I spent nearly $100,000 to learn exactly how to get the best links on the planet for free $97,900 most influential tech companies and yeah that's PornHub in third it's picked up 42 links including the dr94 New York Times and my favorite Japanese beer company pah super dry I'm going to share everything with you today a repeatable process so you can build digital PR links yourself how digital PR can be a complete waste of money if you don't know what you're doing the results I got from spending that $97,000 and what separates the best digital PR agencies from the worst but before I get started click the link in the pin comment to sign up for my free SEO training Master Class class it goes over all my top SEO tactics that I'm using in 2024 to get websites to the top of Google this whole digital PR experiment started because of our old friend fomo back in 2020 the entire SEO industry could not shut the up about digital PR they get you links that money can't buy I just got a link from WebMD oh yeah I just got a dr200 link the fomo was real but then I started digging into my biggest competitor barbend who absolutely crushes with 1. 7 million traffic per month and lo and behold look who started posting a digital PR pieces like this top 50 most fit cities in Indiana this study picked up 224 referring domains including Dr91 Newsweek so I was like oh hell no we need to jump on this now I did some digging around and found a digital PR agency that promised the world for 2500 lb per Campaign which is about $3,100 side fact most digital PR agencies are run out of the UK no idea why once we were on boarded they started brainstorming ideas on what kind of story they could pitch for our fitness site this was back to during covid when people were sitting around all day eating Oreos and putting on the quarantine 15 so they came to me and said let's make a contest lose weight and get paid money $100 for each pound it'll get shared around like crazy and journalists will love it I was like okay $20 per pound and you got yourself a deal how'd this idea do it crushed 54 referring domains including d91 iHeart dr85 bante Minos d84 radio. com and tons of newspapers at $3,100 per campaign 54 links comes out to the killer $574 per link and these were damn good links too I wanted more so I got another two campaigns from them but they couldn't repeat their results here's an atress report on the two other campaigns they ran in the top campaign they only got six links freaking six the bottom campaign got 12 but absolutely none of them were due follow now the cost was $344 per link which sucked at as you can imagine I was pissed most digital PR agencies have minimums where if they don't hit five links they'll do another campaign and until they hit five links either way if they're only hitting their minimums like these guys were you're not getting good value it's the Home Run campaigns that make it worth it so at this point I was like we got to do this in-house if I'm going to bomb a digital PR campaign I prefer it cost me time rather than $3,000 so I hired another agency to teach me their whole process here's what I learned executing a digital PR campaign happens in stages starting with ideation what is your idea for a newsworthy campaign you want to come up with a topic that is related to your Niche but extremely sharable the types of content that work best include surveys industry reports and data studies contest expert opinions and case studies but the hack to making a successful campaign is to make sure your topic is trending is it currently on the mind of the masses that make money to lose weight campaign work because it was during the pandemic when weight gain was an issue the most influential tech companies piece was during the money printing bull run where companies like zoom and Nvidia were all people could talk about here's the thing now that we had chat gbt coming up with ideas angles is so easy it's stupid yo chat GPT Elon must recently challenge Mark Zuckerberg for a cage fight how can I use this viral event and create a piece on my gambling website that can be used for digital PR look how freaking good this is it suggested I create a betting odds and Analysis breakdown it could have a user poll on the page that would update odds in real time and we can even give quote humorous yet informative fighter profiles on Elon and Zuck as if they were Street Fighter characters another viral event from last year was a simultaneous release of the Oppenheimer and Barbie movie which created the barbin Heimer meme bro I don't know where all the hype is about I don't even live in the states anymore I'm out of touch chat GPD help the Oppenheimer movie and the Barbie movie were recently released on the same weekend how could I've turned this viral event into an article that could be used for digital PR give me five potential article titles that would go on a Fitness website number four would work for sure you can whip up an article teaching exercises like Atomic ABS Barbie burpees and the constant plank if you just got the planks constant pun give yourself a high five another hack is to put a negative spin on it you can thank mainstream media for why this works people have been sadly conditioned to pay more attention to bad news that was the angle I was going for with a big business fine study which the dr85 Scotsman picked up with their name and shame headline who paid the largest criminal fine in history and why by the way I'd like to give a shout out to pitchbox the sponsor of this video pitchbox is an endtoend link building platform for SEO agencies Brands and affiliate Publishers it's my Outreach tool of choice and I use it across all my businesses with pitchbox my team is able to streamline process prospecting and Outreach achieve better email deliverability and manage the whole link building process in one place this hands down the best Outreach tool out there in a game changer for link Builders if I had to choose between pitchbox and any other Outreach tool I'm going pitchbox all day if you want to make your link building process more efficient and effective give it a try to sign up with pitchbox use a link in the description and get 50% off your first month now back to the video next up is the data collection phase if you're doing a survey or industry report here's where you collect the data surveys are easy you can run them yourself if you have an email list you can blast a survey off to or you can run cheap paid ads to a survey form you could also compile existing data from public sources for your survey data is so easy to find online for government databases you have usa.
gov for the states data. gov is another alternative UK data service is the equivalent for the UK eurostat is great for other countries in the EU and statistics Canada is for Canada obviously internationally World Bank open data and United Nations data are treasure Tres Pew Research Center is great for social issues public opinion and demographic Trends FBI crime data Explorer is great for crime stats CDC is great for Health Data look there's probably 10 more sites like these data is not the problem reaching journalists is the next step in the digital PR process you've got your story created now how do you get it in front of the right journalist that will publish it a great tool you can use is prowley it lets you search for journalists based on their location language topic and media type so if you wanted to find English-speaking food generalists in the UK you'd fill out their search form like this the it'll then give you a list of all the journalists that match those filters and how to contact them most of the digital PR agencies use Muk rck instead of prowley it's much more expensive so unless you're starting a digital PR agency I'd stick with prowley but if you want to save money on tools you can always just search manually for example if you wanted to get on the telegraph do a site telegraph. co.
uk in title food to find their food category now here's all the William sitwell Rob Crossings and Diana Henry's that your little heart could desire now once you successfully stalked them and secured their email addresses it's time to pitch your article here's some rules of thumb have a clear subject line be personal explain why your content is relevant to them for example if I survey each state in a study I'd tease out the stats that I found for that journalist particular State be as brief as you can cover who what where when how and why as fast as possible include a press release something that they could simply copy and paste and get up on their website as soon as possible and for good measure add a quote from your CEO here's what that would look like with an example subject lines study shows PornHub Tinder and Facebook Facebook among the top 10 most influential tech companies hey Adam I've been following your work and I've recently completed a study that you might be interested in on the topic of tech companies and their impact on society there's a personalization and relevant step checked off some of the key highlights the 10 most socially impactful tech companies of the 21st century according to the study R Facebook Google PornHub blah blah blah blah here's how much people use them 91% use Google more than once a day 86% blah blah blah blah blah digity marketing CEO Matt digity said about the study measuring a company's impact on blah blah blah blah blah blah and let me conclude with I've attached a link to a press release in the event that you'd like to publish it if you need any more information please feel free to reply here and I'll get back to you so now I was armed with the knowledge that I needed to do digital PR inhouse at the time we had a keto diet Niche site the month was January where people are most likely to start a new diet the timing was perfect we decided to do a piece around which states are the most ketofriendly that way we had something specific to pitch to news outlets in each state yo your state got number one for most keto friendly restaurants hey your state got number one for most keto influen ERS and so forth the campaign was perfect it had timing relevance and scalability how'd it do is six links good no excuse me 11 historical links what went wrong we crushed the ideation the data everything except the Outreach my hypothesis is that these journalist relationships are built over time and we were newbies and we had no relationships or our pitches sucked I'll let you know what we ultimately figured out soon in the meantime we hired the same agency who we learned digital PR from to run six campaigns one per month for one of our legal websites it was £3,000 per campaign so $3,700 with a 10 link minimum spread over 6 months for a grand total of $22,200 had' it do this was the worst experience to date in all we got exactly 60 low-end To Mediocre links 24 of them were no follow so pretty much useless and to top it off it took 2 years to complete no God please no so now I'm like what if our campaign didn't work because we learned learned digital PR from literally the worst digital PR Agency on the planet by the way I'm not one to name and shame publicly but if we know each other feel free to reach out and I'll be happy to tell you who to avoid anyways I was back to the drawing board I still wanted digital PR but I needed a consistent agency I also really wanted to know dub TF I did wrong so I could do it in house so here's how I spent the remaining $65,000 by sampling and testing every digital PR agency that came across my path I'll share the full results in a second but here's some interesting anecdotes one agency ran exact same keto piece and got 60 links so the problem really was with our Outreach process apparently our pitch emails were too long and wordy and we just needed to get to the point excuse me one agency didn't get a single due follow link not like this not like this one agency had an idea for our data piece but never got access to the data and had to refund us after a year of doing absolutely nothing and one agency stood out as different both in their approach to digital PR and the links they were Landing here's a full list of results as you can see agency one hit two minimums making their cost per link pretty high agency 2 did better only missing one campaign but overall still a pretty high cost per link agencies three and four bombed completely and five and six bombed let's say mostly agency 7 is the only one that didn't miss a campaign and thus you can see their cost per link was the best enter search intelligence let me first say that my skepticism was through the roof before I sampled these guys not only are they the most expensive digital PR agency but they're aggressive marketers and sponsor nearly every o podcasts on the planet nonetheless they're consistent they always do a good job because they take a different approach than other agencies here's the thing they don't create content for your site they don't create a big piece of content like this format it all nicely these pieces take time to create time to design and what happens if it doesn't work instead they figure out a small set of data pitch that data to journalists and just say yo these guys collected the info just link to their homepage it looks like this here's d82 eat this.
