Link building strategies: News media

Posted by Ken McGaffin on 21 March 2012

Targeting news media should be part of everyone’s link building campaigns. You can do this on your own, or use Wordtracker’s Link Builder tool as the perfect starting point.

In Link Builder’s ‘News media’ strategy you’ll see:

• Media outlets that link out to other sites (unlike other media directories).
• Media outlets ranked in decreasing order of importance.
• The exact URL where the links sits so you can go there directly and understand how the link got there.
• A mixture of mainstream, industry specific and niche link prospects.

From our own experience over the last 12 years, we know how valuable coverage and links in the media can be. There are three main benefits any business should think about:

• Media coverage brings an immediate surge in traffic on the day the story is released
• Quality media sites are regarded as authority sites by Google because, to be published, you have to convince a reporter, an editor and even a fact checker before you get published
• There’s a cascade effect at work - if you get one story published in a major media outlet, then other journalists and bloggers will write about you and comment on the story - you get additional links as a bonus.

So let’s look at a number of examples. In this strategy you’ll find a wide variety of media stories. We’re going to look at four:

• CBSNews.com
• Forbes.com
• TravelandLeisure.com
• Chronicle.com (higher education publication).

When you create a link building campaign, your link prospects are automatically organized into different link building strategies. Note that in order to get the largest selection of media outlets possible, you should enter the URLs of leading brands in your market (or leading magazines and information sites).

CBSNews.com

Click on ‘News media’ to see the sites that we have grouped under that strategy:

I have highlighted CBSNews.com as a link prospect that is linking to www.threadless.com and the URL on which the link sits is http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505143_162-41840961/five-things-your-company-can-learn-from-threadless

From the article, you can see that the journalist who wrote the story is Donna Fenn. Your next job is to hunt around the site and see how you can make contact. This can take a little effort, but you may find that the best way is to search for the journalists on Twitter. It’s then easy to make contact with the journalist involved:

The fact that so many journalists use Twitter to get feedback on their stories - and more importantly from the link builder’s point of view - as a source for news stories and interviews, makes the ‘News media’ strategy relevant to websites of any size.

Forbes.com

Are you ready with your quote? (If you are, you can get some great links!)

Journalists need real people to give them insights and interesting quotes for their stories and this example from Forbes.com shows that:

Browsing through the links prospects, I came across “Last Minute Holiday Marketing Tips From Six Top Retailers’. This is a very common type of story - it’s quick copy for the journalist under pressure to meet a deadline and can offer rich pickings for the link builder (Read our articles in Online PR to learn how to do it).

TravelandLeisure.com

TravelandLeisure.com is a niche site that appeared when I was building a campaign for the outdoor clothing industry.

Follow the top link and again, Link Builder takes you to the page on which the link sits at http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/best-affordable-fall-adventures/1

In this case they make it easy to get in touch at http://www.travelandleisure.com/contact (but remember Link Builder can find contact pages automatically).

Chronicle.com (higher education publication)

The final example I’ll show you is a higher education niche publication, which can offer link opportunities to a surprisingly wide range of businesses, as you can see at http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/five-things-that-helped-us-survive-summer/26233

And here’s the story:

This story is full of links: From having a quick look, ‘PROFHACKER’ has a group blog within the site. It includes bios for all the contributing writers - gold dust for a publicity-hungry link builder!

So the ‘News media’ strategy brings an online public relations facility to every user. And we guarantee that every single link prospect that we provide links out to external sites.

For further tips on how to make this work for your site, see Online PR

Try Link Builder free for 7 days

So it can be done. There really is a tool for link builders that will help you research and find media prospects, plan your campaigns, and monitor targets.

It’s called Link Builder. You can register now for a free 7 day trial