How To Get High Authority Links with Digital P.R

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for The SEO Show, where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hi guys, Michael here. And today on the SEO show, we are talking high authority backlinks. Everyone's favorite topic in SEO is backlinks. It's official. And there's nothing like a DR 80 plus backlink. And today's guest is going to talk to us about how we go out and get those things. So I've just got off a chat with Gabby Covay from Bright Valley Marketing. She specializes in digital PR. Digital PR is a big topic in the world of SEO at the moment. It's a bit different to going out and doing typical SEO link building outreach where you might blast an email out to thousands of people trying to get a guest post on a website. With digital PR, you're going a lot more upmarket with your tactics and the types of sites that you're trying to get links from. It's a totally different approach, so I won't ramble on about it anymore. I'm going to throw over to our chat with Gabby Covay from Bright Valley Marketing. Hi, Gabriela. Thanks for joining us on the SEO show today. If you could please let us know who you are and what you do, we'll get going from there.

GABRIELA: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Gabriela Covay and I am the founder and managing director of Bright Valley Marketing, and we are an SEO and a digital PR link building agency. We specialize in helping companies get featured online and prominent news media outlets to get them really nice, high quality, high DR backlinks.

MICHAEL: Cool. So this is digital PR, which is a bit of a hot topic in SEO at the moment. You know, I see a lot of agencies scrambling to offer digital PR and I'm just wondering if you could let me know how does digital PR differ from, you know, maybe creating an asset and then paying for links. You know, if we look at a scale of links and on the bottom, there's really dodgy automated links and maybe in the middle, there's paid guest posting and then maybe at the top, there's digital PR. If you could maybe let me know how it differs from traditional link building, you know, agencies might go out and buy links. So yeah.

GABRIELA: Yeah. Yeah. No, this is so digital PR is totally different because you are essentially earning backlinks. You're earning media coverage without paying anyone because you are directly in touch with journalists and these journalists will feature you because they like the story and they like the data or they like the commentary that you've provided to them. So they will feature you in their articles and without you asking them for money, or without them asking you for money, I should say. Yeah, so because you're essentially, you're giving them something that they want. And oftentimes these articles will show up in really prominent news magazines, online news media outlets, CBS News, ABC News, front page even. So that differs wildly from, you know, just like the sponsored posts or guest posts that are buried on some website that no one's actually going to read. When you are featured on these prominent media outlets, your article will actually be seen and be read by real people. You're not just getting backlinks, you're generating brand awareness. And these are such hard to get backlinks, essentially, because, again, you can't just pay your way through and get that coverage. And of course, there's some media outlets, like Forbes now, obviously, that they offer sponsored posts where you can basically just pay your way through and get an article placed on there. But for the vast majority of media outlets, you can't just pay your way to get featured. And if you do, they have a dedicated paid post section. And that's often usually different than the front page of the news site. If that makes sense, it's in its own category and it will say something like sponsored posts. And sometimes those posts don't even get indexed in Google. So, you know, if they're not indexed, they have really no value.

MICHAEL: Yep, absolutely. Okay. With digital PR, just so our listeners can get an example or understanding of maybe what's possible, could you maybe walk us through a campaign that you've done and some of the results achieved? Because like, you know, someone's buying links, they know they spend X, they'll get Y in terms of links. What does a typical digital PR campaign look like? Or is there even such a thing as a typical campaign in number of links and types of links?

GABRIELA: Yeah, so I mean, with us, we have a process where we basically run campaigns that are survey based. So we run a survey surveys of, you know, three, usually 3000 respondents in the United States on on a variety of different topics that generate original newsworthy data that we then use to pitch to the media on behalf of our clients. So we actually, you know, we ran a pretty successful campaign recently. And it was a New Year's theme campaign for a website where we surveyed 3,000 people in the United States asking them what nature walks they would most want to go on on New Year's Day. So that was like a really nice, feel-good New Year's Day story that generated so much coverage from a variety of local and national news media outlets for our client. We created a ranking, basically, of all these different really cool places in the United that these families really wanted to go on a nature walk on. So all these local media outlets picked up the story and they talked about it and they're like, okay, on New Year's Day, this company ran a survey and they showed that I don't know, like the Chattanooga nature walk is the coolest nature walk that people want to go on on New Year's Day. And here's directions to how to get there, and here's why it's great. So it was a nice feel-good story, and it was really timely and relevant because it was a New Year's-themed campaign. So that generated, I think it was, yeah, it was like over 50 links. It's a lot. Yeah. Yeah, nice. One go.

MICHAEL: So with that, like nature walks, I would imagine your client needs to have some sort of a link, however tenuous, to nature, you know. So you're trying to find an angle that works with the client's niche. Yes. Am I right in assuming it's not going to work for every client? So like a local plumber, you're probably not doing what you're here for.

GABRIELA: No, absolutely not. So yeah, so you your idea needs to have some sort of relevance to your business as a whole Otherwise your campaign is completely off topic and it will have little to no relevance basically to your website from an SEO standpoint. So Yeah, the client that we ran a campaign for, for Nature Walks, they have a website around sustainability and eco-friendly living, wellness, all that. So it really tied in nicely to the broad themes of their website. So yeah, absolutely. You always want to start off with considering the themes surrounding your website. What is your website about? What are the services that you provide? The different categories, and then kind of go from there. Because like you just said, you don't want to run a campaign about plumbing, but you're like a software company or something, you know, that would make absolutely no sense.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. So are there niches that you find more response from the journalists, you know, like overall niches as opposed to ones that don't really get much interest?

GABRIELA: Yeah, I mean, yeah, lifestyle niches are really popular travel, finance, I mean, health, anything consumer focused, really, because the vast majority of news media outlets are consumer focused, you know, they are not b2b media outlets, they are b2c, they are, you know, They write articles for us as consumers, the average Joe, you know, that looks online and looks at the news. So your story has to be appealing to the vast majority of people. But that's not to say that, let's say, if you have a very industry-niche-specific website, let's take manufacturing or something. You're a manufacturer of chips or something. I don't know. Coming up with something. You can still run a successful digital PR campaign if you take a step back and you consider the broad themes of your website yet again, right? you can talk about AI, or you can look at all these themes that are relevant to society right now that everyone's talking about and find a way to come up with an idea that is still somewhat relevant to your website, but has that newsworthy angle that will catch journalists' attention. Because if you publish a story about manufacturing and chips and all these obscure industry-specific terms, like an industry PR campaign, no one's really going to pick that up, except perhaps some industry, trade magazines, trade journals, right. But if you're looking at, you know, getting featured in the New York Times, or Washington Post, and all that, you need to come up with something that's intriguing, interesting, and captivating, and tells a story. really and gets people talking because the point of digital PR is really to spark that online dialogue, get people to think about things, new things, spark debate, get people on one end of the spectrum and kind of like Not fighting, but debating. Yeah, this is true. Oh, no, this city is not. This city should not be ranked number one. I absolutely don't agree with that. So you want to get that online dialogue going because that creates engagement. And when more people are talking about your story online, then that makes the journalists look good, too. So engagement is really powerful. Yeah. And that's what you have to think about. Is this story going to be engaging?

MICHAEL: So I'm hearing the idea is really important. You know, if you put all this effort into a bad idea or topic, you're going to put it out in the world and get nothing back. What's your process for coming up with these ideas? Do you sort of sit there and sort of, you know, go into a zen-like state and try and come up with ideas or do you involve the client like a brainstorming session and how long might it take to come up with them and how many end up on the editing room floor and how many are actually ones that you'll go with?

GABRIELA: Yeah, yeah. So we have a very in-depth brainstorming process that we go through. Yeah, we always welcome client feedback. So if the client has any general themes or ideas and campaign directions, we always welcome their input. But usually, we look at their website. We see what services, what products they provide, what the general themes of their website are. And then based on that, we kind of Just go from there. We start connecting the dots. We look at what's happening in the world right now. Are there trends? Are there topics we should be aware about? Societal trends. In America, a lot of tech workers are getting laid off right now. There's all this stuff going on, so we need to be aware of everything that's going on in the world. and stay on top of that. Are there upcoming national holidays right now? Right now we have Valentine's Day. I mean, Valentine's Day will probably not be relevant to most clients, but maybe for some clients if we're talking to a florist, for example. So that's a huge topic, right? So we consider national holidays. We consider even national days, like National Pizza Day, which is, I think it's tomorrow or Friday or something.

MICHAEL: Yeah, we're doing pizza in our office on Monday here.

GABRIELA: So if you're a pizza company, that's something to consider, right? So we think about all these things. And we don't always just think about holidays and things of that nature, but also evergreen topics, like things that are just, you can do this campaign any time of the year. It doesn't matter when. So those are really important types of campaigns as well. And then we just start brainstorming. Really, it's a creative process. We actually work with a handful of freelance journalists as well. So we kind of brainstorm with them. And they tell us, yeah, this is good or this is not good. because they're actual journalists, right? Getting that feedback from them is invaluable. And then, yeah, we have team brainstorming sessions. And then we kind of narrow down the ideas that we think would work best. And then, of course, we present it to the client. And then they have the final say if they don't like it or they like it. And if they like it, then we go into production. If they don't, then it's back to the drawing board, essentially.

MICHAEL: And so it sounds like when you're trying to get engagement, maybe taking a side or a position or being a little bit controversial or something like that might work. Not every client's going to want that. But yeah, can you maybe talk around stuff like how do we make these journalists look good by getting a lot of engagement on their posts? Is there angles that always work?

GABRIELA: Yeah so I mean there's a variety of different angles that you can take and you can yeah of course you always want to sort of create something that will get people talking and you don't necessarily need to do something that's like you know obscene or controversial like we never do those types of campaigns but just We uncover data that's meaningful and that tells a story. And these journalists will then, they pick up our data, and they start writing about it. And they infuse the data with their own opinions and their own angles. So everyone has an opinion and a thought, and they interpret our data in a certain way. And then they roll with a story about that. And that usually, it just captures people's attention. And again, Sometimes in the comment section, they'll say, yeah, I agree with this, or no, this is so off, or here's why I don't believe that this place is the best place to get ice cream. I don't like this area. But yeah, I think beyond just that, again, does your story elicit an emotional reaction? People want to feel something when they read a story. They want to feel good. They want to feel surprised, shocked, happy, joyful. I mean, all these emotions. What kind of emotions does your story spark? Because those are the types of stories that work really well. positive stories, also negative stories. So if you've got something that's down the middle, it could be a little bland sometimes. It's not necessarily bad, but if you have a unique spin and a unique angle on that story, it can definitely work. But again, does your story elicit an emotional reaction? That's always something I think about.

MICHAEL: Yeah, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So you're referencing, you know, your data and you said at the start, you do surveys, 3,000 people. That sounds like a big undertaking. Maybe we'll talk about how you do that. But is there ways that you can do it maybe a bit easier? Like are the days of being able to go on Google Trends and just pulling a bit of data together and chucking it up and getting some sort of coverage out of that gone? Are journalists able to see through that or can you do it a bit easier?

GABRIELA: Look, Google Trends is a source of publicly available data that anyone can just, you know, you can go on Google Trends and you can gather all this data in like 15 minutes. So there's very little effort that goes into Google Trends. If we ever use Google Trends, it's when we want to supplement our data with with something from Google Trends that backs up our data. But we never lead with, like, Google Trends shows this, this, and that. Because you know what? Journalists can just go on Google Trends, and they can get the data themselves in 10, 15 minutes. It doesn't take a lot of effort. So the likelihood that your story that relies solely on Google Trends is going to get picked up is decreased significantly. So yeah, when you're running surveys or you're crunching numbers from publicly available data sources like bls.gov, census.gov, Statista, excuse me, that shows that you're putting in a lot of effort. So, you know, obviously, the more effort you put in, it's sort of like you get rewarded for that effort.

MICHAEL: Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Totally. Well, let's talk about how you run these surveys. How do you go out and get 3,000 people's opinion on what the best ice cream shop is.

GABRIELA: Yeah, I mean, there's so many different survey providers that you can use. Polefish is one of them. And you can basically create your own survey there. And they have their own panel of respondents that are screened. And all the data that comes out from this is significant and legitimate. So you can use those types of survey companies. If you have a wide readership, if you have your own email database, your own, I guess, contact lists of people that have visited your website and have signed up for your newsletter and stuff, you can certainly try to use your own data, ask your own readers and provide them with that survey. But for us, using a survey provider like Pollfish is really valuable and it makes things a lot easier. And we go in, we create the survey, and then we just run the survey, and it takes a couple of days to come back. And then we have our data, and then we just have to kind of analyze it, obviously, and find trends and find unique angles from that and create a captivating story, and then illustrate that in a linkable asset, usually in some sort of an interactive infographic, a table, something that communicates the data in a visual way, because we're visual learners. Most of us, we like to see images. We like to see data that's illustrated in an easy-to-understand way. And so do journalists. And when you have this supplementary a linkable asset, you can show the journalist, like, hey, here's the data in a nicely illustrated way. They will take that data and will sometimes embed it in their own articles. So you get an extra backlink. But also, yeah, they just like the engagement that comes from that, because their readers can better understand the data. And again, the easier you make the journalist's lives, the better. So you want to give them everything that they need to create that story and write an article about you.

MICHAEL: Okay. Well, let's talk about journalists a little more because, you know, doing the research and putting together like a really compelling, awesome bit of content all makes sense. With the journalists, A, how do you find them? And B, are you creating this content often with publications or journalists in mind and you know who you want to reach out to beforehand? Or do you go with the idea first and then go find journalists that you think suit the idea?

GABRIELA: That's a great question. Yeah, it's always we run with the idea first, and then we find the right journalist that we think will cover our data, our story. So the way that we do that, we use a media database, Scission. And there's also Muckrack, I believe, in the UK, Roxhill. There's also Prowley, which is sort of a more budget-friendly option for those who are starting out. I believe that's like $300 a month or a year. I think it's a month. But Scission, for example, is like more than $10,000 a year. But because we use it so frequently and we rely on it, it's worth it for us. So yeah, once we've come up with a campaign, we have our data and everything, we go into Scission and we look for journalists that might be interested in covering our idea. And the way that we do that is by searching for journalists that have covered a similar idea or a similar topic in the last six months to a year. Because if they've covered a similar story, chances are they're going to be interested in our story as well. So that's sort of how we find the right journalists. We also look at Google News and see if there are any journalists that we might have missed that might be interested in covering our story. And we also look at general journalists. For example, if we're doing a campaign travel, then we'll also look at lifestyle journalists that have covered travel topics broadly in the past. So not necessarily related to the specific idea that we came up with, but just cover that broad general theme. Because they might also be interested in covering our story. So we have different tiers of journalists that we outreach to them, if that makes sense.

MICHAEL: Yep, makes total sense. On the topic of outreach though, I know myself, my inbox is hammered. I imagine a journalist, they would know no such thing as inbox zero. They would be getting hammered by people all the time. So you have like one shot with this, I guess, when it's going out. How do you sort of break through that noise and stand out in their inbox?

GABRIELA: Yeah, I mean, it's hard journalists get I mean, on like about like 200 or 300 emails every day, believe it or not, it's a lot. So yeah, standing out is very hard. And that's where you know, you have to have a very catchy, captivating subject line that gets to the point and really communicates what the story is. and gets that journalist's attention. If you're running a digital PR campaign, I recommend A-B testing subject lines and making sure that everything looks good before you go on and do your entire outreach. You want to start small, send a small batch of outreach emails to journalists and then see how they engage with that, track open rates, track click-through rates, and if everything looks good, then go ahead and move on to the broad outreach for your campaign. Because you want to catch their attention, right? And if you don't, you can always follow up. follow up with them in a couple of days, and perhaps your email just got buried, and they just didn't see it. But I also don't recommend following up more than two times, because if they didn't read your email the first time, and they didn't read it the second time, then chances are your email is just, you're just gonna annoy them the third time. And it might mark you as spam, and when they do that, you're gonna, it's not good. Your domain reputation's gonna take a hit, Yeah, you don't want to be sent to a journalist spam folder.

MICHAEL: I have emails where there's like 9, 10, 12, 15 follow-ups and it's just kind of intuitive.

GABRIELA: And the worst is when you have like the RE, you know, like replied, but then you never replied and it's in the subject line and like they're trying to trick you into thinking that you had actually replied to that person. So don't use shady tactics like that because That's just bad.

MICHAEL: On the topic of tricking though, let's say you have a journalist that publishes your stuff. Is every campaign like a new day in that you blast it out and they pick it up because they're so busy or do they start to remember who you are, and you can start to maybe leverage it like a like a traditional PR type relationship where you might have journalists, you can take things to one to one, and they're going to respond.

GABRIELA: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, over time, you can you definitely start building relationships with journalists. And You know, they'll remember you because you are offering, you know, they'll remember that you're offering them really solid, awesome content. So you'll stand out for sure. So we have a list of, you know, we call them friendly journals, where we know that, you know, they love our content. So we're going to send it to them. And we know that they're going to feature us. But for the vast majority of campaigns, we you know, we rely on journalists that have we've never heard of before, you know, That's also important because if we're only sending out our press releases to these existing journalists, what's going to end up happening for the clients that run ongoing campaigns with us is we're going to get them featured in the same publications over and over again. And that's obviously not very beneficial from an SEO standpoint. You want to diversify the linking domains. the websites that are linking to your website because that's just better. So the story just needs to be strong enough to stand on its own so that a journalist that has never heard of you before is going to write about you because your story is just so compelling. Your data is so interesting, so insightful, so newsworthy that they have to write about it, essentially.

MICHAEL: So I know with a lot of these journalists, they have to write, say, eight articles a day or something like that for their publication. How easy are you trying to make their life, like we spoke about making it easy before, with the stuff you send out to them, are you going as far as writing passages of text that they can just copy-paste, you know, to make it super easy, or are you just giving the data, and here's what we did, here's the interesting findings, and then putting it on them to actually write most of it?

GABRIELA: Yeah, so you always want to make journalists' lives easier. So you can do that by, indeed, including all the information that is pertinent to your campaign, including all the top key findings, your commentary from a spokesperson, like what does the person from your company think about this data, in a quote. Really, it's a press release, a press release that's written in a journalistic way. And these journalists can then take whatever information they find relevant and rehash it in their own, you know, put their own spin on it. And then it just makes their lives easier, really, to have all that information well communicated in an email format with all the data that they need. And in the email, you can also include a link to your linkable asset if they want to see that visual data representation, if they want to see more.

MICHAEL: And are you straight up asking them in the press release or the email you send to link or you're just hoping that they link and they'll do what they want. So there might be the case that they'll cover you and there's no link and it is what it is.

GABRIELA: Yeah. So there's sort of an unwritten rule when it comes to this type of stuff where if you if you're sending content to a journalist It's an unwritten rule that they need to credit you for the data because you took the time to create this awesome data and they can't just take that from you and not give you credit. I mean, they just can't do that, you know? So, in the vast majority of cases, the journalist will link back to you because, again, they're crediting you. In some cases, they'll forget to link back to you. And in those cases, then you need to just reach out to them again and just say, hey, I noticed that you featured our story. That's awesome, but you didn't link to our website and provide us credit. Can you just link to us? That would be great. And then they'll usually be like, oh, well, yeah, sorry, I forgot, or something like that. And they'll get back to you. Yeah, so that's pretty rare, but it does happen. And if it does, then you just need a follow-up. And that's why it's so important to keep track of your media mentions. Sign up for Google Alerts. It's free. If you have Ahrefs, there's Ahrefs Alerts. Mention.com, we use that. We also use Cision's own alert system, so it alerts us as well. So yeah, just keep track of your media mentions because these journalists in the vast majority of cases are not going to write back and say, hey, here's the article. They just don't have time for that. So you've got to be on top of it.

MICHAEL: What's the turnaround time? Let's say you send your press release out. Are you expecting if it's not live within a couple of days, it's more or less done for that angle with those journalists?

GABRIELA: No, it really depends. So if your story is of a time-sensitive nature, for example, like if you're writing a story about Valentine's Day, and you're reaching out to journalists. And yeah, if you don't get any coverage before Valentine's Day, then your story is not very good, right? But if your topic is evergreen, so again, a topic that can be done at any time of the year, what is, like, let me, I'm trying to think right now. One campaign that we did was, what is each state's favorite author? So we ran a survey of 3,000 respondents in the United States, and we figured out which Which authors were which states like favorite author right per state? So that can you know that type of campaign can be run at any time of the year really so with with that those types of campaigns Coverage can can take a while to come out so but if you don't if you don't Hear anything or see anything within I would say two weeks for those types of evergreen campaigns then something is wrong with your story and then you need to re-angle it, look at your subject lines, look at the press release, see what's going on, see what's wrong with it. Sometimes journalists will hold on to a story for weeks, for months at a time, until they roll with it. We've seen coverage come out a year later, we're like, oh my gosh. We wrapped up that campaign a year ago and finally we get this link. It's up to them, really. They're holding on to that story until it makes sense for them to run with it. And that's something that you can't really control. But again, if you don't see any movement, anything within, I would say, like two weeks, a two weeks time frame, then you've got to kind of go back to the drawing board and see what might be wrong with your campaign. Why it's not picking up any coverage for those evergreen topics.

MICHAEL: And are you pretty much exclusively using research or survey-based data? You mentioned there like a time-sensitive thing, let's say something's hot in the news and the angle might be working off that. Is there other ways that you go about it outside of just surveys or using data to try and

GABRIELA: Yeah, so that would be more like a newsjacking. So if there's like a trending topic, you can piggyback on that topic and create a rapid fire press release with your expert commentary on that trending topic. and send it out to all those journalists that are covering that trending topic. So that's kind of like a rapid fire campaign. But that's really, I mean, that's dependent on those trending topics, right? Which happen fairly quickly. So if you're not on top of that, like right away, your window of opportunity to get it featured and seen by these journalists is very, very slim, or very, very short, I should say. So yeah, so that's that's harder to do. But yeah, you know, totally, you should always set up, you know, again, Google Alerts with topics related to your niche, and and stay on top of things that are happening in your, you know, that, that are, that are related to your niche. So that if, if a trending topic does take place, if it, if it, if it's happening, then you can, you can just quickly jump on that opportunity and try to get some coverage out of it.

MICHAEL: Okay. Awesome. Yep. Makes total sense with the tools you're using. You mentioned a whole bunch there, like the prowleys, incisions and that sort of stuff, muck rack, I think for finding journalists. Do those tools also help you to reach out like your outbound campaign? You know, like let's say a normal sales outbound tool like Mailshake, for example. Yeah. Do they have those sort of features built in where, you know, you send one email then it will follow up automatically and it will sort of track if they reply or are you doing that manually through your email? Is there any tools you should or shouldn't be using, things you should or shouldn't be doing on that front?

GABRIELA: Yeah, so we have our own email marketing platform, our own distribution platform where we cut we send out all the outreach messages and we track open rates. track click through rates and whatnot. And we also monitor our domain reputation. So we don't share our server with anyone else, but you know, our own internal team. So that way, we can see exactly if you know, if we're getting marked as spam, and like, what's going on? What did we do wrong? But mail, yeah, Mailshake works fine. MailChimp, I mean, really, it's just any, any email, like marketing platform would work fine for this. Yeah, so but we have our own kind of internal built out system. That I'm totally not technically involved in. That's handled by someone else already. But yeah, yeah. And there's a little bit of automation that's involved with that, but a lot of it is really personalized. We try to personalize all the emails as much as possible because the more personalized the emails are, the higher the chances that they're going to get opened, that they're going to be read, and whatnot. Yeah.

MICHAEL: And are you sending from a domain that's like a domain just for reaching out to the journalists?

GABRIELA: That's right. Yeah. So we have, yeah, we have, we have a domain just for reaching out to journalists. Yeah. And it's not Bright Valley. This is, this is just our, our, our business card website that I do zero SEO on. So.

MICHAEL: Yeah, look, it's the same sort of thing with outbound sales, you know, B2B email marketing and the like. You've got to protect your domain, which makes sense. I would imagine maybe you're not sending, let's say a campaign. Is it a couple of hundred people you're reaching out to? Thousands? How many journalists at a time are you hitting up with these campaigns?

GABRIELA: Yeah, so it's usually around between 200 to up to maybe 2,000 or so if they're in general lifestyle niches, travel and whatnot. There's just more journalists that cover those types of topics. But yeah, it's usually around 200 to 2,000 or so. So you don't want to reach out to too many journalists that are irrelevant, because again, your reputation is going to take a hit. And if they mark your email as spam, that's very bad. You don't want that. So the more relevant contacts that you find, the better. And again, it's based on the story and who might be most interested in covering it.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And once you reach out to them, is the job largely done? Are they coming back to you for clarification, follow up? How much of your time is spent on a campaign once it's out in the world?

GABRIELA: Yeah, so I would say 80%, maybe 85%, maybe 90% of the journalists will just run with the story and all the data because, again, we've presented them with everything that they possibly could need to create a compelling article. But in some cases, they'll come back and they'll email and they'll say, hey, Is this person available for a TV interview? You know, and that sometimes happens like, like randomly, we're like, Oh, do you want to be on TV right now? You know, maybe like one out of three campaigns that we do, there's gonna there's TV coverage that comes out of it. as a byproduct of a really good story. So that can happen. Sometimes journalists will come back and they'll ask a clarifying question like, oh, so why did you do this versus this? And just one or two questions or so. But again, for the most part, they'll have everything they need, everything's clarified in the email, and they'll just run with the story.

MICHAEL: Okay, cool. Well, maybe let's wrap things up a bit by talking about cost because, you know, you're from an agency, so people can hire you to do this, which is one way. And then obviously the other way is trying to do it yourself. So with that, there's a time cost and all of this software costs. Could you give rough ideas? Maybe if you were to try and do it yourself, what you're looking at in terms of time and investment in tools, and then typically maybe what someone might need to invest with an agency to do this. Um, yeah, and I guess the pros of each.

GABRIELA: Yeah. So, I mean, if you're doing this on your own, really, you need, um, There's free data available online, right? There's so many databases that are free available to everyone. So those don't cost any money. But then if you're looking to run a survey and you want to outsource it to, let's say, a provider like Pullfish, those run about, I think, $2,000 to $4,000 or so for about 3,000 respondents. And if you're doing the newsjacking expert commentary, that costs pretty much nothing, except your time, because you're just creating a press release. And then you can use Google News to find relevant journalists. You don't even need Google News. you know, muckrack, recision, or prolly, or so. I mean, those are really comprehensive databases, and they're going to provide you with a lot of relevant contacts. But if you are in a shoestring budget, and you don't have, yeah, just those resources, then you can just use Google News, Twitter, find relevant journalists, do a little bit of research on your own. And of course, your email automation, your marketing software. So there's that. And then I would say that's about it. You can set up a free Google Alerts for your brand name. So that's free as well. Yeah, so you can totally do this on your own. It's just a matter of investing time. I would say a good campaign. For us, it takes six to eight weeks from start to finish, from the brainstorming process to the point where we complete outreach. So it's a very in-depth, kind of long drawn out process. But yeah, so I think it's really, it's time requirement more than anything, if you're trying to do this on your own. And of course, if you're looking at an agency like us, you're looking at six, $8,000 or so, to run a campaign.

MICHAEL: And you largely charge just per, per campaign or do, can people use your own retainer where you're just sort of constantly on the hunt for ideas and, and newsjacking opportunities, that sort of stuff, is it?

GABRIELA: Yeah. So most companies we do kind of like the, the, yeah, just one-time campaigns that are also on an ongoing basis, but really it's not really on a retainer. We've like our SEO clients where we're producing like blogs and, and doing all this other stuff. Um, Yeah, because they've got kind of their own teams in place for that. And they just digital PR is sort of like a supplementary sort of like backlink building process that they want to incorporate in their existing overall SEO strategy.

MICHAEL: Let's maybe wrap things up before I sort of ask you if there's anything I've missed. I'm interested where you see the future of this with Google and the like, you know, AI coming into the mix and Google changing. Do you think there's going to be a point where links aren't as important or is this sort of digital PR going to be important for the foreseeable future?

GABRIELA: Well, I think didn't some Google came out with something like, Oh, links are not the most important ranking factor or something like that, right? Like that, that's Google's always saying things, and you can either believe what Google says, or you can believe the data you're looking at. So we look at the data, and right now, links are still really important, very much important for building EAT, creating those brand signals, because Google trusts brands, right? Brands get featured on the media. Look at Apple, look at Tesla, look at these Nike prominent brands. They're always in the news, right? and everyone trusts these brands because they are so renowned. So I think nowadays, Google is really moving towards rewarding websites that are real brands and are not just these shady, dodgy affiliate sites that have no EAT and are written by someone who lives in their mom's basement or something. So they want, yeah, they want real brands. And now, you know, I think with the latest algorithm update, someone in the industry, I can't remember who, but they had mentioned that Google, they saw a correlation between websites that were affected by the helpful algorithm update versus the ones that weren't. The ones that were not affected had more branded search traffic. So people actually searching for your brand online. So that again, that kind of shows us like we're moving into the direction of brands and brands get featured on the media. They get, you know, brands have high DR backlinks from all these authoritative news sites. So if you want to make it into the future as a company, you need to invest in digital PR, really, and invest in these high-quality, hard-to-get backlinks, really.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I agree. It makes total sense. Well, this has been an awesome chat and it's not something we've really covered on the show. So I think our audience will really enjoy what you've covered off today. But is there anything I haven't asked you about this whole world or process that you think is going to be beneficial for people to know?

GABRIELA: Yeah. I mean, I think you really just need to You need to dip your toes into this. Get your feet wet. Try it out. And don't be discouraged if it doesn't work out in the beginning. Because really, you've got to keep trying. And eventually, you're going to figure out what works. But if you don't try it, you're never going to get these really amazing hard to get backlinks. So, because it can be kind of a daunting process, you know, like, what do I do? What is, you know, the first step? How do I create something that's newsworthy? And you just really have to go out there and try and develop these relationships with journalists, you know, talk to them, make friends with them, make friends with journalists. And you can then ask them, hey, like, what do you think of this story? If I if I ran with it, would you be interested in covering it? Or like people in your industry? Would they would they like it? So just kind of do that and don't be afraid to just try things out.

MICHAEL: Awesome. Love it. Great advice. For people that want to learn a little bit more about yourself after this show, where should they go to check you out?

GABRIELA: Yeah, you can go to brightvalleymarketing.com, like bright, like the sun. Or you can just shoot me an email, gabby, G-A-B-B-Y at brightvalleymarketing.com. Find me on LinkedIn, Gabriela Covay. Yeah, that's kind of where I hang out. I'm trying to get on Twitter, or is it X now? I don't know.

MICHAEL: It's both at the moment, I think.

GABRIELA: Yeah, and I've got some YouTube videos. I've got a YouTube channel I just started recording last couple of months or so. I'm just trying to figure that out. I don't know too much about YouTube, but I'm trying to get out there right now.

MICHAEL: Nice. Awesome. Well, hopefully some people from the show go check you out. And I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your knowledge with us. And yeah, it's been great chatting.

GABRIELA: Thank you so much, Michael. It's been awesome. Have a great day.

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