.

These campaigns, they’re cool because
you can get local press coverage as well.

So in this case, it’s like countries.

So it means every newspaper
in every country could essentially

cover this story, which
is why they got so many links.

I’m checking atres now, they got 133
referring domains, but that’s much easier

for them because every country
can essentially link to them.

If you’re running campaigns within
a single country, you can also do that

by pitching regions against each other.

Basically, that’s like an archetype you
can use, and you can get more local press

links, which are still very good links.

Dr 60, 70s are pretty common for local
newspapers, and it’s much, much,

much easier to get run on a newspaper
than on a national newspaper, usually.

We have an example coming up in
this episode where we’ll show you how we

did that just at a state level in the US.

That’s quite interesting to look at.

The next one I want to talk
about is from signs.

Com.

They did something very unique in that

they went out and they surveyed 150

people and they asked them to draw the
logos of some popular brands like Apple,

Adidas, Burger King, Domino’s, 711.

And they took all of the drawings together
and compared them in one image.

And it’s so interesting
to read through this article.

If you’re watching this on YouTube,
you’re listening in the podcast, go watch

this on YouTube or check the link
in the description and check this out

because it’s super interesting.

There’s some Apple logos here.

They still have this Stripey colour one
from the 1990s and stuff in there.

It’s very interesting.

But almost, again, it hits on
that curiosity vibe that a lot

of people people would have.

And a lot of these campaigns
do hit on emotions like that.

Pulling off a campaign like this is a
little bit more tricky because you can’t

just go to the Internet and do a survey
or collect the data from somewhere.

You actually got to go talk
to, in this case, 150 real people.

But with a little bit of budget,
that’s not really too big of a deal.

A lot of universities do this
fairly regularly with students.

You can pay them 10 bucks
or something and all.

And also you don’t need to qualify people.
It can be anyone.

Exactly.

You could literally walk down in the
street and ask people to draw for you.

That would be fine, actually.

Like an iPad and an Apple pencil
and just be like, Draw this for me.

Spend two days and get that.

Okay, it sounds like crazy for SEO
to go outside and talk to people.

I know.
It’s scary, right?

But look, they got 405 reference

domains, if I check from HrS,

which is pretty cool.

But most importantly, I think
what’s really cool with this campaign is

that there’s a lot of social potential.

Brands probably can have a lot
of fun on their Twitter accounts, etc.

Resharing funny drawings
of their brands and so on.

To me, if you’re being mentioned by a big
brand, then that probably ends up driving

up your branded search, which is the
thing that Google is using as well with

the recent updates to rank your site.

You’re doing all of this stuff
to get links, but you’re getting links

to get more search traffic.

What I like about these PR campaigns is
they get you to your goal,

which is getting more search traffic,
but not just through through actual

branding exercises and real marketing,
which you don’t really get when you’re

doing guest posting or when you’re buying
a link on Fiverr or something like that.

That, to me, tells me it’s going
to be more future-proof.

It’s going to be easier to sell to maybe
bigger stakeholders if you’re working for

big companies in-house, for example, etc.

It actually plays on more factors
than just links, which is-It also

is like baiting the brands
into responding in a way.

I’m sure not all of them did,
but for sure, some of them,

that’s some of them did.
Yeah, so it’s a really cool campaign.

I really like that.

I really like the idea of mixing PR and
social in general, especially in a world

where brand traffic is so important.

Okay, so we’ve talked
about content-first approach.

We’re tapping into a medium
to long some trend.

What’s going on?

Let’s take a look at news jacking now,
which is when we’re looking at something

which has happened today or this week
in the news and creating some content

around it to react to it.

So reactive PR,
good example, would be Bulk.

Com.

Now, there was a story from Chris
Martin, who’s the singer in Coldplay,

how he does intermittent fasting,
only eats one meal per day.

So this became big news one week.

So what Bulk.

Com did, it’s actually
through Search Intelligence,

who was running the campaign for them.

But they did this campaign
where they would reach out to people

who had already covered the story
and presented an expert from Bulk.

Com, a nutritionist,
explain why that maybe wasn’t such

a good idea for everybody.

And this really hits on
controversy and expert opinions.

So what does the scientific expert
have to say about this story

that this crazy celebrity is doing?

And if it’s not in line with what they’re
doing, that creates some controversy, and

that is quite appealing from a journalist
perspective and from a news perspective.

Remember, try and get in the minds
of journalists when you’re doing this.

They are usually overworked
and They have huge deadlines

to create multiple articles per day.

They don’t have very
much time to research.

So if you’re just giving them everything
on a plate, say, Here’s this expert

that has this controversial
opinion, this is all you need.

They can make this article
really quickly with that.

So they’re going to take the path
of least resistance when they can.

Do you think Search Intelligence had
the relationship before they did this,

or they just found people who talked
about the story and did not know them?

I don’t know.

Maybe Barry from Search Intelligence
can weigh in on that one.

But I will say when we first got
into digital PR, I had this assumption

that all agencies, they had these special
relationships, and that’s really

how they were getting most of the links.

But someone told me a while back,
actually, that if you are relying

on relationships to get links,
then you’re not very good at digital PR.

The story should carry itself,
so you don’t really need to rely

on these relationships for that.

I’m sure it happens, but it’s hard
to say exactly how Pretty much.

Yeah, okay.
Fair enough.

But for example, when I did this story
on CNET that was using AI content,

I actually got some editors
in shift that opened their DMs

to me on Twitter and so on.

That just allowed me to directly
feed them stories if I wanted.

I imagine agencies have a bit
of an edge on that because they run

so many stories, actually.
Absolutely.

If you think of the journalist
perspective, again,

they’re getting dozens of pitches
every single day for people from story.

If you have a track record of providing
a good pitch

that resulted in a good story,
and that story did well

for the journalist,
they’re obviously going to give you more

time, at least look at your next idea,
versus if they don’t know you

or they’ve never heard of you.

So your reputation in some networking
for sure counts, but it’s really

a smaller percentage.

I think the underlying
story is the main thing.

The reason I’m highlighting
that as well is because we’ve actually

built a contact tracker inside
the Notion dashboard inside the course.

So you are to be able to build
your own little database of contacts

that you have within that industry,
and then you get to reuse them

for your next campaign, which I think is
a cheat code for link building.

The more you do it,
the better your result is.

Yeah, and that’s not just digital PR.
You should be doing that.

Whenever we’ve built
relationships, with other companies

in the link building space,
that’s almost universally been fruitful.

So something a lot of people don’t
bother doing if they take

a short term perspective.

Speaking of perspectives, though,
another type of news jacking, not just…

So there’s reactive when you
react to a story that’s happening,

and there’s proactive when you predict
a story is going to happen.

Certain things happen
every year, such as Christmas.

It’s always on the 25th of December
in most countries, I believe.

Some countries do have it in
different times of the year, apparently,

like Venezuela for some reason.

So essentially what creditfix.

Com did is created a Christmas light
electricity cost calculator

and an article to support that.

They released that in early November,
so about three or four weeks before most

people would put up their Christmas tree
and turn on their Christmas lights.

To give people some perspective
about the cost of running these things

in electricity.

And it worked because it’s predictable
when the event was going to happen.

Everyone puts their Christmas lights
up at the same time every year.

And it also worked because there’s this
like, mood of the nation, as I call it,

articles around saving money
and inflation, all these types of things

in 2023,
that any article which was around saving

money or making more money
tended to perform quite well.

Wasn’t it the year when there was
this crisis with Ukraine and

energy costs were crazy high and stuff?

Wasn’t it also piggyback writing on that?

I see the article is from 2022.

It’s 2022.
Yeah, you’re right.

So That would have been even more
of the case than the electricity costs

being high here in Europe, at least.

I just run my calculations, actually,
and it says that I would spend £460

for running Christmas lights
for a month and a half.

That’s what that’s called.
I’d say it was really high.

Yeah, this doesn’t make
me want to move to the UK.

That’s all I wanted to say.

These LED lights are supposed
to be low energy or something.

I don’t know.

But anyway, the interest
of this campaign is that it’s Christmas

happening every year,
so you can predict it’s going to happen.

You can cross it over with something
that people are talking about,

which at that time was the cost of energy
because there was an energy crisis

in Europe that year, specifically.

We didn’t even know if we were going
to make it through the winter, if

you remember, in terms of gas and so on.

That is perfect because you have
a predicted event,

cross it over with news,
and make something that’s a little bit

interactive
to make a campaign that journalists are

going to react to and want to cover
because that’s trendy in two ways, almost,

in a seasonal way and in a news way.

Having said that, it only got 20 links.

I say only.
That’s not?

That’s normal for a campaign.

But depending on how much effort
you put into it that you can say,

was that worth it or not?

You know what’s interesting
is that these calculators,

you can now do this with Claude.

Basically, cloud can actually write
a calculator like the one on that page.

While I maybe have, I It was
a little bit difficult for some people

to make that campaign before.

Now, you just need a good idea and you
can use cloud artefacts to generate this.

You can make it a plugin through it,
and then you could essentially

have that calculator built
on your site and run that campaign.

Even for 20 Good Links, it’s totally worth
doing because the amount of resources

needed to do something like this
is so little right now, actually.

That’s really the game with doing
digital PR in-house and doing it yourself

is optimising for return on investment,
so not spending expanding thousands

and thousands getting the content
or the data that you need.

And that actually leads perfectly
into the first of the campaigns

that we ran internally.

And we were really trying
to do this on the cheap first time

around, so without going all out.

The campaign that we ran was around
the most popular site hustles in the US.

So if you remember back to the
Map type campaign with the emojis,

this is a similar structure we’re doing.

It’s a content-first approach.

We’re taking data from Google
Trends, which is free and

about the cheapest, easiest way
you can collect data on something.

We’re tapping into that
emotion of popularity.

So what’s the most popular
site hustle in each state?

And we’re also tapping
into the comparison aspect.

So how does my state compared
to every other state?

So our approach, I think it was maybe
this will work and maybe people

will find this interesting.

And it did work relatively well.

I think in total, we got 31
referring domains to it from sites like

Market Watch, Go Banking Rates, and then
a lot of these small local newspapers

as well, like Oregon Live, syracuse.

Com, pennlive.
Com.

There was a bunch of others
as well throughout the US.

So we got a link from casinos.
Com.

I don’t know if that’s a good thing
or a bad thing, but it’s a DR72 link.

I’m not sure if that was
a scrapery type link.

I don’t imagine we outreach
to them, to be fair.

No.
Okay.

But there’s some good ones.

Yeah, there’s some good links in there.

I’m checking it now.
For sure.

And so to outline the process
of how we went through it,

generally, there’s three steps.

Ideation, so coming up with the thing
you’re going to do, content where you

create the thing, and then outreach
where you outreach and try and get links.

For ideation, we wanted to
take a content-first approach here.

So as I said, we’re looking
at broad trends in the world

at that time, and side hustles,
making money in 2023, it was super hot.

The mood of the nation, as I call it,
around saving money, every penny

counts thing was a big deal.

But we also wanted to connect
our brand, Authority Hacker, to that.

And bringing in SEO or affiliate marketing
in that way, it just doesn’t

connect with the average person
in the street, as we said.

So side hustles was one step
removed from that, but still connected.

So that’s why we went with that approach.

In terms of coming up with our originality
anchor here, the thing that makes us

unique,
we wanted to do this based on a map

because we’d seen those types of campaigns
work well before, and we knew that would

give us a lot of prospects
to outreach, too.

So we had that in mind.

So it was really just how can we
compare site hustles across

different countries or different states.

And Google Trends was the cheapest,
probably not the best, but

the cheapest way we could look at that.

One question is, how far can you go from
the core topic of your site?

To someone who is, let’s say,

semantic or SEO-oriented and tells you,

Oh, you’re far away from your core topic
that’s hurting your website?

What would you answer?

Yeah, that is a good question.

You can go pretty far.

I mean, look at the crossword solver one.

They had one targeting
most popular emojis.

How is that related?

Maybe they’re both to do with language,
but it’s a little bit

of a stretch, isn’t it?

Okay, but that’s also
what agencies do, right?

When I check campaigns from agencies,
they also go a little bit far

from the subject matter.

I think if you want to get wide coverage
from large media, you need to talk about

broad appeal topics.

It’s not always what you do.

There’s a few ways you can approach this.

You can take what it is that your business
does and then think, what is the closest

related broad B2C topic to this?

If you’re in some industrial food
processing, machinery and all that,

no one cares about, but food waste
or food of any kind might be

a more interesting starter for
your research for something like that.

Maybe food recalls could also work.

So try and do it that way.

You could also focus on companies.

We could do something on Google
or OpenAI, for example.

You focus on longer-term trends.

And this is really where
it’s not really a a single way.

Step one, do this, step two,
step three, do this.

But you need to look at what are
the outcomes that you’re aiming for.

And that’s when knowing
the different types of campaigns which

we outlined earlier is really helpful.

And then it’s really just
a little bit of creativity, honestly.

It’s hard to do a complete pain
by numbers for that bit.

I think this is the perfect segue
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All right, so let’s go
back to the campaign.

So the Popular Side Hustle,
we came up with the idea because

that was related to our topic.
How did we actually…

We put the content together
from Google Trends, you say.

Then what did we do?

We found the most popular side husts
across the US, made a list of them,

and then researched in every state.

Google Trends lets you philtre by state.

So we looked at the trends
for each one in every state.

Took a bit of work, put it all
into a spreadsheet, and then we made

a ranking of the most popular ones.

To go a little bit further,
because honestly, Google Trends is like,

it’s not the most sophisticated campaign.

In terms of making an originality
anchor, it’s not that great.

What we then did is we We
found some pricing data on

how much people were getting paid
for each site hustle in every state.

We got that from indeed.

Com and ZipRecruiter,
two recruitment websites.

So then we compared all of that and then
we put it into a map on our site.

It’s like an interactive map.

You could hover over each state
and see what the most popular ones

are and how much they cost.

We did use our dev for this.

It took a little bit of time to build,
like a day or so of work, I think.

But honestly, there’s a lot of off a shelf
code, especially for things like maps

that you can use and probably
do that in a fraction of the time or even

code it yourself in a no code way.

We then created our article where
we were placing ourselves at the centre

of the news cycle, talking about other
stories which are related to side hustles

and general economic doom and gloom
to help cement its purpose in a way.

And then we presented all the individual
data state by state in a toggle

drop-downs at the bottom of the article.

That was really just to show completeness
for when we came on to do our outreach,

which was the next thing we did.

How much do they care about
the quality of the data?

If you stuck to just Google
Trends, would that have been enough?

Good question.

I think the harder it is to get the data,
the harder they perceive it

is to get the data, the more
they think it’s something unique.

That’s a general rule.

There are plenty of stories
out there that have used very basic data

out there and get hundreds of links.

So there’s always an exception to What
I will say is that we’ve never once been

asked to provide the underlying data.

No one really checks.

However, I have been told that
when you’re working with tier one

outlets, I think BBC, New York Times,
that level, they look a bit more behind

what’s going on to verify everything.

Next, we moved on to the outreach section.

Here we built a prospect list
of journalists who were covering

similar stories around economic economic
sadness, cost of living, side hustles,

and even some specific side hustles
that were on our list as well.

How did you find them?
We did this on Google.

Google News just looked for the keywords
and started building up a list

of articles there, and that
was essentially our prospect list.

In order to get their contact
info, it’s a little bit different

from normal link building in digital PR.

There’s all these journalist databases
and tools specifically

to find emails of journalists.

So we used one called Prouly,
which is currently run by

or owned by SEMrush, actually.

At the time, it was great because

all of the other tools out there, Cision

and these tools were super expensive.

You pay $10,000 a year, and
the economics only work if you’re

running an agency doing a bunch
of campaigns every single month.

What we did with Prowly
was $299 dollars a month.

So still not cheap, but it was all right.

The problem with Prouly is they
have credit limits on exports.

I don’t know if they got
that one from from Ahrefs.

Maybe they learned a thing or see there.

The user interface is
a little bit complex.

They’ve gone to town on adding
all these features for email sending

and link monitoring and all this stuff.

And it’s just not necessary.

Just give me the damn email.

That’s all I really care about.

Sounds like a CMR share.

The keyword The keyword search
in there works, but it doesn’t

work by scraping Google.

They have some other tech behind it.

So it’s a little bit clunky.

But since then, we didn’t
use it for this campaign.

Since then, we started using
another tool called journalfinder.

Com.

This is a third of the price.

So you pay $99 a month.

And it’s built by someone who actually
does campaigns exactly like this.

So if you think of hunter.

Io’s interface, how easy it is to upload
a list of sites and do a bulk search.

It just works.

It’s really, really well-coded, Hunter.

Journal finders like that,
but for digital PR.

So it will scrape Google
and Google News in the same way

that you would do manually.

So that saves you a tonne of time there.

You can upload a list of URLs and
it will find the authors for the article.

And the media list storing is just as good
as probably and the export function

works really well as well.

So for a third of the price,
for a better, easier to use tool,

you really can’t complain.

It’s the one I would recommend.
How much is it?

99 dollars per month.

I see it, yeah.
If you pay, it’s 83.

Okay, that’s the thing.

It’s like a lot of people
were intimidated by Dutoubi because

the database was so expensive.
Exactly.

Now it’s 99 bucks a month.

How much do you spend on in-building?

If you’re a serious in-builder, you’re
spending this time’s 100 or something.

It’s definitely reachable
for most people, actually.

It looks cool.

I haven’t tried it, but I definitely
want to try it, actually.

So then it comes to outreach, where all
we do is we send them a short message.

In the beginning, in these campaigns,
we were trying to personalise it,

I think, a bit too much, saying, Hey, we
read your article about this other thing.

We’re coming from a SEO link
building, guest posting type mindset.

But with digital PR,
they don’t care as much.

They actually want to be pitched
multiple times a day, and they just

want to They’ll quickly get to the gist
of the story and make a decision,

do I want to cover this or not?

So they welcome pitches, but if they’re
not good, they’ll just ignore them.

So it was a learning experience there.

So the structure of your pitch
should be a short introduction about

what you’re trying to pitch to them.

Personalization, all you really
need these days is to have their name.

And then below your email, after your sign
off, you have your press release.

In some cases, if you have a short
article, it can literally

be the entire article.

Because we had lots of data
and toggles and things like that,

we just took the top section
for what were our key findings

and takeaways and pasted that there.

That means the journalist doesn’t even
have to click out of their inbox

to read everything they need to
and make a decision about whether

they want to feature us or not.

Okay, so what’s the heat rates
with this campaign?

How many emails do you send
and how many actually get picked up?

We were looking at about 2 to 5 % success
rate, outreach resulting in a link.

It’s a little bit difficult
to gauge interest initially with digital

PR, and this was surprising to me,
because nobody responded to the emails.

They just cover the story and then you
find out about it, usually through Ahrefs

or Google Alerts or something,
as opposed to them saying, Hey,

we featured you, because journalists,
they have zero time

and there’s not really too much benefit
for them starting a conversation with you.

They don’t want to get into it.

So they’ll just take your stuff, publish
it, and then move on to the next thing.

But 5% is pretty good, actually.

If you think about outreaching in general,
if you’re outreaching to normal websites,

5%, you’re pretty happy, I think.

Absolutely.

It’s because you’ve created
something valuable here

through your originality, Anca.

The data we have and the way
it’s presented is It’s interesting

to a lot of people, as was evidenced
by the coverage that it got.

Yeah, I’m pretty happy with that.

Yeah, I think it’s good.

It shows you people
imagine also digital PR.

It’s so intimidating that drum will never
pick it up and your success rate would be

way lower than it would be for average.

I would almost target it.

It might be reversing at this point
because everyone’s spamming webmasters

like crazy and people
are a bit intimidated by digital PR.

It’s a case of you zig when they zag
and you just avoid the crowds

by actually going in that direction.

You do get better links in the end.

For sure.

It’s gotten more accessible
as the knowledge has gotten better

and tools have gotten better
and cheaper, more affordable.

Journal finder is great, actually.

Let’s talk about the next campaign?
Sure.

So the next campaign we ran
was around job security.

And this was really interesting
because at the time we launched

the campaign at the start of 2024,
a lot of big tech companies

were laying an awful lot of people.

So we wanted to create a campaign,
and we had AI at the back of our minds

because that’s just really popular.

And that’s what we’ve been creating
a lot of content about, even

on this podcast and in other places
over the last few years, because it

does really well with our audience.

It also does really well
with people outside of our audience,

the general public care about AI.

So when we were looking
for AI stories at the start of the year,

a lot of layoff stories
came up around these big tech companies.

I think in the first five weeks
of 2024, there were 33,

000 layoffs in tech in the US.

And there was quite a lot right before
that at the end of last year as well.

One CEO in particular was blaming
generative AI for a lot of this stuff.

So we were like, Okay, we’ve got
our angle for how we want to take this.

How can we create an originality
anchor, something that stands out?

And we’re doing this unique in this space
to further the story that’s already

the news cycle that’s already going on?

So our idea idea was
to create a survey here.

We used a tool called Polefish to do,
which we talked about in the last episode

of the podcast, we were talking about our
linkable asset campaigns running surveys.

So we used the same tool, polefish.

Com, to survey, I think it
was 1,200 people in the US

about how they felt about job security.

We asked them some questions like,
how safe do you feel you are in your job?

How likely you think your job is to be,
or your job security is to be affected

by AI and how the economy
will affect your job security.

So it was really interesting because
Polefish gives you demographic data

for all your participants.

So you can then break down people’s
responses by age, the sector they work in,

employment status, salary even,
which led us to find this really

interesting dynamic that older,

better paid tech workers were

by far the most scared of AI.
I see.

Which is interesting because they maybe
know AI a little bit better.

So is it because they’re more aware
of what it can actually do?

And this is a real threat.

So we wanted to tap into
that scarcity, fear-based emotion

when we were creating this piece.

So when we ended up analysing the data,
we were able to pull out a lot

of cool charts and stuff like that,
which we made up in Canva.

We even got our illustrator
to make this nice infographic,

which broke down the job security
concerns by industry as well.

And all the tech-based industries
are towards the top there.

So that was cool.

Okay, that’s a cool angle.

I think it might be a bit risky
or scary for the For me,

it sounds like how well did that do?

That did almost as well as the first one.

So we got 27 referring domains,
including links from Business

Insider, Yahoo Finance,
Yahoo News, Fortune, Fast Company.

All of these are DR-90 plus
sites, by the way.

So I would count this as
a pretty successful campaign.

That’s the thing.
It’s like 27 links.

The problem is that counting just the
number of links, it doesn’t necessarily

reflect on how well a campaign has done
because if you got 27 links from the R30

sites, you cannot compare to
getting links from these sites.

I’m looking at it now.
We have business insider.

There’s a lot of good ones.

There are, let’s call them
unscrupulous link dealers out there.

You probably get emails from them as well.

They’ll pitch you saying, Hey, do you
want to buy a link on business insider?

Do you want to buy a link
on such and such company?

And they’ll sell them for $800
or $1,200 for one link.

That’s right.
I don’t know exactly how they’re doing it.

Maybe they have some corrupted intern
there or whatever.

But the value of one of these links,
according to that market,

at least, is very, very high.

And considering the main cost
for our campaign here was the survey

data, which I think it was $1,100,
give or take, to run it.

We already made our money back almost
in just one of those links,

depending on how you value, obviously.

But we got several of those links.

It was a successful campaign
that had a good return

this one, I would say for sure.
That’s the thing.

I think that’s so important.

The cost per link is so much lower
than going through the market

and outsourcing it.
It’s quite insane.

As you said, pretty much one
of these links that we got, I have Ahrefs

open now, a business insider link
or a Yahoo link or a fast company link.

That would be the cost of almost
the entire company, maybe

a A little bit less, but not a lot.

We managed to build essentially 10,

15 times more links, discounting some

of the lower links in there.

I see some lower links at the end,
so it’s like they’re not all great.

But if you divide your cost
per link by 10, what does that

do to your SEO strategy in general?

How much more can you get
out of SEO for the same budget?

I think that’s the essence
of what we’re trying to tell people.

That’s the game of link building.

It’s not like, Can I build links?

Yes, everybody can do it
if they just try a little.

With enough money and resources.

But it’s like, How can I build
the quantity and quality of links

I need to take my site to that top tier
where things just get much easier?

Also, how can I do this?

In a way where I’m still ROI positive?

Because as we said in a previous
podcast, to get your site to a level

of authority where you can
compete decently in search these days,

you need pretty high authority.

It’s like a DR50, 60.

I’d say you start playing.

In many industries,
70 plus to start playing.

You know something that’s funny?

I lived in Hungary for eight
and a half years, and I only just

learned this earlier this year is that
there’s a saying about Scottish people

in Hungary that they’re really cheap.

I didn’t realise that was a thing.

From Hungary, that’s
pretty offensive, but sure.

Exactly.
But it is.

Us, Scots, we’re notorious penny-pinchers.

I think that that has Because I just
come through in our approach

at Authority Hacker to link building.

We’ve built thousands and thousands
of links for very, very little money.

And it’s because I just refuse
to spend shitloads of money on going boss

to the wall with some of this stuff.

And I want to say, you can absolutely
hire help for competencies you don’t

have in-house, but I think hiring help
for every single link you built

seems crazy in terms of budget.

Full disclosure, when we first got
into this, we worked with some digital PR

companies and some professionals in there
because it’s great to learn from it.

But building up your own competency
in-house, it’s an invaluable thing

you can do for your business.

Yeah, because I think to give some context
to people, we build all these links

with one link builder on payroll.
That’s it.

That was half of his job as well.

Yeah, he was doing
something else as well as something.

Obviously, a little bit of money
into the polling and tools and We do

spend money there, but that’s the extent
of the link budget, and that’s

the links that we managed to build.

I know a lot of people are looking,
they’re like, You guys are launching

a link building course.

I’ve seen these tactics
already before, etc.

That’s not the point.

The point is, how do you execute this
at a decent scale and at a very good

and competitive price where if you’re
an agency, you can save a bunch of money.

If you’re in-house, you can
get a lot more for your budget

and you can actually be competitive
in SEO because with the budget you have,

where you can take on much larger size
than yours if they’re not doing this.

Without getting too much
into your pitch, but also how you can get

your team members to do all of the work
to do that so you don’t have to.

Yeah, we didn’t build this.

I didn’t do any of this
prospecting outreach.

I had a little bit of input
on the ideation and things like that,

but our team executed the entire campaign
essentially without us.

Yeah, I love this stuff.

I’m literally discovering
as we prepare this podcast.

I just wanted to say that Because I
know there will be some criticism on some

stuff we’re releasing right now, but I
want to say the point is not the tactics.

The point is how much and at what scale?

How much do you spend and at what scale
can you do this confidently without

dropping the quality while getting links
from the size that we’re talking about.

That’s the challenge of link
building, not the ability to build links.

Let’s keep going.

Just to finish off on
the last one on how we actually

did the outreach for that one.

It was very similar to the previous piece.

We looked for articles that were covering
the tech layoffs, which there were a lot

of at the time,
and any workforce reduction in major

companies, so like Google, Amazon,
Microsoft, Spotify,

people who were covering those
specifically, and just any other general

state of the economy topics, we use Prouly
again to find contact info for them.

We are reached in a very similar way.

There were a couple of small differences.

The pitch that we did at the end
of the email was a little bit longer

just because there was a lot more
to convey with this one.

And we also attached the infographic
that we created as well.

So I’m not sure how much
that affected things.

But yeah, we got 27 referring domains
from this and was I’m really happy with

it, especially considering job security.

It’s like it does have broad appeal,
but it’s starting to get a little bit…

Is messy, yeah.
Yeah, a little bit more niche.

And that brings us on to
the next piece we did quite well,

which was around AI regulation.

Now, when I read it, just
reading the word regulation, it’s like,

oh, I’m going to fall asleep here.

Sounds fun.

It’s probably not the best
angle, but we still made it work,

which was quite interesting.

So we got 21 referring
domains in this one.

So it was slightly less than the others,
but still it was pretty reasonable

for a digital PR campaign, considering
the time and energy invested in this one

wasn’t particularly high.

Once we’d figured out how to
do this process before, a lot of it

was just doing the same thing again.

So it was quite easy.

We got a link from Tech Radar,
so a DR-90 site there.

And we also got links
from MMM Online, which is like

a medical marketing website.

So very, very specialist
B2B site there, DR 75.

Grc World Forums, which is about
corporate responsibility and governance.

So some very interesting
topics there for you to read.

But again, DR 71 site.

A bit more niche, let’s say.

And that was, I think, because the topic
was a bit drier in that sense.

The idea here was we
wanted to cover something, again,

AI-related because it does well
We’d had success with it in the past.

And we’re looking
at the current news cycle.

And as we were doing that,
AI regulation, specifically in the US,

was being talked about a lot.

Now, I realised now that
the average person in the street

does not care about AI regulation.

We maybe missed that a little bit, but at
the same time, there is this underlying

fear of, is this going to turn into
Skynet and take over the world thing?

We were hoping we could
tap into that a little bit.

How much did we spend on this?

Did we spend a lot of money on this?

This one, we went with 2,000 respondents.

I think we maybe made a mistake there
because that cost twice as much

as a campaign with 1,000 respondents.

I don’t think it brought
us anything extra.

I would say we break even here.

Given the links we got, I wouldn’t
say it’s the best campaign ever,

and we learned from this, but given
the link from Tech Radar and these DR 70

plus sites, I would say we break even.

When I first got into digital PR, one of
the first things I where we’re being told

was that you need a minimum of a thousand
survey respondents to be taken seriously,

and 5,000 if you’re going for a tier one
publication, the BBC or New York Times.

So 2,000, it was unnecessarily
in the middle there.

We should have just stuck to 1,000,
saved the money, and gone from there.

We also did some research
country by country.

So we looked at every country
in the world, and we tried to find what

their AI regulation was like,
and we grouped them into a few

different categories to create this map.

The idea being that we could maybe reach
out to sites in different countries.

But that didn’t really pan out so well
because of the nature of the topic.

A lot of countries just didn’t
have regulation and didn’t care about it.

Again, it wasn’t…

They didn’t yet until see you in
a few years when the jobs start falling

off and then people will care more.
Yeah, exactly.

But then people, they’re not
going to blame the regulation.

They’ll blame the current politicians
or the tech CEOs or whoever it is.

Would you say you regret
doing this campaign?

It was okay, but it was-No,
because it’s a great learning experience

from a point of view of…

I think it was a well-executed campaign.

It’s just we got the angle
and the topic a little bit wrong.

We should have gone for something
that had more broad appeal and was

a bit more exciting or interesting
or even a bit more scary.

We could have maybe find a way
of linking it to AI fears and that thing.

Maybe something around the AI companies,
maybe lobbying around politicians

or manipulating them.

Yeah, exactly.

How they’re trying to control you
or steal your data or whatever it is.

When it came to creating the content for
this piece, we used a simple color-coded

map, so no dev work was required here.

I think we did all that in Canva.

Presented the top-level
findings from the survey.

I think we could have still presented
the story a little bit better, maybe made

the survey results a bit more visual.

I think it’s a bit wordy, to be honest.

Again, if I was involved in this,
I feel like journalists just don’t

have time to read this.

I would focus maybe a bit more above the
fold, like quick takeaways or something.

There’s a lot of big newspapers that.

That would be my take.

What we were trying to do was does cement
our story within the news cycle.

We’re saying all this other
interesting stuff has been happening

and we’re linking to those stories.

Here’s why ours is relevant.

But I think we spent too long
doing that, and you’re right.

I agree.

I think we should have gotten
to the point more and made those results

a bit more visual in that way.

Yeah, I agree.

Again, good learning experience.

It shows that not every campaign
is successful, but it doesn’t

mean you can’t save a tonne
of money running your own campaigns.

This one was like, I We would
call it a break-even campaign.

The links we got was like, it’s okay,
but it’s like if we had outsourced it,

probably would have been around
the same price for the same result.

But the other ones were significantly
better, and we just keep doing

this and keep getting better at this.

But we wanted to be realistic and show you
stuff that we’ve done and so on.

The point of this podcast
was to remove the shield that people

have against digital PR, thinking
only qualified professionals can do this.

Everyone can do this, provided you
run an interesting story

and run outreach that’s not bad.

And you can build these links
that the really big sites have

for really a fair amount of money.

I want to repeat that our cost per link
on digital PR is around $130,

which it’s not cheap,
but we’re talking like the 80,

90 plus links that you would probably buy
for like a thousand bucks on the market if

you were actually passing
through someone else.

So we’re talking about huge savings
and huge, essentially…

But if you’re an agency,
huge It’s a potential profit margin.

If you’re able to do these links
for this price and then you sell them for

a thousand bucks, that’s a fair amount
of profit that you can do, even

if you have some staff on payroll, etc.

And so that’s the opportunity for people
who are still focusing on SEO to That is

to essentially learn to build that skill
in-house so you can build these links

that people still sacralize a lot
for not a lot of money or for a budget

that most people can reach.

So I hope we managed to do that in this
episode and show some real life examples.

If you want to learn how to actually do
these campaigns, Mark has shot an entire

big digital PR module that will show you
step by step how to make these campaigns,

and you go behind the scenes on how we run
some of these and so on,

how to write your surveys,
and how to essentially process the data,

and a lot of things that we could not
necessarily talk about in this episode.

But the launch is ending soon,
so make sure you don’t miss it out.

Go check it out.

We’ll actually put the URL
in the description and at

the bottom of the screen.

If you want to learn more
about the course, that includes

the digital PR module and a bunch
of other things as well.

You can go on authorityhacker.com/link-builder-academy, and you’ll be able
to have all the information.

But the launching is closing
soon, so make sure you don’t

miss it out because we don’t
extend our launches pretty much ever.

Unless there’s a technical problem,
we will not extend it, basically.

That’s pretty much it.

Hope you guys enjoyed this episode.

If you did, we’ll see you
in two weeks for another one.

Bye-bye.

All right, that’s a wrap
for today’s episode.

I hope it got your creative juice
is flowing and showed you anyone

can dive into digital PR.

Who knows, your next killer campaign
might be just around the corner.

Now, before we sign off,
I’ve got to tell you about our brand new

course, Link Builder Academy.

If you are serious about SEO,
this is something you don’t want to miss.

In this training,
we’re pulling back the curtain on our

tried and true systems,
the same systems that allowed us to build

digital PR links for just $130 each,
guest posts on the R 60 plus size for just

$75, and linkable asset
size for a mere $8 a month.

Here’s the kicker.
We’re giving you a taste for free.

You’ll get a full module of the training
and a custom-built chatbot to help you

snag high-authority newspaper links.

It’s one of our way to show you
how powerful this stuff is,

and we hope you want to buy
the whole thing after checking it out.

To get your free module,
head over to authorityhacker.com/high-dr-links.

I repeat, authorityhacker.com/high-dr-links.
Put your email and you get instant access.

Thanks for tuning in today.

We can’t wait to see you
inside Link Builder Academy.

Until next time,
keep crushing it out there.