How We Build Digital PR Links In-House

So I want to show people today how to actually just get started and do some campaigns that get some results you know it's kind of the biggest crazy in Ling building right now and that's why we wanted to have kind of a big module about this in the new link building course you have this saying done is better than perfect uh and and it's very very true for digital PR the problem is like people kind of have these high Expectations never really get started never really do it that to me tells me is going to

be more future proof it's a problem a lot of companies have us included you ask someone in the street if what about SEO and nobody cares stopping grandmas and asking them SEO advice for YouTube video but I guess I guess we'll never do that one you're overruled on that one unfortunately yeah 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 recognizable

Brands which boost your own Brands credibility and here's the kick up because it's real marketing when your campaign really takes off it can boost things like brand searches which many SE veterans agree Google is using these days in the recent algorithms but here's the thing a lot of People get CAU fit 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 snag Lings from pretty big names we're talking like market watch Yahoo news Fortune magazine and even fors so whether you've never Dipped 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 shelles right around when this episode

drops the strategies that we teaching 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 100 $32 a Pop guest posts on the r60 plus sites for just $75 and linkable asset links for measly $8 each so 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 build 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 authority.com high-d links I repeat Authority higher.com High-d links and you'll be able to put your email and get instant access

and 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 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 hi everyone welcome to the Ator 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 you know it's kind of the biggest crazy in Ling building right now and that's why we wanted to have like kind of a big module about this in the new link building Course um but like people imagine that normal people can't do this they they it's kind of like sacralized and like 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 and we wanted to show you kind of like examples of campaigns you can do uh today or like at least attempt to do and how we've done it and the results that we got is that is that did I summarize it right I think That's fair I think part of the problem and certainly when we first got into digal PR I was expecting each campaign to have hundreds and hundreds of links uh 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 you know uses as case studies on their their agency website so you have to be a little bit careful when you're when you're getting started with This yeah it's like I mean it's the same for everything right it's like everyone talks about social media and they show you like blog like post that get millions of views and and and same for YouTube and everything and I guess the same happens for digital PR these things happen the same way as like a vir is going to happen to you like once

in a while on social media um but for this to happen you just need to go through a lot of reps and you need to do it a lot and One of one of them is just going to take off and so the problem is like people kind of have these high expectations never really get started never really do it and they kind of stuck to maybe like lower quality guest posting or like 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 like digital PR is kind of like the Holy Grail of acquiring links this days if you want to Do well in SEO right it's also so yeah there's this kind of like perfectionist angle to it right you have this saying done is better than perfect uh and and it's very very true for digital PR so I want to show people today how to actually just get started and do some campaigns that get some results I I have a question though before we get started like do you like when I hire

an agency like a popular agency that does GTO like is it the same for them like do do their Campaigns only get a few links most of the time and only some of them really take off or is that 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'll flop but they usually have enough experience to be able to reang a campaign and and get you what you need so

yeah okay so it's like you you should Check that out basically okay let's jump into the examples and uh as we go through the examples going to show us kind of like the archetypes of campaigns that people can follow yeah so I I I want to start with that though because this is really important to understand what types of campaigns can be run and the way they're 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

kind of news related to a medium to long-term Trend so what's going on in the world this year or you know this quarter kind of thing as opposed to uh specific news story you're reacting to which is the other type that's called newsjacking 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 really successful piece analyzing 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 kind of like competitive popularity contest vibe that that that that people have within them and they've targeted AI obviously they're an AI tool but ai's also been a really hot Trend over the last two years or so so they're kind kind kind of hting it from both of these angles if you're watching or 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 at the

traffic of the most popular AI tools and that was it that was the extent of their research there so was it only search traffic then because ially reports that right maybe something like uh really this it yep that was it looked at their SE traffic and looked at how popular they were uh And then they ranked them and they made a nice little infographic at the end to to kind of visualize it and puts the the size of chat GPT compared to all the others into perspective there but that that was it that was about

the ENT 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 oh I wonder who's the best I wonder who's the most popular Uh emotion that a lot of lot of us have moving on to the next example we've got uh crossword solver here and they are in a kind of 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 how to make you ask someone in the street uh what about SEO and nobody cares uh that was an idea I had actually like stopping grandmas and asking them as your advice for a YouTube video but I Guess I guess we'll never do that one got overruled on that one unfortunately yeah so what they've done is they have done this big data analysis of the most popular emojis on Twitter in every country uh and it's very very clever the way they've bangle 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 what whatever the campaign is covering and hit all of the Publications there and everybody wants to know how do I or how does my country my state my region compare to our neighbors to the next country and it's just a Sparks curiosity in a lot of people and I think that's why this campaign did 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 kind of understand what's going on here so hence they picked up links can engage exactly hence they picked up links in Japan in South American Spanish sites and many non-english sites as well so very clever campaign there yeah these kind of campaigns yeah they're cool because you can get local press coverages also in these cases like countries so it means Like every newspapers in every

country could essentially cover this story which is like you know why they got so many links like I'm checking atress now they got 133 refering 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 kind of like an archetype you can use and you can get more local press Links which are still very good links like 60 Dr 6070s are pretty common for like local newspapers uh and it's much much

much easier to get run on the local newspaper than on the national newspaper usually we have an example coming up in this episode where we'll show you how we did that uh just a state level in the in the US that's quite interesting to to to look at the next one I want to talk about is from signs.com uh they did something very unique uh 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 7-Eleven and then they

took all of the drawings together uh and compared them in one image and it it just it's so interesting to read through this article if you're watching this on YouTube you're listening to the podcast go watch this on YouTube uh or or check the the link in the description and and check this out cuz it's super Interesting there's some like Apple logos here they still have the stripey color one from like the 1990s and stuff in there it's very very interesting but almost again hits on that kind of 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 it 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 with a little bit of budget that's not really too big of a deal like a lot of universities do this fairly regularly with uh students you can pay them 10 bucks or something and they'll and

also you don't need to qualify people right it can be anyone and you could literally walk down the street and ask people to to draw for you and that would be fine actually like an iPad And apple pencil and just be like draw this for me spend two days and and get that okay it's it sounds like crazy for SEO to like go outside and talk to people I know scary right but but uh but I mean look they got 405 refering domains if I checked from um from at which is uh pretty cool but

most importantly I think what's really cool with this campaign is that there's a lot of social potential so like Brands probably can have a lot of Fun on their Twitter accounts Etc res sharing like funny drawings of their brands and so on and to me like if you're being uh mentioned by a big brand and if like that probably ends up driving up your branded search which kind of like is a thing that Google's using as well with the recent updates to rank your site right you're doing all of this stuff to get links but

you're getting links to get more s traffic right um and so what I like about these Kind of PR campaigns is they kind of get you to your goal which is getting more search traffic but not just through links 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 right uh and so like that's that to me tells me is going to be more future proof uh it's going to be easier to sell to maybe bigger stakeholders

if you're working For big companies in house for example Etc uh and it actually plays on more factors than just links which is it also just kind of like baiting the brands into responding in a way I'm sure not all of them did but for sure some of them some of them did yeah so it's a really cool campaign I really like that I really like the idea of like mixing PR and 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-term Trend what's going on uh let's take a look at newsjacking now which is when we're looking at something which has happened you know today or this week in the news and creating some content around it to react to it uh so react PR good example would be bulk.com uh now there was a story from Chris Martin who's the singer in Cold Play how he does intermittent fast and he only eats one meal per day So this became big news one week so what bulk.com did through it was actually through search

intelligence uh 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 and nutritionist to explain why that maybe wasn't such a good idea for everybody and this really hits on controversy and expert opinion so like 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 kind of controversy and that is quite appealing from a a journalist

perspective and from a news perspective remember try and get in the in the minds of journalists when you're doing this they are uh usually over overworked and underpaid they have huge deadlines to create multiple articles per day they don't have very much time To research so if you're just like giving them everything on a plate say like here's this expert this has his controversial opinion this is all you need like they can make this article really quickly with that so you know they're going to take the path of path of least resistance um when they

can do you think like search intelligence had the relationship before they did this or they just found people who talked about the story and did not know them so I I Don't know maybe F from searching intelligence can can weigh on that one but I will say when we first got into digital PR I had this assumption that all agencies and they had these special relationships and that's really how they were getting most of the links but uh 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 like the story should carry itself so you don't really need to Rely on these these relationships for that I'm sure it happens but um it's it's hard to say exactly how much yeah okay yeah fair but like you know it's like for example when I did this story on like CET that uh was using AI content like I actually got some editors in chift that like open their DMS to me on Twitter and so on for and that just allowed me to like directly Feit 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 uh the journalist perspective again they're getting you know dozens of pictures every single day from for people from from story so 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 um versus if they don't know you or they they not heard Heard of

you so your reputation and some networking for sure counts but it's it it's really a smaller percentage I think the underlying story is the the main thing the reason I'm highlighting that as well is because we' actually built kind of like a contact track inside the notion dashboard inside the so you you are able to kind of like build your own little database of contacts that you have within that industry and then you get to reuse them for your next Campaigns which I think is kind of like a cheat code for link building the more

you do it the better your result yeah and that's not just digital PR you should be doing that like whenever we've built relationships with other other companies in link building space that's almost universally been been fruitful so something a lot of people don't bother doing if they they take a short-term perspective so yeah um speaking of perspectives though uh another type of Newsjacking not just there 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

you know uh it's all always on the 25th of December in most countries I believe some countries do have it in uh different times of the year apparently like Venezuela for some reason uh so essentially what creditfix.com did is created a Christmas Light electricity cost calculator uh and an article to support that they released that at the 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 in electricity and

it worked because it's predictable uh 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 kind of like mood of the Nation as I call it uh around saving money and you know inflation all these these types of things in in 2023 that uh these any article which was around saving money or making more money uh tended to to perform quite well so they wasn't it the year when there was this crisis with Ukraine and like energy costs were like

crazy high and stuff like wasn't it also piggy back ring on that I think uh I see The article is from 2022 oh 2022 yeah you're you're right so that would have been even more of the case than electricity cost being being high here in Europe at least so yeah yeah I I just R my calculations actually and it says that I would spend 460s for running Christmas lights for for a month and a half so that's I see was really high like I yeah I'm definitely this doesn't make me want to move to the

UK that's all I want to say These like LED lights are supposed to be like low energy or something so I I don't know but but anyway the the interest of this campaign is that uh you know 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 uh the energy 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 um and so and so like that that is perfect because you 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 uh that's trendy in two ways almost you know in in a seasonal way and in a news way having said that it only got 20 links so and I Say only that's that's kind of normal for a campaign uh but depending

on how much effort you put into it that you know you can say is that was that worth it or not uh you know what's interesting is that uh these kind of calculators you can now do this with clo basically clo can actually write a calculator like the one on that page so um while maybe have like it was a little bit difficult for some people to make that kind of campaigns before now you just need a Good idea and you can use cloth artifacts to generate this uh you can make it a plugin through

it and then you could you could essentially have that kind of calculator built on your site and run that kind of campaign for 20 even for 20 good links it's totally worse doing because the amount of resources needed to do something like this is so little right now actually and that's really the game with doing digital PR inhouse and doing it yourself Is optimizing for return on investment so not spending thousands and thousands getting the content or the data that you you need and that actually leads perfectly into the first of the campaigns that we

ran internally uh and we were really trying to do this on the cheap first time around so without without going all out uh the campaign that we ran was around the most popular side hustles in the US so if you remember back to the map type campaign With the Emojis this is a similar kind of structure we're doing a Content first approach we're taking data from Google Trends which is free and about the the cheapest easiest way you can collect data on something uh we're we're tapping into that emotion of popularity so what's the most

popular uh site hustle in each state and we're also tapping into the the comparison aspect so how does my state compare to every other state so our our approach and our Thinking was maybe this will will work and maybe this people will find this this interesting and it did work relatively well I in total we got 31 referring domains to it uh from sites like market watch go banking rates and then a lot of these small local newspapers as well like Oregon live syracuse.com pen live.com and there was a bunch of others as well uh

throughout we got a link from casinos.com I don't know if that's a good thing or bad thing But it's a the 72 links I'm not sure if that was like a kind of Scrapy type link or we I don't imagine we Outreach to them to be fair no okay but there's some good ones like uh yeah there's there's some good links in there I'm checking it now for sure and so like to outline the process of how we we went through it generally there's there's three steps like ideation so coming up with the thing you're

going to do uh content where you create the thing and then Outreach where you Outreach and try and get links for ideation we want 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 uh in 2023 it was it was super part the the the mood of the nation as I I call it around saving money um you know every penny counts kind of thing was 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 kind of one step remov from that but still kind of connected so that that's why we we went with that approach in terms of coming up with our originality anchor here the the thing that makes us unique uh we wanted to do this based on a a map because we'd seen those types of campaigns uh work well before and we knew that would give us a Lot

of prospects to outreach to so we had that in mind so it was really just how can we compare side hustles across different countries or different states and Google Trends was the cheapest probably not the best but the cheapest way we could uh we could could look at that uh one question is like how far can you go from your the core topic of your site and to like uh someone who is let's say semantic SE oriented like and tells you like oh you're far away from your C Topic that's hurting your website what would

you answer yeah that is a good question uh you can go pretty far uh I mean look at the crossword solver one they had one uh targeting most popular emojis like how is that related maybe they're both kind of to do with language but it's a it's a little bit of a scratch isn't it okay but I that's also what agencies do right when I check like campaigns from agencies they also go a little bit far From the the subject matter I think if you want to get like kind of like wide coverage from large

media you need to talk about like you know broader appe topics and it's not always what you do the way 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 uh like broad B Toc topic to this so if you're in uh you know some kind of industrial food processing uh Machinery and all that no one cares about but food waste or food of any kind might be a more interesting like starter for for your research for for something like

that maybe food recalls could could also work uh so try and do it that way you could also focus on on companies uh you know we could do something on Google or open AI for example you focus on longer long longer term Trends and this is really where there's not really a single way you know step one do this Step two step three do this but you need to look at what are the outcomes that you're 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 creativity honestly it's it's hard to do a complete Pain by numbers for for that bit I think this is the perfect Saveway to talk about our sponsor of today search intelligence has created the world's first digital PR Ideation tool to help you find that inspiration for your next campaign the initial inspiration for digital PR ideas can be pretty tough especially if you don't have a team to work with with our new tool idiot. online all you have to do is give it your site's domain name and within a

few seconds you got ton of ideas for your next digital PR campaign it's really interesting the tool is trained with data from search intelligence's successful campaigns and Honestly it's pretty good we tried it with our domain Authority hacker clicked the capture to prove we weren't robots and a few milliseconds later the tool accurately picked out our site's main topics like SEO digital marketing strategies and affiliate marketing and there are dozens and dozens of suggestions for our next digital PR campaign it even broke down suggestions into helpful categories like saving and preventing warnings and dangers best

Worst tools frequency why and why not and even Regional specific ones like UK tabloid media this is actually a huge timesaver because the story structures behind this have already been tried and tested and proven to work so even if you don't use the exact suggestions I'm sure it's going to sparkk some massive inspiration and remember you only need one good idea from the tool to have a successful campaign you can kick these campaigns off yourself or to take the Hassle completely out of your hands click the execute this idea button to get in touch with

search intelligence to do it for you making a creative digital PR campaign has never been easier thanks again to search intelligence for sponsoring this video all right so let's go back to the campaign right so popular s side hustle we came up with the idea because that was kind of related to our topic like how did we actually like we put the together from Google uh Trends You say then what did we do we found the most popular side hustles across the US made a made a list of them and then researched in every state

Google Trends lets you filter by state so we looked at the trends for each one in every state took a bit bit of work put it all into a spreadsheet and then we made a 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 of campaign and it's in Terms of making an originality anchor it's like it's not that great what we then did is we found some pricing data on how much people were getting paid for each side hustle in every

state we got that from indie.com and zip recruiter to recruitment websites so then we compared all of that and then we put it into uh a map on our site that it's kind of like an interactive map you can hover over each state and see what the most popular ones are and how much they cost we did Use our Dev for this uh 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-the-shelf code especially for things like maps that you can use

and probably do that in a fraction of the time or even even code it yourself in a of no code way we then created our article where we're s placing ourselves at the center of the news cycle talking about other stories which are are related to side hustles and general Economic Doom and Gloom to to help kind of cement its purpose in a way and then we presented all the individual data state by state in uh toggle dropdowns 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 like if you stuck to just Google Trends would that have been enough uh if good question so 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 kind of something 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

to it what I will say is that we've never once been asked to provide the underlying data uh no one really checks however uh I have been told that when you're working with tier one Outlets you Know think BBC New York Times that kind of level uh they're they look a bit more kind of behind what's what's going on to 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 sadness cost of living uh side hustles and you know 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 uh list of articles there uh and that was essentially our our 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 uh journalist databases and tools specifically to find emails of journalists uh so we used one called prowley which is currently run by or owned by uh sem Rush actually uh

and it's Uh at the time it was great because all of the other tools out there cion and uh these kind of kind of tools were super expensive you know 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 prowley was like $299 a month so still not cheap but it was was all right the problem with prowley is they have credit limits on exports I don't know if they got that one from from ahr Maybe they learned a

thing or two there uh the user interface is a little bit complex right they've they've gone to town on adding all these features for like email sending and Link monitoring and all this kind of stuff and it's it's just not necessary like just give me the damn email that's all all I really care about s like yeah uh there the keyword the keyword search in there works but it doesn't work by scraping Google they have some kind of other Tech behind it So yeah it's just it's it's a little bit clunky uh but since then

we didn't use it for this campaign since then we've started using another tool called Journal finder.com this is a third of the price so you pay like $99 a month uh and it's built by someone who actually does campaigns exactly like this so if you think of Hunter doi's interface like how easy it is to upload a list of sites and do a bulk search and just like it just works it's really really well coded Hunter Journal finders like that but for digital PR uh so it will scrape Google and Google news in the same

way that you would do manually so that saves you a ton of time there you can upload a list of URLs and it'll find the authors for the article uh and the media list uh storing is just as good as as as prowley 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 $99 per month I see it yeah if you pay least 83 okay it's that's the thing it's like a lot

of people were intimidating by digitop because the databases were so expensive exactly yeah um and now it's like 99 bucks a month I mean like how much do you spend on in building like if you if you're like a serious thing Builder like you're spending like this times 100 or something and it's a it's it's definitely reachable for most people Actually looks cool I haven't tried it but I definitely want to try actually so then it comes to outreach where we all we do is we send them a short message in the beginning in these

these campaigns we were trying to personalize it I think a bit too much saying oh hey we read your article about don't care this other thing we're coming from like 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're just want to quickly get to the the gist of the story like and make a decision do do I want to cover this or not uh so they welcome pitches uh but if they're they're not good they'll just

just ignore them so uh it was kind of a learning experience there so the structure of your pitch should be uh a short introduction about what you're trying to pitch to them personalization all you really need these days is to Have their their name uh and then kind of 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 uh because we had lots of data and toggles and things like that we just took the kind of top section

for what were our key findings and takeaways and and pasted that there that means the journalist doesn't even have to click out of their inbox to uh read everything They need to and and make a decision about whether they they want to feature us or not okay so what's the what's the heat rates with these kind of campaigns like how many emails do you send and how many you actually get picked up so we were looking at about 2 to 5% success rate uh Outreach resulting in uh a link it's a little bit difficult to

gauge interest initially with digital PR because and this was surprising to me because nobody responded to to the Emails uh they just cover the story and then you find out about it usually through ahrs or Google alerts or or something as opposed to them saying hey we featured you cuz Journal they 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 so they run emails take your stuff uh publish it and then uh move on to the next

thing yeah yeah okay um but like 5% is pretty good Actually if you think about like outreaching in general like if you Outreach to normal websites like 5% you're pretty happy I think absolutely and and it's because you've created something valuable here through your your originality anchor like the the data we and the way it's presented uh is interesting to a lot of people as was evidenced by the coverage that it got so yeah I'm pretty happy with that yeah I think it's good it shows you like you Know people imagine also digital PR is

like it's so intimidating that like journalist will never pick it up and your success rate would be like way lower than it would be forver which I would almost argue it's it may be reversing at this point because like everyone's spamming web Masters like crazy and people are a bit intimidated by digital PR so it's kind of a case of like you Z when the zag and you just avoid the C the crow by actually going In that direction and you do get better links in the end so yeah I think it's gotten more accessible

as the knowledge has gotten better and tools have gotten better and cheaper more affordable joh finder is great actually exactly yeah uh let's talk about the next campaign sure so the next campaign we ran was around job security uh and this was really interesting because at the time we launched the campaign at the start of 2024 uh a lot of big tech companies were Laying off a lot of people so we wanted to create uh a campaign and we kind of had AI at the back of our mind 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 uh so when we were looking for AI stories uh at the Start of the year a lot of layoff stories came up around these these big tech companies I think in the first five weeks of 2024 there were 33,000 layoffs in Tech in the US um and there's quite quite a

lot uh right before that at the end of last year as well one CEO in particular was blaming AI generative AI for for a lot of this stuff so we're like okay we've got our our kind of angle for 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 in this space to further the story that's that's already kind of the new cycle that's already going on so our idea was to create a survey here uh we used a tool called pfish

to do which we we talked about in the last episode of the podcast we were talking about our our linkable asset campaigns running survey so we use the same tool P fish.com to uh survey I think it was 12200 people in the US About how they felt about uh job security we asked them some questions like you know how safe do you feel you are on your job how How likely you think your job is to be your job security is to be affected by Ai and how the economy will affect your your job security

uh so it was really interesting because pfish gives you demographic data for all your participants so you can then break down people's responses by age uh the sector they work in employment status salary Even uh which led us to to find this really interesting Dynamic that uh older better paid Tech workers were by far the most scared of AI which is interesting because they maybe know AI a little bit better so is it is it because they're more aware of what it can actually do and this is a real threat so we wanted to kind

of like tap into that scarcity um like fear-based emotion when we're we're creating this this this piece so when we end when we ended up Analyzing the data uh we were able to pull out a lot of cool uh charts and and stuff like that uh which we we made up in canva and we' even gotten our illustrator to make this nice uh infographic which which broke down the the kind of uh job security concerns by industry as well and all the tech based Industries are are sort of towards the top there so that was

that was kind of cool okay that that's a cool angle um I think it may be a bit risky or scary for The listeners 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 uh I I would count this as a pretty successful campaign that's the thing it's like 27 links and the problem is that counting just the number of links is

it doesn't necessarily reflect on like how well a campaign has done Because like okay if you got 27 links from the R3 sites like you cannot compare to getting links from from these kind of sites I'm looking at it now yeah we have Business Insider uh we have yeah there's are allot good ones there are like let's call them unscrupulous unscrupulous link dealers out there I you probably get emails from them as well uh 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 like $800 or $1,200 for 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 uh the value of one of these links according to that Market at least is is very very high and considering like the main cost for our campaign here was the survey data which was I think it was like $1,100 give or take uh to to run it uh we already made our our money back Almost in just like one

of those links you depending on how you value obviously but when we got several those links so it it was a successful campaign that had a good return this one I would I would say for that's the thing I think that's so important it's like the cost per link is like so much lower than like going through the market and Outsourcing it it's it's quite insane like as you said like pretty much one of these links that we got I have HS open now like a Business Insider link or a Yahoo link or a Fast

Company link like that would be the cost of almost the entire company maybe a little bit less but not a lot uh and so like we managed to build like essentially 10 15 times more links that like discounting some of the lower links uh in there like I see some lower Links at the end so it's like they're not all great um but like that that if you divide your cost Pink by 10 like what does that do to your SEO strategy in General like how much uh how much more can you get out of

SEO for the same budget and I think that's kind of like the essence of what we're trying to tell people you know that's the game of Link building is it's not like can I build links yes everybody can do it if they just try a little 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 right but also how can I do this in a way Where I'm still ouri positive because as we said in the previous podcast

like to get to your site to a level of authority where you can compete decently in search these days you need pretty high Authority right it's like Dr 5060 is like a I'd say you stop playing you know uh and and in many Industries like 70 plus to stop playing uh you know you know something that's funny uh so I I lived in Hungary for eight and a half years and I only just learned this uh Earlier this year is that there's a saying about Scottish people in Hungary um that they're they're really cheap and

I I didn't realize that was a thing from from Hungary that's pretty offensive but uh sure exactly but but it is like we us us Scots we're notorious Penny Pinchers and I think that that has uh come through in our Approach at Authority hacker to to link building like we've built thousands and thousands of links for like very very little money um and It's because like I just refused to spend like shitloads of money on on you know going balls to the wall with some of the stuff so and and then I want to say

like you can absolutely hire helpful like competencies you don't have in house but I think like hiring help for every single link you built seems like crazy in terms of budget you know full disclosure like when we first got into this we worked with some digital PR companies and some professionals in There cuz like it's great to learn learn from it but like building up the your own competency in in house like it's an invaluable thing you can do for your your business so yeah because I think to give some context to people like we

build all these links was like one link Builder on payroll like that's it that's and that was like half of his job as well you know yeah yeah he was doing something else as well or something so it's like and and obviously a little bit Of money into the polling and tools and everything like we do spend money there but like that's that's the the extent of the link budget and that's the kind of links that we manage to build and so you know it's like I know a lot of people are looking they're like

oh you guys are launching a link building course or like I've seen these tactics already before Etc that's not the point the point is like how do you execute this at a decent scale and at a very very very good and Competitive price where if you're an agency you can save a bunch of money and if you're in house you can get a lot more for your budget and you can be competitive in SEO because with the budget you have you can you know take on much larger size than than yours if they if they're

not doing this and so that's kind of without getting too much into a pitch but also like how you can get your team members to do all of the work to do that so you don't have to I didn't do Any of this prospecting Outreach had a little bit of input on the ideation and things like that but our our team executed the entire campaign essentially without us yeah yeah it's like a lot of this stuff I'm like literally discovering as we prepar this podcast you know um so like yeah that's I I I just

wanted to say that because I know there will be some some criticism on like uh on some stuff we're releasing right now but I want to say like the Point is not like the tactics the point is like how much and how and at what scale like how much do you spend and at what scale can you do this conveniently without dropping the quality while getting links from the sites that we're talking about uh that's that's the the challenge of Link building not the ability to build links let's keep going just just to finish off

on the last one on how we actually did did the Outreach for for that one so it was very similar To the the previous piece uh we looked for articles that were covering the tech layoffs which there were a lot of at the time um and any kind of uh Workforce reduction in major companies so like Google Amazon Microsoft Spotify like people who were covering those specifically and just any any other General like stateof the economy topics we use prowly again to to find contact info for them um and we we are reached in a

very very similar way there were a Couple small differences the pitch that we did at the end of the email was a little bit longer just CU there was a lot more to convey with this one and we also attached the infographic that we we created as as well so um I'm not sure how much that that affected things but yeah we got uh 27 referring domains from this and was was pretty happy with it um especially considering job security it's like it does have broad appeal but it's starting to get a little Bit yeah

a little bit more Niche and uh that s 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 ah fall asleep here sounds it's it's probably not the best uh angle but we still made it work which is quite interesting so we got 21 referring domains in this one so it's it was slightly less than the others but still was pretty reasonable for a digital PR Campaign considering um the the time and energy invested in this one um

wasn't particularly high like once we'd figured out to do how to do this process before a lot of it was just doing the same thing again so it was it was quite easy we got link from tech radar so dr90 site there and we also got links from Mmm online which is like a medical marketing website so very very kind of specialist B2B site there dr75 GRC World forums which is about Corporate responsibility and governance so you know some very interesting uh topics there for you to to read but again Dr 71 site very uh

a bit more Niche let's say and that was I think because the topic was a bit drier in 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 as we were doing that AI regulation Specifically in the US was being talked about a lot uh now I realize now that the the average person in the street does not care about AI regulation uh you 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 so we were hoping we could kind of tap into that a little bit how how much did we spend on these like did we did we spend a lot of of money on these so this one We spent we went with 2,000 respondents uh I think we maybe maybe made a mistake there uh because that cost twice as much as a campaign with 1,000 respondents and I don't think it brought us

anything extra I would say we break even here like given the links we got it's like I wouldn't say it's like the best campaign ever uh and we learn from this but uh but like given the L link from tech radar and these dr70 plus sites it's it's I would say will break even when I First got into digital PR one of the first things I remember being told was that you need a minimum of a thousand survey respondents to be taken seriously uh and 5,000 if you're going for a tier one publication you know

the BBC or New York Times so so 2000 it was like kind of unnecessarily in the middle there we should have just stuck to 1,000 saved the money and and gone from there we also did some research uh like 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 uh sites in in different countries but that didn't really pan out so

well um because of the the nature of the topic and a lot of countries just didn't have regulation didn't care about it and it again it wasn't this they didn't care yet until Like see see you in a few years when the jobs start falling off and then people would care more yeah exactly but then people they're not going to blame the regulation they'll blame the current politicians or you know the the tech CEOs or whoever it is um so would you say you regret doing this campaign like it was okay but it was no

because it's it's a great learning experience from a point of view of I I think it was a well executed campaign it's just we got the The angle and the 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 we we could have maybe found a a way uh of of linking it to you know AI fears and and that kind of thing yeah yeah maybe something on around a companies maybe lobbying around politicians

or manipulating them or yeah exactly like you know how how they're trying to control you or like steal your Data or whatever it is so yeah when it came to creating the content for this piece uh we used a color simple colorcoded map so no Dev work was required here I think we did all that in in canva uh presented the top level findings from the the survey um I I think we could have still presented the the story a little bit better maybe made the survey results a bit more more visual I think it's

a bit Wy to be honest it's like if again if I was Involved with this it's like I feel like journalist just don't have time to read this and uh I would focus maybe a bit more above the fold like quick takeaways or something like this like a lot of big newspapers do that uh that would be my take what we were trying to do was cement our story within the news cycle so we're saying all this other interesting stuff has been happening and we're kind of 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 um I think we we should have gotten to the point more and made those results a bit more visual in that in that way yeah I agree I mean again good learning experience and it shows that like not every campaign is successful but it doesn't mean you can't save a a ton of money running your own campaigns like this one was like I would call it a break even campaign like buildings we got was like it's it's okay But it's like if

we had outsourc it probably would have been around the same price for the same result uh but the other the other ones were like significantly better and we just keep doing this and keep getting better at this but you know we wanted to be realistic and show you like stuff that we've done uh and so on and the point of this podcast was to kind of like remove the The Shield that people have against digital PR thinking only qualified Professionals can do this like everyone can do this provide you uh run an interesting story and

run Outreach that's not bad and you can build these links that like the really big sites have for really a fair amount of money like I want to repeat that our cost per link on digital PR is like around $130 uh which like it's not cheap but we're talking like the you know 80 90 plus links uh that you would probably buy for like a, bucks on the market if You were uh if you were actually passing through someone else so we're talking about huge saving and huge essentially but if you're an agency huge potential

profit margin right if you're able to do these links for this price and you sell them for a thousand bucks like that's a that's a fair amount of profit that you can do even if you have some stuff on on payroll Etc and so like that's the opportunity for people who are still focusing on SEO that is to essentially Learn to build that skill inhouse so you can build these kind of links that people still sacralize a lot for not a lot of money or or for like a budget that most people can reach so

I hope we managed to do that in this episode and show you some real life examples and if you want to learn how to actually do these campaigns Mark has shot like 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 so if you want to learn more about the course that includes that jitop module and a bunch of other things as well you can go On autor hacker.com linkbuilder Academy and you'll be able to have all the information but the launch 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

phasically uh so that's pretty much it hope you guys enjoyed this episode if you did we'll see you uh in two weeks for another one byebye all right that's a wrap for today's episode I hope you Got your creative juices 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 Co sling 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 andr systems the same systems that allowed us to build digital PR Lings for just $130 each Guest post on the r60 plus size for just $75 and linkable asset size for a mere $8 above and here's the kicker we're giving you a taste for free you'll get a full module of the training and a custom build chat but to help you snack High Authority newspaper links it's kind 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 so to get your free module head over to Authority hacker.com high-- links I Repeat Authority hacker.com High dg- links put your email and you get instant access thanks for tuning in today we can't wait to see you inside linkbuilder Academy and until next time keep crushing it out there