Brand Mentions Beat Backlinks for AI SEO (Digital PR Playbook w/ Chris Panteli)

Chris, this is your second time back on the show. I feel like your agency has grown a lot. Your link-building agency has grown a lot since the last time you were on. - Yeah, I think we've sort of leveled up in the Clientel since the HCU. Obviously all the affiliates drop in like flies. And with the AI visibility becoming such a thing, it's sort of lent itself sort of perfectly for what we do. So we've sort of leaned into that as much as possible. - So I had Charles Float. He's been on the show a few times now, but he was on a few weeks ago and he was recommending your agency linkify as this great link-building agency. So I think you have one of the top link-building agencies in SEO, which is kind of like crazy. - That's not, yeah, I know Charles. That's a lovely thing for him to have said. - Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people doing it, I suppose, that we've always put quality ahead of anything else. And yeah, it's been going well, but it's nice of Charles to say. - What do you think, linkify your link-building agency does different from other link-building agencies? - We don't compromise on quality. And with that comes. Some hate-and-points, I think, for customers, because it takes time. So everything we do is editorally earned tier one media. So it's a competitive space. But we've got good at it, and we've been doing it for half a decade. So our systems have grown with us, and then obviously with the advent of AI, we've been able to make those systems more robust. And I think one of the biggest and most important parts of earned media is the relationships that you have with relationships. And that's a really difficult thing to systematize, because you don't want an organic relationship to be systematized, but you do need a system so that you don't lose those relationships and you can leverage them. So I think we've got better at that, like, let's say, over the past 12 to 18 months. - Well, and now I'm actually, okay, so for people who don't know, you're doing expert quotes and digital PR. Are you doing anything else? - Yeah, so we have two main offerings. One is like a pure SEO play, and that's where we will assume the identity of one of an expert representative from your website, and we will pitch inbound requests or direct requests from journalists. So that is your classic sort of "Hero" query. Obviously, there's lots of platforms, and we've got lots of relationships with journalists that come straight to us. Have you got an expert in X? Have you got an expert in Y? And that's to get the client the best links on the planet. It's editorally earned. So no payment just earned through that relationship, the journalist will cite them, quote them, and then link to them by way of attribution. And then our other offering is much more involved because we've seen that just having this engagement with journalists can lead to so much more than just those quotes. So it's more of a traditional slash authority PR. It's more expensive, it's more involved. And the goal isn't just links, the goal is coverage and brand building. And that can be, it's a great place to start is by putting those clients in front of journalists for those expert quotes. But that can lead to things like op-ed pieces, TV appearances, podcasts, where we had a client recently, the journalist from the New York Times went to his house to do a piece to help those of him. And E. Carmer's client, he got like a channel for spot in one of their documentaries about UK businesses. And obviously we know the advantages of that now. Just in terms of things like brand mentions and all of that for not just SEO but AI visibility and all of that good stuff. This method of marketing is so effective, I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept doing it. It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions, how, what, when? Compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy. These pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago, I couldn't believe this was allowed. It's less work too. The average compact keywords pages only 415 words. Compact keywords is a 13 hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer recently said, each lesson is dense with information. You're giving years worth of experience, boil down into 15 to 30 minute lessons with no filler or fluff. I feel like I'm gaining a new superpower. Compact keywords is about setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years. It works with AI, it's less work than traditional SEO, and it makes way more money. You can get it now at compactcewords.com back to the podcast. Why are brand mentions so powerful for AI visibility? - Don't I? But they are. - I mean, they are. - I don't know. I mean, I don't really, I mean, it makes sense, doesn't it? Like Google built this system that enabled them to have trust in the 10 blue link results that they would surface on their first page, and that's links. So, anyone can write a blog. Some nutcase could write a blog about how to treat cancer. And if they do all of the SEO right, then how can Google prevent it from being on page one if it's some nut job who's written it in his dressing room? So, links. So, as this page being algorithmically trusted from other websites that we already know and trust, that's like a genius method. Google still relies on it heavily today. The NLMs need something as well, I guess. Like they leverage Google's indexed search results in order to surface a lot of its results. We know that like, semantically now, these algorithms can understand so much more. So, if they can see a brand mentioned contextually within a piece of text, then I think it can understand more what that brand is, what that brand does, like who that brand is being associated with. So, it makes sense. I don't claim to know exactly how it works, but it just makes sense. - Oh, it's, it's, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. It's basically like this concept of topical authority. And so, when your brand is mentioned in a trusted publication, that is strengthening, that is strengthening the, that actually strengthens the authority that your brand has and your ability to rank for queries within your topic. Hence the name topical authority. You say topic and authority, combine them together, but also, I mean, think about like it, think about somebody's doing due diligence on your brand and then Chachypt is doing a query fan out, herplexity is doing a query fan out, it's doing these web searches. And your, even though you're not even linked, but your brand name appears in the New York Times, that is showing up in the results. And that passes an extraordinary amount of trust and authority for an LLM that is researching you. - Yeah, I agree. - Unless the article is bad. - Yeah, true. I agree. And actually, I would add onto that. What I think makes sense as well is the idea of consensus. So we know for a long time that Google relies heavily on consensus. So if you go to any sort of listicle, you're always going to see, like sort of the same results. You can't really expect to produce a listicle with eight brands that nobody else has ever mentioned before and then for Google to rank that because it lies outside of the consensus. So when you look at things like brand mentions, if an LLM or Google for that matter has got to like, sort of determine what your brand is and what you do. And your brand has been mentioned once on some obscure blog that no one's ever heard of compared to has been mentioned a thousand times across a thousand websites, which lots of people have heard of. Then that's how it can then go and derive that like, consensus of what this brand is, what they do, who they are, who they're being talked about and in what context they're being talked about. And that again, I think just makes sense, doesn't it? - It makes a lot of sense. And yeah, it's entirely true. And when you're doing earn media properly, people are writing about your brand in many different ways. And that's like, first of all, it's passing, you wanna have a natural backlink profile and like Google has a million signals for what a natural backlink profile looks like and a backlink profile which people are trying to game looks like. So you wanna have like, actually having real earn media is we'll get you a natural backlink profile of extraordinary powerful backlinks. - Yeah, that's one. And then two people are writing about you in different ways and they are literally expanding your topical authority. A quote that I like about topical authority is that it's something that you kind of shape. And so when people are writing about your brand in all these different ways, they are shaping, they are shaping search engines understanding of the topic that you satisfy. But then just for researchers too, a searcher, a human is doing due diligence on your brand. And when they see your brand appearing in one of these publications, it really gives you a tremendous amount of social proof. - Yeah, oh yeah, I mean, the advantage is of the link, the brand mentioned however you wanna look at it, look at it, of being in these publications, whether or not you've got hyper contextual relevancy, let's say you're a realtor and you'll be talked about on realtor.com, I mean, that's awesome. But also if you're being talked about on forums and review websites in a positive way, all of these different signals are a way to produce more information for the knowledge graph that you said shapes that topical authority. - And I've always considered, I think one of the reasons I'm as good at COSIM is because I've always considered reputation management to be a part of search engine optimization, but it was only with a generative AI that lots of other SEOs started seeing it as also being part of search engine optimization. And I mean, one, like without generative AI, like I said, people are doing due diligence, they wanna see if they can trust you. And they wanna see just as many positive mentions of your brand as they can find. - And I've seen a massive uptick in sales calls booked from people looking for reputation management. Some nasty shit as well. The stuff that I wouldn't touch with, like, can you give examples? You can change the niche so that you don't. - Well, what niche are they in or how bad is it? - You don't have to rotation it. - Yeah, like just an example and you can obscure it, so you don't reveal the company or person. Things that people are trying to do with reputation management. The last couple was. I've tried to think as how to put the niche as broad as possible. Let's say property and the reputation issue was criminal, but sort of white collar. And then the other one was the niche that they were in was, I think finance and the reputation issue was criminal. But yeah, like not nice. They wanted you to basically push down. These maybe was like a lawsuit that was showing up. And yeah, they want some nice earn media, which will put. But that's real because it actually works. Like when you get positive earn media, it can actually push down these bad things that are showing up about your brand. Or even if you don't have any bad things about your brand, it just strengthens your authority and makes you a lot more likely to get customers. It also really shortens the time between awareness of your brand and conversion. And that's something that a lot of people underestimate. Like you don't have to do as many sales calls. You don't have to send as many case studies. Can you share like some. Actually a better question is when you are getting links for brands, are you also paying attention to the effect that these links have on rankings for like keywords or prompts that they care about? We don't on the SEO play, just because we want to plug and play into what they're doing. Obviously on the more traditional authority PR side, there's a lot more involved in obviously we're working towards like results collectively within a more holistic process with the client. But when it comes to just like the SEO link building play, most of our clients are coming to us to plug their link build. That, you know, one, maybe perhaps even just one aspect of their link building strategy. So maybe they've got an SEO vendor and maybe they're doing guest posts in and they've heard that they should do some digital PR. A lot of clients of ours will only do digital PR. They don't want to do anything that's like not White Hat and they've been with us for years. And they get a lot of their revenue is generated through organic Google search. And then I suppose in the buyer, the exploratory buyer journey, a lot of brands will, smaller brands, small businesses, maybe they'll say like, you know, is this gonna have an effect? And as you know, as an SEO, it's impossible to say, okay, build five high value DPR links in your traffic will, you know, three X within eight weeks with X. Like, it's impossible to say. But because I believe so firmly that it is, it's true marketing and all brands should engage in true marketing. I think even, even just if you just take one of the benefits of like your first five high authority pieces of coverage, brand mentions links or whatever, that gives you a press badge for your homepage and whatever you're doing, whatever you're selling, that is like the shark attack effect. You'll see any company that was ever featured in history on shark attack or dragons, then go on the website as seen on shark attack, drag instead. You know, if you've been featured in Forbes, New York Times, BBC, you want to put those logos on your front page. If you're an e-commerce, hopefully your click through rates, conversions will go through. If you're like selling a coaching service, people will have that. You know, even I do it, if I see some YouTube who's talking about XYZ, I think I'll ask interest and go to his website and I see that he was a Forbes 30 under 30 and you have that instant trust. And like you said, those touch points, they get shorter and smaller and that journey from awareness to buy in is just drastically shortened. So yeah, yeah, to answer. - I wanted to ask if you have any case studies that you looked at or like anything that you, any stores that you could share where you actually, you got like a link or a few links and then you just saw people's organic visibility shoot up. I mean, but if you're not paying attention to that, you're not paying attention to that. - We have clients come to that, one client come back to me and say, we did a small campaign for him five links and he said he got his first like eight chat GPT referrals, like a month later. - Amazing. - So yeah, I mean, and we see that as well. Like I'll see that from things like, if I do a podcast, like yours, for example, you'll start to, because I check myself in chat, you see I check link, like you'll see that that stuff works in the LLM's quickly. It has like a sort of a few effect, I think. So you got to keep doing it. But yeah, I've had clients as well where we've done like a 20 link campaign and their organic traffic's just gone from where it was to X'd and then they'll re-up and it's been either just consistent growth or a consistent level, which in this day and age is more than anyone can hope for, isn't it? - So a lot of listeners know they know of help reporter out and source of sources. You are one of, if not the like the top people agencies for doing that, one of them, maybe even the top. And like, I remember you gave me this crazy stat about how many expert quotes you sent out. And it was like, I don't know, like 10,000 or something. Last time we talked, do you remember what the number that you gave? It was so many. - I remember that, yeah, thousands, yeah, thousands and thousands. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what are your favorite platforms for actually getting, for submitting an expert quote and getting in the top publications? Publications where when you are mentioned and when you get a link, the story that you're in is actually indexed and people are clicking on that link and it's leading to real referral traffic, not just the back link. - It's, I mean, it's been such an up and down with everything. I think the journalists are hopping across platforms. It depends what niche you're in and it depends how you're gonna handle it. Like, are you gonna do it? You know, properly and, I mean, the thing is now is you can't be producing AI written answers. There was like a golden period where I think I had an app sumo deal on like one of the first AI writers that was produced, Honey and Rembrandt, it was called now. And like, I thought, we can like 10X our output here and we did and we were like winning links left, right and sent that. And it didn't even really make sense, some of the stuff. Like, I, not, not make sense, but it was, like, Paulie written and bad grammar, which actually looking back is probably one of the reasons why it did so well when it did because it looked like some real person had written this, you know, Paulie written all these months. - This was before, this was before generative AI or this was with chat to PT like, this was before chat to PT. - So what were you using like content spinners or like what? - No, no, no, no, it was, what was it called? The app sumo had this deal on this one. I think it was, they had one called word hero, I think, and one called pepper something. - Yes, okay. - They were, yeah, so I don't know if they were, I think maybe open AI was out somewhere, I don't know if they were hooked into open AI's, you know, pre-chat to PT or if they just had this like, a large language model, pre-open AI, large language model. But I mean, it worked to an extent, but I mean, not like today. But yeah, you can't use AI in the way that you do today in the way that you can't just use an AI in the nilla, in part out. - And if you do that with like source of sources, don't just ban you. If you do that with a lot of these, help or report her out, they'll get banned. - Yeah, and they're actively using tools to check. Now that's another issue because the tools that they use to check are like, they don't work in the way that I think they should. Like I have written, like handwritten stuff, you know, 3, 4, 5, 6 paragraphs of completely handwritten stuff and it's flagged as like 100% AI. And then there's ways that you can like get around these tools. And I think the whole industry is in this like battle now where they want handwritten stuff. And but anyway, I mean, all of that doesn't really matter because if you're just gonna use like some of these tools, what you're doing is it might be well written or too well written, but there's no like depth or individuality or originality. Now that isn't always what journalists are after. So you also have to determine what the journalists are looking for. You have to determine whether or not you're the right person to give that. So when it comes to best platform, I would say you need to be on all platforms in order to find the perfect opportunity. And it's really when you find that perfect opportunity, it's then yours to lose if that makes sense. - Sort of, but I mean, I do think there are probably platforms to focus on more than others. Like is help reporter, do you still see help reporter out end source of sources as like the gold standard, like the place where the top journalists go to get expert quotes? Are there new ones popping up that are like, oh yeah, this is a hot new place that that journalists are going to to get their quotes? - The top platforms are still, I would say, help reporter out, SOS quoted press blogs response source, those guys are a bit more UK centric, help a B2B writers, okay. Then you've got tools like Gerno Finder, Sasha Frontiers tool, which is an aggregator tool, which will aggregate a lot of these together. And then the golden thing to do, which takes time, is really what you want to do is you want a D platform. So you actually eventually want to get to a point when you're not on any platforms and you have, you're directly embedded into whatever the journalists approach is in order to source expertise, that could be either following them directly on their social, have all the way through to building a relationship with them where they are coming to you directly through email or maybe you are integrated into their Slack. And then when you've built that network out for us as an agency obviously is multi-need, but as an individual you're going to have built out that network of journalists within your industry. And then from there you will be monitoring all the platforms for new opportunities because new wonderfully amazing publications will come that we've never seen before. And it'll be like, whoa, that's like an amazing site. Never ever seen it anywhere before. Maybe a new journalist has just been hired or a new tier one writer and they go, well I'm going to enhance this article with expert. Comment on it, go and post it on some platforms and you don't want to miss that by limiting your network. - But you're getting, you're basically, like let's say you get just some mention, some like, yeah, expert quote mentioned, maybe up from source of sources and you're in a decent publication. And then you want to make sure that that journalist remembers you, that you have top of mind awareness with that journalist so that when they think of your topic they think of you, they don't have to go and post a query on help her porter out, they can just go to you and be like, I'm writing this story, what do you think of this? And you have actually systematized getting top of mind awareness with journalists so that when they think of your niche, they come to you. First of all, I'm actually, I'm curious if you're doing like traditional things like, you know, like, I mean, yeah, you said following them in social media so you're probably congratulating them on like work accomplishments if you know their birth. Like, are you just, are you like sending them holiday presents, are you doing things like that? Or like, I'm very curious, how are you systematizing top of mind awareness in relationship building with journalists? - The system, the system I took, the, the systemization of it is about data. So it has to start slow as well. And then it's on a completely individualistic level. So you can't have a catch all system. We use lots of different things. So CRM, journalist information, you can build it directly into a Gmail inbox with the contacts and you can have all the individual information on there. And then you can use like the snooze tool in a Gmail inbox as well to remind you like when to do a follow up. But it varies drastically from journalist to journalist. And you'll see things like some journalists are they're really chatty and personable and they'll maybe they've got a newsletter and they'll send, I saw one the other day, journalist sent out a newsletter. She'd mentioned I know, a dog had died, something like that. And she said thank you for everybody that got back to me and said, "Wish me warm wishes for the death of my beloved pet or whatever." So I mean, that's a nice thing to do. But you would need to know that that journalist is a sort of person that wants that in their inbox. Some journalists, they don't want, they don't even want you to thank them for the peace. And that relationship is nothing more than only sending them her effect responses. So they are looking for a Chicago-based MD with 10 years experience. Do not pitch that journalist unless you have that expert or you are that expert. That's the extent of the relationship. Without journalists, anything else and they might block you or, so you have to first learn, you first have to be in a fairly prolonged learning stage, a data gathering stage, and then you need to build that into a system where you could say, "Okay, this journalist, they're sourcing every week and they're always looking for X, Y, and Z, reach out to them on a weekly basis, present your new experts, they'll always come back and they'll always say, "Yeah, I'm looking for this time of what you've got." Right the way through to a journalist where it's just a matter of don't pitch them unless you've got the perfect expert. How many people work at your agency and where they base? Well, I think we're at about 20. We're all remote. A lot of Eastern European, a couple of Americans, and then, "Dada, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, my mom works for us as well for now." She's obviously English. Yeah, that's about the spread. Have you ever had any cultural issues where you have journalists trying to create a relationship, or sorry, where you have employees trying to create a relationship with journalists in a very different location, say like one of your employees is very far from the United States, but you want them to understand like what's up, how to actually create a relationship, how to talk to journalists in a way that's familiar to them. Have you had any issues like that, or do you just have a very, very rigorous hiring process so you don't face those issues? We have had issues with that. I think it would be unfair today we haven't. And we do hire well. I don't think it's something that, I mean, I think I'm okay at it. Obviously I'm not in the day today. I know people on my team are unbelievably good at it, and they just have a way of wording things. It's like a gift, I think. And then I don't know how much you can be on a certain point. I don't know how much you can teach it. I mean, I don't think there's, you know, saying happy birthday and stuff is just, that doesn't work anymore. It's the same sort of nonsense outreach. Like, oh, happy birthday. Like, are you looking for, like, they read through it, where I mean, we've got one, one lady on our team who's just fantastic, and she just writes in a beautiful way. She's just writes wonderfully in a way. You know how some people are just really good at interacting with other people? Yeah. I think it's not as much as a cultural thing. It's probably more something that you can teach up to a point. Have you heard of, have you heard of Brex's champagne? Campagne? I have not. Okay, so I, I was like, the CMO of Brex was buying. This is like an amazing, I guess kind of like, what's this earned media sort? So, okay, actually, oh no, it was for customers. I'm sorry, I thought it was for journalists. Basically, okay, this is what it was. So, so there's like four steps. Step one is, Brex scraped a list, and you could apply, I feel like you could apply something like this to journalists, I don't know. So, Brex scraped a list of 300 startups in the Bay area that raised funding in the last six months. Then they bought, step two was they bought 300 bottles of $50 champagne each, 300 bottles of $50 champagne each. Step three is they sent champagne bottles to the 300 startups with a handwritten note from Brex's CEO. Handwritten note for 300 startups. Step four is Brex's CEO sent a personalized follow up email to each company and asked if they'd take on a demo. So, they spent $15,000 total on the champagne, $2,000 on the handwritten notes, $2,000 on taskrabbit delivery. The total spend was $19,000 for 300 prospects. They had a demo rate of 75%. So, they got 225 demos from that. And then a close rate of 75%. So, total new customers was 169. And, I mean, Brex, what does, I forget exactly what Brex does, but they made a ridiculous amount of money from something like this. - I guess, I'm sharing this story 'cause I was curious if you've ever done anything like this or if you ever thought about doing something like this with journalists. - I think the issue with that, we've done that from a linkify level in order to, we've done a send books to prospects and had this whole multi-touch point sort of lead gen strategy going. I think the issue when it comes to journalists, and the reason it fundamentally doesn't work is because of journalism, journalistic integrity. So, the idea is about being a good source, providing value and nothing more, any sort of exchange of anything outside of that, a good journalist. I mean, maybe you could find some dodgy ones that are up for a free bottle of shampoos. I don't know, but I don't think, I like it. - Well, I mean, I would assume that you have to give, you're already giving good information. It's not like they're just accepting you because you're buying them stuff. You're already actually giving them high quality stuff, but it just makes it so like, if they're considering between you and somebody else, it tips them over the edge every time for you. Something like that. - Could be a really good, like, could be a really good strategy, nurturing strategy. So, let's say you engage with a new journalist for the first time, they include your commentary or one of your clients' commentary. By way of thank you, you could send them something, like my client was blown away with being included in this. Here's some champagne just to say thank you. Please don't think of it if anything other than just a thank you. And then, yeah, I mean, they're definitely gonna remember you, then on they say, and the next time you pop up in their email box with like another client's commentary, that's a pretty nice idea, that could work. - Yeah. - Yeah, actually I was looking, so Brexit champagne campaigns cost $19,000, and it got them millions of dollars in ARR, in annual recurring revenue. From 19 grand. Okay, so people who are trying to do, and I also wanna ask you about digital PR, which I'm endlessly fascinated with, like how you're, like the different stories that you're generating, if you're doing like viral marketing, like what you're doing there. But what are the biggest mistakes that you see people making when they're trying to get accepted with helper reporter out, with source of sources, with help of B2B writer, with quoted, with all of these platforms? - Not being completely, an utterly visible for who you are, and your association with the company that you represent. Like journalists are in a real dilemma now with not just AI responses, but AI. Sonas, there's been a lot of talk on LinkedIn and Dev exposed like 20 different companies that have been doing this. - Really? - Well, no. - So journalists are talking about, there's like journalists circles where they're like, don't trust this company, don't trust this, your blacklisted, blacklisted, blacklisted. - There's a guy from, I think it's called Prescazette, I forget his name, it's great to meet you. He's done like a couple of exposed APs where, I think there's a big publishing house, publishing company in the UK called Reach PLC. They own like the Express, the Sun, big publications, and there was this like, psychologist that they'd exposed as being completely fictitious, AI generated, AI profile, just a not a real person. You've been quoted like 70 plus times across all of these publications, and they had to go in and remove everything, then they all wanted to level up their validation of who it is that they're gonna include in their stories. And then this guy also, a few weeks later, released a list of like 20 companies that have been using fake personas. Big companies, one company responded, and which was nuts, they like, he printed his response and he was like, they just had no shame. They were like, yeah, we just use fake persona because it's like an easier way for our brand message to be positioned in a way that we want. I was like, you can't do that. You can't do that. So yeah, the biggest mistake that you can make is, I mean, you might be a completely legit company, and a completely legit person with completely legit credentials, skills, qualifications, but I've been on people's like CEOs, LinkedIn's, and they've got like no headshot picture. They've got like a banner and no headshot picture, or a headshot picture and no banner and like three connections. And it sounds, yeah, maybe you're not a LinkedIn person, but like LinkedIn is what you need a LinkedIn profile and needs to look legit. You need like a secondary and a tertiary social profile as well. So it doesn't look like you've just created a single fake profile. You need multiple headshots that are like demonstrably visible across the web. Like actually, I'm guilty of this to an extent. I like use the same headshot for everything. So if you've got like one headshot out there and a journalist does a quick Google search and then like a Google image search and it's just the same headshot everywhere, it's instantly like, it might not be instant, or I don't trust this person, but if they've been, if they've got another pitch from someone and they Google them and they go to Google images and they can see like a hundred different images of them with their arms around different people as well, it rather than waiting their time to dig into whether this person is like genuine, they're just gonna go with the other quotes. So you've got to be like as aggressive as you can, like be visible on the website, have clear navigational clicks to about sections on the webpage, like on the homepage. Don't bury it like eight clicks deep in some like expanding navigation. Like you want to be able to go about, okay, there's the founder. Like these are simple things that I see so many people do wrong. - Journalists need to make sure that the people that they are citing are real. And because like this wasn't as much a problem before, but it's a huge problem now that there are so many just fake AI personas or just fake personas. And yeah, it's like if you're creating a fake persona, you're probably not gonna put a thousand pictures of this fake person online. And if you're a real person, there could be a bunch of real pictures of you. So actually go out of your way just so that people know that you're real. - Yeah. And I mean, we'll probably get into a point where they can make a thousand. - Yeah, that's true. - That would be a crazy service if somebody generated that. If somebody made that, like just it's a bit, all these fake, it creates social profiles and updates them. Oh my gosh, that would be so bad. I mean, we'd go against the terms of service of like every social media platform. It'd be very dangerous to do. Very, very, very dangerous to do. But I wonder if that exists. - I'm sure it does, 'cause they must do something like that when they're doing all the election pumping and they have those, like farms where they have all these social profiles trying to push a narrative. - Yeah. - Yeah, so it is scary. But even putting things like a direct phone number at the bottom of an email, like that. And if you've got that and you could, it's a bit more tricky for agencies. But if you're a real person and you've got a phone number and you don't mind taking a phone call, like pop your phone number. - Do you do that when you're writing on behalf of the people that you represent? The companies that you represent? - Not normally. We'll say like a phone call can be arranged if needed, but obviously we'd need to go back to the client and then see if they do wanna do that. But yeah, that's a great thing or say that they can be made. You can make yourself available for a Google Meet or a Zoom. Anything that you can do to enhance that visibility of authenticity is gonna work in your favor against, even someone who is not doing shady shit but hasn't made any effort to like, you know, a lot of SaaS companies are guilty of this. Like it's really difficult to find out who's behind the company, especially if the founder doesn't wanna be like forward facing. But really like founder led growth through that entity of the founder and building the brand via that persona is like exactly what they should be doing. So I mean, you can't do it through other people. Like you'll see some companies like, who's the first name you think of when you think of Atrefs? It's not, it's like Tim Suks, so it was me. Yeah, and he's not the founder, he's not the owner. But so you can do it through other entities within your business but you should be doing it and they should be visible, highly visible. When you're taking on, you said you're taking on the role of the founder when you are replying to help reporter out and sources, sources, sources. So then are you disclosing that you're an agency or are you just pretending to be that person? No, we pitch it as an agency. We'll take the comments. We'll have a load of documentation to help construct the comments, then we'll get the approval from the client and then we'll be able to send those to the agency. These are the comments from our client. If you really are saying these are the comments from our client, okay. Yeah, yeah. That's how most agencies do it. Yeah, I've actually been a journalist. I don't know if you've ever done it, but I've been a journalist on like, Helper Porter out and I've gotten lots of quotes like that where people say, yeah, I pitch for my podcast on that. Actually, so it's really interesting to see the other side. And I think it's nuts as well that like, the old like cookie thing, not cookie Easter egg thing. Like I'll just put in there like, sourcing for a podcast, 'cause we're looking for like, looking to explore like medical growth marketing and how that industry's like looked since the advent of AI. So I did one recently and I'll put clear as dang like, like what I want, like I want a LinkedIn profile, I want a short bio and if you've got any previous podcasts you've been on, a couple of talking points, like that's what I want to see in the replies. And the amount of people that just don't read it, and there'll be some like legit people on there. And I want to interview them, but why haven't they taken the time to pitch it, to read what I've written? Yeah, it's endlessly frustrating. When I was a journalist on these platforms, I dealt with that all the time. And I was just, it was just crazy to me. It's like, why even take the time? Why even take the time? Just like, you know, I ask you like, what's something that, what's a mistake that everybody makes? And it's just like, read what the journalist wants. And it's doing what the journalist wants. Yeah, yeah, 100%. It's classic sort of read the question in an exam. Like, just take the time to read it. And yeah, why bother? Like if you want to get on my show, like you can potentially, but not if you don't read the question. Something else I was talking about this recently is you'll see on these platforms that journalists have a certain bias. And if you don't massively disagree with that bias, actually like figure out what that bias is and like write it in a way that's going to be favorable to them, write the response in a way that's favorable to them. Lead with what they want to hear. They will oftentimes make it very clear what they want to hear. And you should actually lead with that. Yeah, a lot of journalists, yeah, they'll make it clear if they're looking for a contrarian view as well, or they will be very leading in the sense that that's, but that's fair enough. I mean, if they're writing an article and they're looking for ways to bolster their argument within our article, then I suppose that's up to them. It's perhaps less journalistic than one would hope, but it's up to them. So if you want, if you want to get featured, you've got to try and give them what they're looking for. So do you have like a proper system for how to actually respond to a journalist on help reporter out or source of sources or all of these platforms? Or is it just you are hiring people who have an intuitive understanding of this? We have systems that I would say are frameworks, but again, it all boils down to the individual journalist. And then there's always new journalists coming on to the platform as well. So it really does depend. I mean, so let's take me, for example, I only just started sourcing for commentary on my podcast, on help reporter out in recent months. So I'd never posted anything on there from the other side before. And I know when I first went on there, you can produce your response and you can put at the bottom, do you want to filter out AI responses? Which as somebody who, on the other side, who's producing, you know, helping to produce or send commentary to the reporters on behalf of the clients, we have always been against sending AI because it doesn't make sense. Like no, no journalist is going to publish AI on, you know, you want it to be authentic and well-written and interesting and unique. Whereas for me, as a journalist sourcing for a podcast, I actually didn't check that button because I didn't care if people responded to me with AI because I actually just wanted some pretty factual information but I wanted all of that information. So I mean, I've got a custom GPT for myself, which knows everything about me. So if somebody asked me four questions to be a guest in the podcast, like a couple of talking points, you're linked in and like previous things, my custom GPT could answer that in two seconds. And that's fine because I've got the information I wanted. So it really is on an individual journalist level. I thought that was interesting. Are you baking custom AI's for clients and then using that to inform answers? Like, yeah. Yeah, and from, what's the word? Like a compliance level, it's really good as well. So you can have, you know, some clients extremely, you know, will help them craft those answers but like they'll have said to us like, we can't talk about X, Y and Z, whereas my team might think like, that's a really good talking point. Let's say I know a finance client who is completely against by now pay later, they do not want to talk about by now pay later. So you can then put like a crafted response or like the, the ideation element of a response into this like compliance custom GPT on an individualistic client level. And it will come back to you and say like, this client has explicitly said that they don't want to talk about by now pay later. And you've suggested by now pay later. So it works really well in that regard. And so what are you doing with digital PR? This is like, yeah, endlessly fascinating to me. Yeah, so yeah, I mean, I would, I think digital PR, I'm trying to sort of phrase as like SEO link built in. Like that's the goal is the end link and the way that we sell that, that's the deliverable. And that's what we've done historically for years. It works and, do I quote are like a part of it or a part of it? So that's what I would call SEO digital PR. Just traditional, harrow, quoted, press plugs, link built in, the deliverables of the link. Authority PR or traditional PR, it's about coverage and building and growing authority and building brand. And it includes pitching journalists for expert quotes, but it just goes far above and beyond that. And it's more about once you've put this client in front of a journalist, it's not just put this client in front of the journalist, winner, winner link, brilliant. Okay, keep the relationship with that journalist for like other clients. It's about, okay, put this client in front of that journalist. They've lightened included their commentary. Where else can we go with this now? Like we can then put them in front of other journalists based on this piece of coverage. We've got more narrative control. We can try and get op-ed pieces, podcasts, interviews and we can really develop it to include much, much more than just links. And we know that in AI, like all of this stuff works as well. Because I suppose at one point we were thinking, especially with the whole brand mentioned, I had a couple of white label partners come to me saying, hey, look guys, if you want, we can build for the brand mentions, not just the links. So we were like, oh, that's interesting. Like, should we change our packages and say it's like it's links and brand mentions, but then pure SEOs, they're not going to buy a package of links where they are also going to get charged for brand mentions. So it made sense to sort of see the difference in what we were delivering. Whereas one side is just links, whereas the other side is, okay, we can get you sort of a full page feature in the New York Times, but they won't link. Like that's still huge value in that. But you need to position that as like a different service, I think. How do you get somebody a full page feature in the New York Times? We got a full page, home page feature on entrepreneur in recent months for someone who's got a perfume brand, and like a dupe perfume brand. Same guy that then got the TV spot. Yeah, and these things, we've recently got real estate agents, byline author pages on NAR and realtor.com. So they can produce their own articles about their own areas and their own insights. Yeah, this stuff works, man. It takes much longer, and it's, you know, the sort of the results, you know, they start slow because you've got to sort of introduce this person as a baby to the world. And then try and grow and develop them through, you know, through those means. I don't know if, if you can say this like individual, like case study, but it would be really interesting to hear how you went from like this perfume person, not many people knew who this perfume person was, then to actually having a strong enough relationship or just being in front of the right person so that you do get that, so you get the front page feature on entrepreneur. Like, yeah, like how did that actually come about? I don't know if you can share that. We were pitching for him, the inbound requests. Like cold emails, was it texting? I had you actually already gotten a foot in the door. Yeah, we had a foot in the door with the journalist. We'd already got them featured on another article. And then this journalist, we reached out as part of our normal touchpoint situation and said, are you working on anything that would be sort of relevant? This has got like a UK founder sort of startup. And she said, I am exactly looking for that actually. And then we just sent over the information, said I'd love to do an article. Like you can be completely right place, right time. And as well, I mean, there is still a complete need for content and like, people to write about stuff. So if you've got the right experts as an agency or you are the right expert, you've got to be persistent, but the opportunities are there. I mean, some people might call it luck, but like you have a system. And so it's like, yeah, you're in the right place at the right time, but you're doing things methodically so that you can maximize being in the right place at the right time. Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah, it's not a, like as easy as owning a guest post-portal website where you can just buy the product, place the product, buy again, like there is, but that's the nature of it. And that's why it attracts a premium because you can't just go, okay, get me some digital PR links or get me some tier one coverage or some features. Like, okay, we'll get you 10 in a month. Like anyone that says that, it's, they've either got relationships with every journalist on the planet and they are loved by everyone and they can just get their clients' place wherever they want or then doing something untoward. I would say, yeah. When, so do you have like, I don't know, do you know how often you are following up with that particular journalist to just say, hey, you need anything for me, any stories that you're working on. Like, how do you, like what language do you use also when you send these like, reminder emails? - Sort of sweet. I think that journalist was monthly. - So you were just following up like once a month, hey, you're working on anything that I can give a comment on? - Yeah, essentially, yeah. I think I included a slide on that exact thing and one of the talks I did recently. I think it was three sentences. Hey, whatever a name was, you're working on anything currently. Got a few great, just taking on a couple of really great clients, some really lovely expertise, ones of startup, please let me know if you're interested. And as well, I mean, I have hundreds of emails, but if you do that to every journalist that you're having your system and you are right place, right time for one or two of them, then you can see why that system. - It's really powerful. It because like if you actually think about the way that most people do help report out source of sources, these expert quote platforms, they get the coverage and then they forget about it and they move on to the next query and they just keep responding, but they don't actually put people into a CRM. They don't make reminders to follow up with journalists. And the other thing is these same journalists are writing for multiple publications. So you are not just getting a good backlink from the same publication over and over again, they might be working on a relevant story on a different like on a different powerful publication with high domain authority and then a different one and then a different one. And with the same journalist, you can get links from like five to 10 different amazing publications over time with the same journalists just because you followed up with them. And most link builders are not doing that. Most SEOs are not doing that. So that's like, yeah, that's amazing. That's a great thing to share. And so you're following up, do you have like a standard? If you were to say like a standard for how often you follow up, is it just every month? Is it every two months? 'Cause you don't wanna be annoying and have them hate you and block you. - No, no, of course, yeah. And again, it depends like that will all be within the sort of the data that you've gone on each individual journalist. And the best thing to do as well is to follow them on social media if you can and have a alert set on their social posts. So Twitter's great because you can just easily set that like every time they tweet, set an alert, a really good thing as well is like it won't be as systematized and like standard as like monthly. But built into that will be things like if there's a job change, reach out. So journalists will often post, hey, I've just, you know, I've left the express, I'm now right and for the independent, just like starting next week. Perfect. Even if you, you know, I've got those as someone as listed to only reach out to you know, every few months. Perfect opportunity. Hey, really excited to hear about your move, wish you the best for every success. Let me know what, what work or your writing on over there. They might come back to you. Oh, I'm on the travel section. Oh, amazing. We have like, you know, some great travel. Please let us know if you're working on it. So yeah, that's another great thing. Are using AI to pay attention to journalists queries that are relevant like a journalist posts about like, hey, I'm writing this story and you have an AI that's doing social listening and then like it categorizes it as like, yeah, are you doing anything like that? Yeah, we have a custom built system that uses AI to categorize all of the queries and then we categorize all of the clients and then we have a manual like final step to determine if those witch and clients to assign to which queries. Are we only let the AI, and then we'll have a human round of testing on the rejected queries as well. So we don't want to miss anything. Sometimes the AI might say like, oh, this is oftentimes like, well, try and use metrics as like a first pass. We want as higher metrics as possible, like high DR, high organic traffic. But let's say we've taken on a company that does sound proofing, let's say, and the biggest industry sound proofing publication is soundproofing.com and they're like a DR50 with like 12K traffic, but it's like the biggest publication in the industry. That's not an ideal sort of link on the face of it, but in that situation, it is a great piece of coverage and a great link of perfectly matched for that client. So we'll make sure we do a final review on like rejected queries as well, to make sure the AI hasn't. - So like anything that the query, sorry that the AI says this isn't like, this isn't reputable enough, or this isn't relevant enough. So how many different, I guess like how many different levels of AI categorization do you have? Is it like, this is something where I would assume that you kind of have the same system for all niches and all clients, but you're still doing human reviews. So is it like, what is like the first level of AI categorization AI filtering and like yeah? - It's only about 12 categories I think. - That's still a lot. - Yeah, but we then have a system where you can still assign outside of the client a sign category because there are so many individual cases where there isn't just a match for match. Like, well, try and be as broad as possible. So like, we'll have like, let's say like real estate and home design interior, like categorized into one category. And a client might be tagged with that as the high level category, but then entrepreneur.com might be looking for, you know, business leaders in, just business leaders in general, let's say. And then I've been tagged as a query potentially, it'd be like the catch all business tag, but that is an ideal query for like a number of clients that aren't tagged with like broad business, let's say. So there are many situations like that where, I mean, I'm sure the AI could probably get to a point where it's better, but where it's even better, but we're not there yet. We still like that human interference. - Well, what pieces of software or what technology are you actually using to do the social listening and the filtering and then passing on the data to your team and where does that data even go? Is it going to slack? Like, yeah, what's happening? - Table is the database backbone of the whole system. So all of the data lives in a table. And then is custom Google scripts and then we have custom built front ends as well for all of our pitch team. So that was, we've got a dev, so that was built in the cell hosts, I think, whatever it was built in, that's connected to air table. And then, whatever AI model is doing the open AI is API probably for the categorization or like a cheap fast, accurate model for that. And then we're constantly iterating on as well. So like we have like a gyro and we're constantly, adding features and adding functionality to make things smoother and better. - Are you doing this for social media posters? It just for like journalists queries. - Just, oh no, yeah, so are we, yeah, and social media as well, yeah. - Oh wow. And so how are you actually like scraping, so like are you scraping X? Like, yeah, what are you using for that? - It's easy, that's easy, I think. You just have the individual account and then you can just pull from, like, this post. Or another way which you can do it, is you can use one of the pre-existing aggregating tools like GERNO Finder, which we'll pull in socially hosted queries that use #GERNORequest or #GERNOInquiry, I think are the two main ones. And then you can pull those into your own system. Yeah, and then a golden nugget for you is journalists that post requests that don't use that tag. So they're like sort of hard to find. They're mainly operate on Reddit. - Really? - Yeah, there's quite a few journalists on Reddit that will like, be sourcing for like legit big publications. They're legit journalists and they'll be like, sourcing for their experts in Reddit without any like GERNO requests. So it's not getting pulled in by any of the tools so you have like much lower competition. I'm not gonna tell you the journalists or where to find them, 'cause that's like, but they're there. - Oh come on, you can't say where to find them. You don't have to say where the journalists are. And we're gonna find. - Well, on Reddit. - Yeah. - Somewhere on Reddit. - Okay, thanks Chris. - Well, it's just think it's where would the journalists that you wanna find on Reddit, where would they live? They're gonna be in the niche specific thread subreddits on that. - And they'll be posting as journalists. So it's like what you're posting in our science with like a science or like our space or something with this base question. Yeah, okay, I mean, that makes sense. So you're actually monitoring these huge subreddits and analyzing. - That's quite a new, that's quite new. That's in a in a gyretask, yeah. - 'Cause even like monitoring every post from 'cause journalists are very prolific on social media, especially like Axon LinkedIn. And so even monitoring like every post is a lot. But yeah. It is, but we have a huge blacklist. So another thing that we do is we have a blacklist of domains. So this is a living breathing blacklist, which is basically any domain, which doesn't mean our quality criteria. Any domain which doesn't link, so that would be either historically or as an ongoing test. So some publications change their linking policy randomly or periodically, like there's just like usnews.com, changes their linking policy like every month. Sometimes they'll journalists or the editor will come back and say we will not include a link. And like we'll like retest it a month later, we'll do a pitch, we'll win and they've linked. So I'm like, okay, on blacklist it, we're pitching it again. Then we'll pitch it again for three weeks, four weeks, we'll win another link, we'll check, there's no link as an unlinked mention, we'll go to the editor, we'll go to the journalist, can you add the link, no our policy is not to link. So it's like, do you flip it and drop it? But anyway, we've got this huge blacklist. So let's say you're pulling 100 tweets from journalists over the course of a week that have included hashtag, journal request, hashtag, hashtag, journal, whatever it is. And 80% of them, the AI, the journalist says, I am Ryan, an article four, myrubbishwebsite.com. Okay, myrubbishwebsite.com is blacklisted. Remove, remove, remove, remove, remove, remove. - So if a, wait wait, so you will actually blacklist smaller sites that don't give links, or don't give even like do follow links. - No, we will blacklist for a number of reasons. So we bill for follow and no follow, no way around it is up to the journalist, is up to the publication. And if you're an SEO, you want a healthy mixer, do follow no follow. - That's true. - So yeah, we don't blacklist on that level, we blacklist on, we'll not link it all, 'cause it's just a waste of resources. So a few great sites, the source for commentary continually, but they have upheld a non-linking policy for years. So it's just not worth it, maybe for the traditional PR, but not for SEO PR. We will blacklist for scamsites. So Brett, who owns Harrow now, he's done a really good job at trying to prevent this, but it still happens. So you know. - He was on the show last week. - Yeah, he's great. - So yeah, you still have, he still has problem. I still see it occasionally where somebody will source for a publication, we will pitch that publication, because it meets our quality criteria and we'll get a response back from the journalist saying, "Love your comments, really happy to include them, just need you to pay like $150 fee." - Ah, yeah. - "Blacklist." So you get rid of them. And then we just get rid of sites like, you know, for whatever reason, it might be a legit site, legit author, but it's like a DR7 with no traffic. So we're not gonna waste that time with that as well. So we'll blacklist all of those sites that don't meet that basic level of quality. - Yeah, that probably makes things so efficient for your team. Everything goes into one system and it just goes to your, it goes to your team, pre-vetted. And so you don't have like the people on your team reading through the query emails that go out every day on Help Reportor Out and Source of Sources and all of these places. It's all going into one place. It's getting pre-vetted, pre-filtered, and then it's going to your team. That's correct? - Yeah, exactly. So every opportunity that they are dealing with is we want them to win. - Oh man, that's smart. Oh yeah, that probably makes you so efficient. That's great. Are you doing anything with like viral marketing? - In what sense? Like, - You have clients and you're also thinking of like creative angles and stories or things that they can do or like different types of linkable assets that can be done. I don't know if that's within like your wheelhouse or if it's yeah. - I mean, on the traditional authority PR side, we want stuff to go viral, but it's more about narrative control because a lot of clients are as interested in building brand but being visible for what they want to be visible for inside of not just search but also LLMs. So if it's like a realtor who wants to be known for like being the go-to real estate agent in Texas for selling family home units, quite hard to go like viral in and around that narrative, not to say that it can't be done and we are looking at things like the things that can, where you can have more like a hyper local element. So we've done really well with hyper local, digital PR and traditional PR, just because it's like a win-win-win situation. Anybody that's in a business which lends itself to a hyper local media coverage should jump on that opportunity and you'll see this even in your own like town paper. Like they'll write about anything. Like that's not to belittle it. I'm saying like if a new restaurant opens in your town, like your town paper wants to know about it. Like that is free press coverage and links for you and your business. So if you are like an expert in and around your subject matter, your business and you can like tap into local interests or like news Jack, national stories that have a local impact like there was so much you can do and the conversion rate is just crazy high 'cause the journalists like they want that information. They're saying that actually doing like local earn media or just or doing pitches to local journalists. If you are a local business is like way, way easier because there's less news. - Not necessarily because there's less news, but because that news system exists to deliver local news or to deliver a narrative around the local area. So I'll take real estate again, for an example. If a new federal law comes out or a state law with regards to property taxes, let's say zoning issues, I don't know, Americans have crazy zoning codes and all of this. So let's say something like that comes out and you're in a small town or like a mid-sized town in a state where that national or federal law can have an effect, then you as an expert in that industry can provide really granular and important information that that news publication can distil to its local readership. So you can just see the value add goes all the way through the chain there. It's like it makes sense that everybody involved and you as the expert given that sort of commentary, you get exactly what you want, which is like, it's still tier one, you know, it's tier one media in the sense that it's a big publication. It's gonna have high organic traffic and it's gonna be so relevant to you and your business. It's just crazy good, the results just crazy good. - We should do an episode in the future, just like a 15 minute episode on getting local press links because like, there's a lot of local SEOs and local businesses who listen to the show, what like local businesses wanting to do SEO who listen to this show, but they might not have made it to the end of this podcast episode and we should just for those people, if they didn't make it to the end of this episode, we should just do like a 15 minute up on building, on getting local press because this is like, yeah, this is super interesting and you're right, like these, they exist to report on local news. So if you are like, just like a quick overview, so you are a local business and you're looking for local press opportunities to get local mentions, to get local links. Are you just, are there any platforms that you're using or you're just paying attention to all of the local news and publications and journalists and journalists who cover the beats that you're relevant to or in your paying attention to industry news? Like, yeah, like how would you like systematize that? Yeah, so we should do another episode, that's great idea and anyone that is listening that's still with us now and you're in, you have a local business, like you are potentially in a position where you can put yourself head and shoulders above your competition because almost nobody's doing this because it seems crazy, like okay, I'm a plumber, like how the hell am I gonna get in the press, okay? Now this is a different approach to inbound requests. Like local journalists are not sourcing for expert commentary for their articles. This is an outbound strategy, so this is where you need to go to them, but you can see how easy it is and why they will open these emails and why they will print the stories and give you coverage and links. You're a local plumbing business in your area, okay? National news is just, or state news has just said that in the next three days gonna hit be hit with lowest temperatures that the region has seen in the past 20 years, okay? You're gonna go to that local, you're gonna build a small list, you can do this manually if local journalists, local publications, you're then gonna produce a story on how people can make sure that their pipes are gonna stay, that you know, solid within this crazy period of cold weather, what they can do preventatively to stop any issues and what they can do if they do get like burst pipes from freezing. You can just see why that is gonna potentially get pick up and why they're gonna quote you and give you a link and you're gonna be in your local, we know from local SEO that local links are super valuable. But it's that small effort, isn't it? As a plumber, you're going out, you're plumbing, that's your trade, but it isn't as hard as you think. There's so many tools out there now. You will have the expertise, I'm sure. I'm sure if I had a five minute conversation with you, you'd be able to give me the perfect response to all of those things you should do. You might not be able to quite put it in a sort of a clickbait and newsworthy headline and structure. - Dude, I'm gonna make a TikTok after this. No, I can see exactly how you do it. Like, let's say you are that local business, you're the local plumber, you're not as brilliant of thinking of press opportunities as Chris Pentelli. And what you do is you go to Chachi Petit and you just go, you say, I am, I have a, let's do something else. I have a roof and repair business in Dallas, Texas. I want to message local journalists who cover news, again, in Dallas. What are all of the angles that they might report on that would be relevant to me? Like, you know, things like, maybe there's like a heat wave that could impact, that could impact like roofs and where you need, or like there's gonna be a cold snap where you need more insulation, just things like that. And I have no doubt, because I've done many, many props like this, that you will get an amazing list of things to start with. And I'm gonna turn that into a TikTok, because I know that people are gonna, local businesses are really gonna vibe with that. That's, man, and you're so right, because all of these local publications report on this stuff. It's really easy. - Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, there's a few things. I would go for the news jack-in-angle, as opposed to just give me a bunch of things. If there isn't a timely or jack-in-angle to it, it might be a bit, so definitely be looking at the local or federal or national news and thinking anyway, how that can affect. Could that be to give you ideas on, in fact, you can build really cool automations where you can scrape news RSS feeds and then you can put in what it is that you're looking to do and what you wanna be like, the expertise you can give and how these issues could affect the local area and then therefore, like, the things I could comment on. You wanna make sure you've got like a good, strong email, an email that you know works. Email deliverability is huge. You've got loads more, loads less risk doing this compared to blasting 1,000 emails on a national level. If you're gonna send the same email to 10 local journalists from your business domain email, you'll be absolutely fine and I'm sure it will land in the inbox because that's the exact 1,000 emails to journalists is essentially leaning towards spam, which is what they are trying to stop. 10 highly targeted emails from your business email which you've had for 30 years, it's gonna land, so that's great. So don't send 1,000 emails, be relevant. And yeah, put together a nice story, maybe some original imagery. Make sure you put like a bio at the end, make sure you include a link to your website, say that you're reachable by mobile or email if there are any follow up questions. And in fact, you can even use a tool like Proully, I think it is, which can help you with your press release from ideation to sort of format in and really low cost as well. So, or you can just use yeah, chat GPT. So yeah, I mean, it's there, as an opportunity, it's there. I'll say this for anybody, for any local businesses, still with us, just like if you're on YouTube, take this part of the transcript from this segment and give it to chat GPT and then like just tell it your niche and your area and it'll give you some ideas right there and then like take that and go to chat GPT agent mode and then say like, you know, these are the types of stories that I think I would be very valuable in, find local publications in my area who would accept these stories and chat GPT agent mode will just do like it'll spend like 10 minutes like doing a very deep search and giving you lots of recommendations. Man, that's great. And the other thing, if you can find, if you're sort of thinking, well, like I'm a rufa and I'm in an area where like nothing ever really happens that's gonna affect proves, let's say, like the obvious ones. Like, okay, we don't get tornadoes. Like that would be ideal, obviously, no, ideal, but like a tornado. - Yeah, yeah, but that's gonna be newsworthy. - Yeah, and you can certainly see like a tornado is gonna rip for a roof. Like is there anything you can do to make your roof, you know, better protected against tornadoes, but you live in a place where you don't ever get any tornadoes. There can be really sort of clever connections that you can make from news to what it is that you do outside of the obvious. So like plumber, frozen pipes, okay. You own a car mechanic, auto shop and it's coming to the winter, you know, frozen windows. Like these ones are obvious, but there's so many more where it makes complete sense and it's less obvious. I can't think of any else off my head, but there's loads. - So, are you, is your agency doing anything with press releases? - Yeah, with the traditional, yeah, 100%, yeah, we do. - Yeah. - Press release, not in a wired press release sense. Like we would, I would call a press release, like a PR story, so, you know, but like, yeah, wired releases, you just push on the wire for $150, no. - Okay, okay. Are you, do you put press kits in like footers for companies that are clients? - We don't know. - Okay, I sure. - I don't know if anyone read, I don't know. Why don't they, maybe they do. I send a press kit. - I love press kits. - I have a press kit. - Yeah, I have a media kit and a press kit. - Yeah, but I don't know. I think the journalists, then, from what I know from the journalists that I've got a better relationship with, like they're interested in two things. One, the expert, like above and beyond anything else, it's the expert, the level of expertise. Like that's the first and foremost. And in fact, you can see that's true. Like when I did my recent looking for people in the medical space to talk about growth market in the medical space, like, yeah, I saw a guy who was like, you know, an SEO assistant for a company that made needles, let's say, I was like, then I had like a guy who'd like, released this new drug and his company had just had like, it's second round of funding and there were like a two billion valuation and he was one of the world's leading doctors in this area. Like, you can see where, but what gets journalists, and that's not to say that you can't get coverage if your expertise are a bit more, not lower, like a bit more humble, let's say. But you do need to, you know, that's the first thing that's gonna jump out of them. And then the other thing is the quality of the pitch, the originality or the level of expertise. Not every pitch needs originality. If a journalist is looking for a finance expert to give one tip on how you can improve your credit score, they're not looking for you to come up with some like thing no one's ever heard of that doesn't make any sense just because it's original. Like, there's only so many ways you can improve a credit score. So what they're really looking to do is leverage the expertise of the person that's pitched them with a solid, you know, well-informed pitch on what it is that they've asked. - And lead with the results and the benefits. Everybody loves that, start with that stuff. Chris, this has been awesome. This has been really so much fun. And I can see why Charles Flute recommends you so highly and why you have one of the top link building agencies. Like, this was great and you know your stuff. Thank you for coming on. - Been a pleasure. Thank you Edward. Hopefully see you soon. - Yeah, likewise. And I want to do that 15 minute episode that I think that'll be really great. And there's probably a million more 15 minute type episodes that we can do just niching down on to like a very specific part of your expertise. Like, there's like, I mean, you understand. There's like a million stories that we could do. Like a million different things where we could create a dedicated short episode for it. And it would be extremely valuable. Like, I think the local, local links, local outreach, local links episode will be great. I've made local links episodes in the past and they always do well. I think that'd be really good. For people who aren't familiar with your agency, where can they find you? - On LinkedIn, Chris Panthali, email, Chris, I link up by the I/O, or if you want, I have a cheat sheet which can help you go and get your first big five pieces of tier one media coverage and links on your own. You can get that at linkify.io/cheat-cheat. - And I'll put all of these links in the description for this episode as well. - Awesome. - Cool, Chris, thank you. - This is episode 969 of the Edward Show, 969 days in a row doing this podcast. No days missed, 969 days in row since starting. That's crazy. If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple podcasts, thank you so much for listening. And I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.