Put on your creative hat and hunt down websites and blogs manually that are related to your linkbait and contact them directly, in particular if the piece has educational value, make sure to contact authority figures and educators directly. For example if your topic is about astronomy, email the professors and tutors directly, don't bother emailing generic addresses such as "info@", these will be flagged as spam and deleted. Also don't forget to also contact your local journalists, often they are looking for interesting / off-beat topics to fill in the gaps, you might just land yourself a great link from a authority news site.
Seventeen years on, the method has not changed much. You find the people who actually cover the subject, you write to them one at a time, and you do not send anything to an address beginning with info@. What has changed is the standard a pitch has to meet. Editors receive a hundred of these a day now, so the thing you are offering has to be something they cannot get elsewhere: original data, or a named expert who will go on the record.
The 81 placements behind the average DR of 82 quoted further up this page were built that way, one editor at a time. There is no list to buy for that, and very little of it can be automated.
Link building also sometimes goes by the name of "offsite optimization." It is very important to your SEO efforts, and it's also one of the most time and labor intensive. You can't wish other webmasters into linking to your site, and when they do, what anchor text are they using? How will you get inbound links to deep pages in your content?
OK, sure: great content is important. But who has time to wait around for the world to finally discover your great content? You need a great plan to go along with your great content. Consider link building as a vital business strategy for your website's long term success. It has to be integrated into your standard business practice and regularly tended to.
The anchor-text question in the first paragraph dates it. The last line does not, and it is the part that still decides whether this work pays. Link building fails far more often from being treated as a project than from being done badly. A campaign that runs for a quarter and then stops leaves a profile that looks exactly like a campaign that ran for a quarter and then stopped, which is a shape search engines have been able to recognize for well over a decade.
It is also why we report placements as they land rather than in a summary at the end. A client watching the pace can tell when it drops, and so can we.
OK, let's be honest right off the bat: most press releases received by most media organizations go right into the recycling bin. But that doesn't mean yours will. For one thing, the good press releases have a few things in common, and for another, "media" now includes bloggers, ezines, streaming content producers, and freelancers. Whoever you plan to send press releases to, do some research on them first and make sure that your press releases would be a good fit for their organization. It's the 21st century version of the old "don't send a dog article to a cat magazine" rule.
The list of what counts as media has kept growing since, and the research step is still the one people skip. A pitch sent to everybody performs about as well now as it did then.
What we do differently is decide who to approach before anything gets written. The angle follows the outlet rather than the other way round, and that is most of the reason our placements land on sites with a DR in the eighties instead of on aggregators.
So really, the first thing you should ask yourself when you're thinking about sending a press release is "Should I be sending a press release? Or is this just an exercise in vanity or wishful thinking?" Use the "so what" test, because this is what journalists and publishers do. If your press release says, "XYZ Widgetry, Inc. recently hired Dr. Joan Thingity to be head of their engineering development department," the first thing the journalist is going to think is, you guessed it, "So what?"
Ah, but if your next sentence tells about how she won a MacArthur genius grant for her work on desktop plasma widgetry (or whatever) and that she was at one time part of NASA's astronaut corps, then you've got an answer for the "So what" question. If your press release cannot answer the "So what" question, then don't send it. Wait until you have something meaty.
Sixteen years on, the so-what test is still the first thing a client's idea goes through here, and it is still where most ideas stop. Saying no to a release that has no answer is the most useful single thing an agency does on this service, and it is the part clients least enjoy paying for.
It is also why we would rather build a piece of original research with a client than announce a hire. One of those has an answer to "so what" already and the other has to borrow one.
You may wonder why you should bother at all with press releases, since they have such a high chance of disappearing into the gaping maw that is the editor's office, never to be seen again. But it's all a part of your overall marketing strategy. SEO has a place, plain old advertising has a place, and media relations has a place too. Once you do get a press release or two picked up, consider contacting the editor or reporters you have traction with and offer to send them exclusives. If they know that they're the only game in town getting your press releases, they may just take you up on it.
The last two sentences are the whole business. A first placement is worth far less than the relationship it opens, and the offer of an exclusive is what converts one into the other.
Some of the mastheads on this page have run our clients repeatedly for that reason. The first piece took months of work and the fourth took an email.
Understand that people visiting and linking to your link bait most likely won't know about your business or website. So if your site template includes a lot of navigation / product menus, or any other elements that could be distracting to the potential link mob it might be worth considering a no-frills template / special landing page for the link bait. What you want is a fast loading page where the headline and part of your link bait ( images, videos, text ) is above the fold. By doing this you won't scare off any potential linkers by thinking they have landed on some corporate website or shopping site.
The reasoning survives the vocabulary. Somebody arriving from an editorial link has no relationship with the business and no patience for its navigation, so the page they land on has to answer the thing the article promised before it asks for anything.
We build those pages as part of a campaign rather than pointing coverage at a product category. It is also the cheapest place to lose the value of a placement that took two months to earn.
