It’s one thing to convince a journalist to cover your story, it’s quite another thing to convince them to include a link back to your site. Think about it, the last thing a publisher wants to do is divert traffic away from their domain to yours. So there has to be a really good reason for them to do so. This is why digital PR campaigns need to have a linkable asset.
What is a linkable asset?
A linkable asset can be anything from an in-depth report to a video, a tool, an interactive webpage, competition page, or pretty much anything of real value to your audience. Whatever it is, it has to be something that the journalist can easily replicate themselves and adds real value to your story.
How do I make a valuable linkable asset?
What is valuable to one audience or publisher, won’t necessarily be valuable to another. So you need to be acutely aware of what link-worthy content is for your brand. You don’t want to give away the whole story or assets to the journalist who can then publish everything and have no reason to link to your site. If you have released some newsworthy stats to the press, you may want to hold on to the full report and host that onsite. This provides a reason for publishers to say, ‘and here’s more information on it’ that they simply cannot fit into the story.
Include links in your press release
One of the biggest pitfalls of people executing digital PR is forgetting to include a link to their asset in their press release. Once content is live, it is much harder to convince a journalist to add a link to it. Some journalists will lift sections of the release and publish it, so if you include the links, the better chance you have of the link going live.
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