Crowdsourced Interviews – I’ve been in on a few of them and there’s an abundance of potential awesomeness to get from doing interviews like this. First up, you’ll get all the participants linking and sharing socially to their followers. That alone makes it worth doing. Group interviews like this always bring great content to the reader and a lot of social shares and links from them as well. Even if it’s only a dozen links and a few dozen new social followers, if you aren’t going after techniques like this, you’re doing it wrong.
Interviewing Someone Great – If you’re a newer brand or an established one, this tactic never fails. We like connecting with the biggest writers in the industry and interviewing them on the host blog. If you’re new in the scene, this can be a great way to “socially surf” off of their followers, gain that extra exposure and pull in some of their followers. These interviews are great content for your readers and it almost always results in a link back from the interviewees website/blog.
Offer To Be Interviewed – For those companies with a good rep in their industry, asking fan blogs and industry blogs to get interviewed can’t hurt. Don’t come off desperate but extend yourself to them if they’re ever interested.
Getting Cited From News Sites:
This is perhaps one of the harder aspects of getting quality links, but there is hope! Getting links from NY Times, Reuters, Huffington Post and others takes planning. While these links happen naturally if your company has a big news event or pulls a PR stunt, you can also get them unnaturally by paying them for it (you’d be surprised how many news corps will let you buy a link). Every big brand should have a PR person who’s in constant contact with media types in addition to constantly building relationships that will get to the buzz you’ll want to get. Link builders can do this but if you’re a large company, you should have someone more suited to keep these relationships alive.
Connecting With Reporters - Thankfully, there are a handful of awesome services that connect you to the world of news reporting. I’ve had the pleasure of using all of these with various clients, and it has even netted our company a few links in the past. Some of these I’m sure you’re familiar with, others are hopefully a pleasant surprise to a lot of you.
Help A Reporter Out – If you haven’t used this free service yet you’re either daft or living under a rock. This service connects you to over 50,000 journalists from all over the world. They fire off daily emails that you can reply to in hopes of getting quoted, interviewed or even on air exposure!
Reporter Connection – This is another service just like HARO. It isn’t as busy but it has a lot of connections in its database and is a great attempt as a different source. There are tens of thousands of journalists in their database so don’t ignore this service one more day.
PR Manna – This is another well executed service that was launched by
a brilliant mind in the industry. PR Manna was launched to help make it easy for entrepreneurs to get the word out and connect journalists with experts for their news. The service even got on the HARO’s nerves enough to send some
legal threats their way.
ProfNET By PRNewsWire – Tis is one of the more old school (1992) services out there and it isn’t free, but I can tell you from experience the small price tag is well worth it! They have tens of thousands of journalists locked in there as well, so you’ll not have too much of a problem making the right connections.
Flack List – Perhaps the newest kid on the block within the realm of journalist to expert services, but also one of the best handled. First up, it’s free so you can’t go wrong with the price. Secondly, they now have a great user-base that’s definitely worth trying your luck with.
News Basis – This is the big boy of the group right next to HARO. They stand out by employing better technology, however, and as a result, it makes dealing with this service a breeze. Where as HARO is a glorified email list for the most part, News Basis actually cuts out a lot of the work for you and make it really easy to connect. They have quite the database of experts and journalists and I’d argue that they’ll grow to be the biggest in a short time.
Media Kitty – This is another service but unlike most of the others, it costs $89.95 a month to use. If you’re a smaller brand, I’d recommend you try it out for a month and see how it goes. Otherwise, the price might be a little steep for the results you get.
When it comes to getting PR and links, you sometimes have to do all you can to score the good stuff. Check it out, see what others are saying and decide for yourself.
Finding Journalists On Twitter & LinkedIn - The best links come from online relationships right? Well Twitter and LinkedIn are your best tools at getting the job done. I’ve got a few tips that will help all of you out and then I’ll let Google and your skills do the rest. I’ll break things down so you can get to the good stuff quickly and sift through the copious amounts of BS I usually fill in between the tips…
Twitter – There are thankfully a whole host of resources out there such as lists, using Google to search for specific people and compiled lists on blogs. I had a text file sitting on my hard drive for so long full of my most useful bits and pieces, so here goes.
LinkedIn – It’s as easy as searching the groups for journalism/journalists and you’ll find over 10,000 LinkedIn members within minutes. A lot of journalists also share their LinkedIn information on their bio, along with their email and Twitter information. I’d recommend starting your own private list and targeting the right journalists in your vertical. Google is also a great way to sift through prospects on this site. For example, this Google
search query brings back 30,000+ results that are worth looking through.
Press Release Strategies – Start by reverse engineering press releases picked up on big news sites and see where they came from. From there, you can do link analysis on the original press release and see where it got picked up. Each big wire service has its connections and that’s why I always recommend to our clients to release different ones on a few different places. While links from press releases are maybe not the greatest, they can lead to more brand exposure and bloggers writing about your news.
Getting your news picked up on various places also relies heavily on the pre-launch options you set with your wire service. The options can be anything from the right tags to picking the right regions and specific industry to the title you choose. Again each service is different so the more you experiment, the more desirable your outcomes will be. A lot of news sites pick this stuff up based on those factors alone so know what you’re doing before hitting that submit button. Here are a few of the wire services we use on a regular basis with clients which hit a lot of big news sites:
