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If you’re looking to amplify your online presence and secure inbound links to your website to power your SEO, digital PR could be just the ticket. From snagging features in top publications and podcasts, to repurposing content for maximum impact, discover powerful digital PR strategies with Joe Giovannoli, founder of 9Sail.
Unlocking Digital PR Strategies Summary
Key Takeaways
What is Digital PR?
Digital PR is an evolution of traditional public relations, tailored for the online world. While traditional PR focuses on securing coverage in newspapers, magazines, and TV, digital PR targets online platforms. The goal is to get your brand featured in digital publications that matter to your audience, securing backlinks that drive traffic and enhance your SEO rankings. Think of digital PR as backlinking on steroids – it’s about amplifying your online presence in a big way.
The Role of Backlinks in SEO
Backlinks are critical for SEO success. These are links from other websites pointing to your site, acting as endorsements of your content’s quality and relevance. High-quality backlinks from reputable sites signal to search engines like Google that your content is valuable and trustworthy. This can significantly boost your search engine rankings, driving more organic traffic to your site.
One crucial aspect of digital PR is securing backlinks from high domain authority sites. These sites have a strong reputation and can pass on valuable “link juice” to your site, enhancing your authority in the eyes of search engines. It’s like getting a stamp of approval from the industry leaders.
Tailoring Your Digital PR Strategy
Every business has unique goals, and your digital PR strategy should reflect that. Whether you’re looking to improve your keyword rankings or increase your industry presence, it’s essential to tailor your approach to meet your specific needs. This means identifying the right digital publications and crafting pitches that align with your objectives.
Building Relationships with Journalists
In digital PR, a targeted approach is key. Instead of a broad, scattergun strategy, focus on building relationships with specific journalists. Understand the themes and topics they cover, and pitch stories that are relevant to their interests. This not only increases your chances of securing coverage but also helps build long-term relationships that can yield ongoing benefits.
The Power of Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a powerful tool in the digital PR toolkit. When executed correctly, it can secure high-quality backlinks and establish you as a subject matter expert. Instead of sending full articles upfront, pitch a synopsis or a few bullet points to spark interest. Additionally, target sites with high domain authority to ensure that the backlinks you secure are valuable and impactful.
Leveraging Digital PR Content
Securing digital PR coverage is just the first step. To maximize its impact, you need to leverage this content across your marketing channels. Create a 500-word summary of any media appearances or guest blogs and publish it on your site with relevant internal links. This not only boosts your SEO but also provides valuable content for your audience. Additionally, consider creating snippets and clips from these appearances to share on social media, further extending their reach.
Final Thoughts
Digital PR is a powerful strategy for boosting your SEO and online visibility. By securing high-quality backlinks, tailoring your approach to your unique needs, and building strong relationships with journalists, you can position your brand as a trusted authority in your industry. These insights provide a practical roadmap for implementing an effective digital PR strategy.
Unlocking Digital PR Strategies Episode Transcript
Rich: My guest today is the founder and managing partner of 9Sale, a growth marketing agency that coins itself as digital rainmakers. 9Sale provides SEO, PPC, digital PR and content creation services to their clients. Our guest is a fan of hockey, barbecue, wine and bourbon, and collecting watches and sports cards.
Today, we’re going to be looking at digital PR and how it can help you reach more of your ideal customers with Joe Giovannoli. Joe, welcome to the podcast.
Joe: Hey, thanks for having me.
Rich: All right. Can you just start by explaining what you mean by digital PR and how it’s like backlinking on steroids?
Joe: Yeah, awesome. Digital PR is exactly as it sounds, right? We look for digital first publications. Some of them well known, some of them maybe more industry specific, some of them more blog related stuff. But we look to pair our clients desire, need, want to rank for a specific keyword, and we pair that with public relations.
So it’s reaching out to these digital first publications, asking them if we can get a quote on their website or pull up a specific article that they wrote and say, “Hey, we noticed that you write about these topics. We have a great client that can add some real expertise to your next article. What can we do to put you in touch?” We do things like pitch guest blogs for our clients or clients actually write the article. And then we pitch it to a publication that is open to posting a guest contributors content.
But we are looking for digital first publications. We don’t care about getting our clients published physically in ink or Forbes or New York Times or Washington Post or wherever. We’re very focused on that digital footprint, getting them that link one way or the other, whether it is a bio backlink or a link back to their homepage because the firm’s name was mentioned. But we ultimately want to find publications that are going to be twofold, getting them the notoriety and coin them as a subject matter expert and get them a backlinks. So that’s what digital public works is.
Rich: Yeah, so that kind of addressed one of the questions I had. Is the primary only goal getting backlinks? And it sounds like maybe that’s the primary goal, but it’s also to put them in front of this ideal audience, correct?
Joe: Yeah. So it really depends on what the client’s wants and needs are. So we have clients that’ll come to us and say, “Hey, we actually we want to take a more public relations approach to this, so we want to be able to get quoted in places that we can cite on our social media and site within a certain page within the website. We want to keep our news and press page updated.” The goal is actually to get them more industry related publications that they can put on that list.
We are, of course, doing the best practice of trying to get backlinks there. But then we have a lot of clients that are like, hey, we want to do this to infuse our SEO strategy further. It’s a win that we can get in front of the right audience, but we really want you to use this to further build our, keyword rankings for these, X amount of keywords.
So it really depends on the client, but most of our clients are looking at it as, we want to get found higher and we want to be founded in a broader spectrum of places. That’s why they have us do it.
Rich: And Joe, I know you talk about digital publications, and I do know that there are digital magazines that people read. Is most of your focus because of the SEO benefits more on traditional websites, or are there other digital platforms that you might also experiment?
Joe: So most of what we’re focused on is the benefit to their website. And there are clients. typically, we’ll have somebody that’s spreading it through all of their other platforms. We will strategize with our clients. And I think that this is so important.
And I’ll make a small note, whether it’s a PR firm or an SEO firm or both, there should be an ongoing strategy conversation between those entities and the entity that is handling this, the online, the social media, and the content creation for the company. Or in my case, the law firm. But we want to make sure that there’s always this fluid conversation to make sure one, the efforts aren’t ever being duplicated into that, that the right hand knows what the left hand is doing, so that way they can work together to get the most juice out of whatever it is that’s being done.
We spend a lot of time with our clients, social media agencies or their in-house social media person, their content creator. We spend a lot of time with those folks on a regular basis to make sure that we’re all in lock and step.
Rich: Nice. Now, I believe you focus on a lot of legal and healthcare clients or the industries. But talk to me a little bit, whether it’s in those industries or outside of them, what is the vetting process like when you get a new client, and they want this kind of visibility and they want specific backlinks? How do you look at these websites and decide this is worth going after or this isn’t worth going after?
Joe: Yeah, so we do a pretty deep dive once we meet. And we’ll talk law firm for a second, because this can be applied anywhere to any type of business, but law firm is simple because they’re broken out into operating units.
So let’s just say we have a law firm come to us and they want us to work with their corporate law practice on digital PR. We look at the geography that they want to mainly do their work in. And most of the times it’s their backyard. If they’re in a state like New Jersey, we’ll look at central Jersey up to the top of North Jersey. Because if we can get press in their true wheelhouse and their true backyard, that’s going to be a home run. It’s going to be the most profitable work. It’s good proximity to New York, so we spend a lot of time focused in that area. And what we’re doing is we’re building a preliminary list of here are some potential press targets that we could go after. Here’s what the buzz is like in their market. Here are some of the things that local publications are talking about. How does that play into, their corporate practice?
And what we find a lot of times is that some of those clients will weed themselves out. And we’ll talk total addressable market, because it’s a sales and marketing term, but that their total addressable market from a press perspective may not be big enough for us to spend a lot of time on a regular basis. And maybe that becomes a project or a campaign that we work on for a short period of time to get as much as we can out of it.
But what I will say is that when we build these lists, we actually run them by the client before they’ve even become a client. So we want to make sure that we have a good understanding of where they want to go. And it’s all about having the end in mind. So anybody that’s going to do any kind of PR understand what the end is and result is that you’re looking for. Is it social media fodder? Is it hey, we want to do this for SEO purposes. Is it, hey, we have two up and coming rainmakers, we want to stroke their ego to keep them here. That happens a lot in law firms. So it really depends on what the goal is. And then we decide whether or not we feel we can work with the client based off of what their expectations and what their wants and desires are.
Rich: And as you’re going after these publications, are you targeting the publication as a whole, or are you looking at specific journalists or authors for that publication and kind of pitching them specifically?
Joe: Yeah, so it’s always the specific. We start with the broad look at what publications make sense. But then we’re actually really getting granular into the specific journalist, because that journalist is typically going to follow a couple of themes and threads because it’s an area of expertise or an area of interest for them. And it’s a lot easier to connect one on one with a person like that who, you can show that you’ve read their content, that you have maybe even quoted their content somewhere within your client site. We have done that. We’ve had clients quote certain articles from time to time because we feel that, again, it helps us to facilitate that relationship.
But another thing that a lot of PR folks, I’m going to say do not well, is they always look to go into these relationships is they’re going to take, take, take right? “Oh, help my client with this, help my client with that.” A lot of times these relationships are built more organically when you are able to give something without any expectation of something in return.
Giving a journalist that writes on a family law matter a tip on something that you are an expert in that you say, “Hey, have you thought about writing about this celebrity divorce case from the lens of this area of law? If we focus on something like that and we say, Hey, what do you think about this? One, they’ll typically turn around and say, “Hey, would your client like to quote on this? Or, “Would your client be interested in speaking with me so I can get a little bit more educated on it.” Or the other side of that is they say, “Hey, thanks so much, really appreciate that.” And now you’ve started a line of communication where maybe the client doesn’t necessarily get the quote or get an opportunity to be part of that, but now the journalist knows who that firm is and will consider them the next time they’re writing something.
Rich: All right. Makes a lot of sense. Now I know from just my own personal reading of websites, news sources, both locally, the Portland Press Herald, as well as nationally like Wall Street Journal and New York Times, there are times when they’ll link out to a business or to the person who gave the quote, and there are times that they aren’t. Is there any way that you can influence getting that link rather than just getting a quote? And what are some of the tactics or approaches you might take there?
Joe: So it never hurts to ask, first and foremost. Most people who are doing anything with the press fail to ask the simple questions. A lot of our clients, we give them a quick hit sheet where if they have somebody in-house that’s doing some kind of press outreach for them, or they’re dealing with the press, it’s five questions that they should ask the person that they’re dealing with at whatever publication it is.
And the first one is, whether it’s the bio of the attorney, whether it is the homepage of the firm or the specific service that we’re talking about, “Can we have something that links back to our website to give people a source for more information about the person that’s quoted?” Little things like.
Also pulling examples. A lot of times what we’ve done is we’ve pulled examples of other articles on that specific site where they’ve linked out to outside sources. And we said, “Hey, you did this on these three articles. Could you do this for us here?” Now a word of caution, when you’re starting a new relationship with a journalist or a publication, your asks should be way less. Again, you want to give them a bunch before you start to try to take.
Another little tidbit, is there are certain publications that are out there, now, again, the ones you named I wouldn’t call digital first publications, right? They still have a print in circulation, and that is what they’re known for. But there are certain instances, and this is trial and error, where some of these publications actually have a web team that manages the digital side that is completely disconnected from the journalist. So the website is actually willing and able to connect you with the right person to get the right link in the right place.
And you don’t have to worry about continuously going back to the journalist to get that handled, right? Because there, once they’ve handed it off to web team is responsible for it. So just a little nugget for anybody that’s implementing PR in their business, there’s usually a second team that’s responsible for the digital side.
Rich: And when you’re reaching out to these organizations, would you say that you employ more of a direct, brute force type approach, or is it more like a targeted sniper approach where you’re getting very specific with individuals to start to build those relationships?
Joe: Very specific with individuals. Now, if there are several individuals within an organization or a publication that we’re trying to get connected with, we will take a multi-pronged approach where we may reach out to them individually, and then also maybe try some group stuff to try to get them to engage with us. But we always want to show that we are reading and consuming their content that they’re putting out. So we want it to be super targeted.
It takes a lot of time, especially in early days for our team, to read and learn about a specific journalist in a specific publication. We have some of our go-to’s that we already have established relationships with, which is really nice. We have as an example, again in our space, law.com is a big publication that most lawyers read. We have some really good inroads there. So when a client has something that they want to get published, there’s no red tape, we have a really good, established relationship with these folks, and they help to facilitate getting it done.
So we can leverage a lot of our previous relationships with most good PR folks can do. But we take a very sniper approach when it’s a new publication, and we also take our time. So month one, even maybe sometimes month two, we’re not pressing a brand-new engagement, a brand-new publication, to publish something for us. We are very much warming them up, and we get the clients buy in, our clients buy in, and get them to understand this is a process. This is not, what have you done for me lately. This is not a quick hit type of deal. If you want to build press the right way, we need to build these relationships and make sure that you are the go-to person in this person’s mind when they’re going to need a quote on something specific. We do a sniper approach, to answer your question.
Rich: All right. I want to circle back to something you had mentioned earlier, and that’s guest blogging. So when it comes to guest blogging, my experience has been you write for another publication that might have the same audience as you, and in lieu of payment for your work, you get a link to your website or some other resource that you want to put on. Is there anything different, or do you have a different approach to going out and getting those type of opportunities for your clients, as opposed to maybe more of a traditional web-based media site?
Joe: So when you’re talking about non-mainstream publications or even local publications like news publications, you’re talking more about mommy bloggers, if you’re talking about contractors, construction companies. If you’re not dealing with and working with the mommy bloggers, if you’re not working with even the local moms, XYZ town mom’s groups, those are gold mines for you to be able to get inroads into getting some exposure. And if you do what you do well, not really PR-related, but if you do what you do well, you’re going to be mentioned over and over again. And now you have a digital and a word-of-mouth kind of play going there.
But going back to your question, those mommy blogs or their specific industry website, blogs, when you’re going to them and you’re giving them or pitching them on a piece of content, you’re never giving them the piece of content, or you shouldn’t be giving them the piece of content upfront. Rather, you should be pitching them on a synopsis, right? Which is a headline or a title and a couple of bullet points about what you would like to include in there.
Now, a lot of publications, and this is a little bit frowned upon in the industry, but it’s become very commonplace and common practice. Websites that have high domain rating, which I’m going to come back to in a second, because I think that’s another little tip here. They have high domain rating. They’re typically charging something for that guest blog to be published. They are putting it under editing and publication costs, which means that somebody there is going through it. And we have seen plenty where we’ve given them a piece of content. They’d send us back a red line before they go and publish it. So they actually have somebody that’s really reading it and editing it for their readership and making sure that it’s in line with their brand.
So I can understand that cost. But what you want to make sure you’re avoiding is you going to somebody and saying, “Hey, here’s $200. I expect two backlinks for this”, and they go off and they just do it. There’s a really clear line and distinction between those two. The reason why I mentioned domain rating, and I want to just talk on that for a second. There’s a lot of tools out there, some free tools. Moz is one of the free tools, I believe it’s still free. You can use the SEMrush, Ahrefs, but you can look up what domain rating or their domain authority is.
And what you want to do is you always want to make sure you’re going after websites and publications that have a higher domain rating or domain authority than your website. Because link juice, which is the proper term, I always have to caveat with that. It sounds like a made-up word, but it is the real word. That link juice passes back and forth between websites. And you always want a higher domain rating website to pass along to your site, because it shows Google’s algorithm that you are an authority, and a more authoritative website is pointing back to you as a source of information. So that’s one area that we really start with when we’re looking at online guest blog opportunities.
What are their domain ratings? How do they backlink? What do they allow with backlinking? Is it just to the firm’s homepage or to the company’s homepage or is it that they’ll actually link a particular page that we want to send people to. So that’s a really important distinction when you’re going out to a potential guest plug source.
Rich: I definitely understand why a high authority site would be preferable. But how do you balance that with maybe we have a client or maybe our business is in a very specific niche and there may be industry or micro influencer websites that may not have the domain authority that we were hoping for, but their audience might be very relevant? And how do you explain that to your clients if you are going after those lower authority websites?
Joe: So you very much just defined the press play over the backlink play. So at that point, the backlink doesn’t matter. But what does matter is getting people familiar with the name, even if that website didn’t link back to your website.
You’ve done an effective job of getting your brand in front of them. And if they’re curious or they’re interested, they’re going to go out and go Google you and look who you are. The Googling of who a firm is, or who a company is. When they’ve heard the name in a context that’s relevant to them, that is a true part of the buying process and selling process.
We have to explain this to law firms all the time because they don’t understand that, Oh, I was referred to this person, or this person referred us word of mouth is our biggest driver. But they’ll also tell you in the same breath that their attorney bio pages are the most trafficked and visited pages on their website. Why do you think that is? Because people are going online, they’re Googling them, they’re looking up the person, they’re going to their page, and then they’re going a couple of pages in to learn more about the firm. Whether they found us randomly and organically because they searched a specific general term, or they searched for us very specifically and they came into the website and they navigated in the website, that is all part of the digital marketing mix.
Rich: That makes a lot of sense. So talk to me a little bit about how podcasts fit into this whole mix as well. Are you actively going after podcasts in a specific industry to get more visibility for your clients?
Joe: Oh, all the time. So something that’s important to separate, crisis management and breaking news stuff works for some clients or some companies. We spend a lot more time focused on the evergreen, the stuff that’s going to pay for years to come, versus the quick hit. Let’s just get a quote in on this. And don’t get me wrong. We have some clients that we’ve gotten places or that they get reached out to constantly to jump on a newscast or a podcast or something, because they’re a resident expert in a specific field.
Podcasting is a huge part of what we do with our clients and what we see as a big part of digital PR. Because again, podcasts are digital first, right? So it’s a really great way to get you in front of a potential audience that might be interested in using your services, buying your products, whatever, but it also paints you as a subject matter expert. And it allows you to really have your name in the mouth of people that have the audience that you want. So we’re very specific about what we allow our client to be on. And of course they can do whatever they want, but what we spend our time working on is to get our clients onto a specific podcast. We really try to deter our clients from going on things that are just vanity and that aren’t going to do anything for them.
And listen, from time to time we have to prep. We have to prep a firm or attorney or a CMO for a podcast that like it. It’s not going to really matter at the end of the day because the stuff they’re talking about isn’t really relevant to what we’re working on. But it also helps, again, from a press perspective, to stroke the ego of maybe the rainmaker or the partner that’s going to be on that podcast. And it helps to build trust and goodwill within the company.
Rich: Definitely makes sense. And I know for myself, one of my kind of vetting processes if I am going to go on somebody else’s podcast is do they have show notes and is there going to be a link on that page to the things that I’ve done too. Even though my experience is most podcasts do not have very high domain authorities, there are exceptions, but generally they’re not. But that can be still beneficial.
So let’s say we’ve gone out and we’ve gotten this press and we’ve gotten the links back. We’ve gotten our guest blogs. We’ve gotten our podcast opportunities. What do you do with that content on the client side? So how are we best leveraging those opportunities and those appearances so that we can make it?
Joe: So this is a deep, deep question. So from a high level, what we always recommend is that when a client… and I will say, so I also host a podcast, and something that I do is I actually have a 500-word quick summary of the podcast and some of the topics we covered with the guest. I actually have that written up and we give that to the law firm. One, because it also quotes back to us or law firm or partner, whoever we’re bringing in it, quote, it links back to us, which is relevant, but it takes all of the work out of it for them.
So let’s just say for instance, and we just did this. We had an elder law firm, the managing partner of an elder law firm as a guest on the podcast, we talked about a few things. In the summary write up, we actually took the time to internally link a couple of their pages back to the article that we gave to them to publish on their site. So it’s already webbed for them and internally linked to different pages on their website. But what we’ve also done in that is we’ve ensured that we’re going to get the backlink there.
So as a law firm, if they’re going to go and they’re going to be a guest on a podcast and the podcast is not providing that write up, one, they should do a write up summary immediately, right? They should link out to the recording so that way people can get to it quickly. But sometimes what we also will do is we will ask the person that recorded the podcast if they would be open to giving us the raw footage. So that way we can pull little clips and snippets so we can market that on our social channels.
Again, we don’t do the social, but we work with our counterparts to do that. And we ask them if we can do that because we can pull, and there’s AI tools out there that do this by the way, very simply. But we’ll pull little snippets out of there and say, “You don’t want to miss Joe’s appearance on Agents of Change podcast. Check out this clip of a quick back and forth on the value of domain rating.” And we’ll pull that little clip and have the law firm publish that on their page. And we can track all of the traffic that’s now going out of that to the podcast. So that’s just one way that we typically will leverage those podcasts. But there’s definitely a lot of good stuff that you can do there and endless opportunity.
Rich: Awesome. Joe, this has been very helpful. And if people are looking for help in terms of getting their own digital PR going and they want to learn more about you, learn more about your company, where can we send them online?
Joe: So our website is 9sail.com, and it’s ‘sail’ as in like a sailboat. That’s a great place to just reach out, get connected.
What I will say, so we are law firm – and as you mentioned – healthcare focused. If you’re not in one of those industries but you still want to engage in this, still reach out, we will connect you with people that we trust. We are very specific about what we take on. So we don’t take on anything outside of our realm, but we have people that we’ve built relationships over the years that follow our methodologies and follow our philosophy. I’d be more than happy to connect you. It’s becoming more difficult to find great people who are doing this kind of stuff. And we love to connect people to make those intros happen.
Rich: Awesome. Joe, great content, great ideas. Can’t wait to influence some of these myself. Thanks so much for coming by today and sharing your expertise.
Joe: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Show Notes:
Joe Giovannoli and his team at 9Sail specialize in search marketing for their clients, to help them not only stand out and maximize their website’s potential. Be sure to connect with Joe on LinkedIn.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.