I saw a link to this post on Reddit, in the wild, on the /r/vermont subreddit.
Why?
It concluded (through a very scientific study SARCASM) that Vermont loves cheese the most.
That’s it!
What does that have to do with Online *******, the site behind this cheesey post?
Nothing!
Does that stop them from writing about it and doing outreach?
Nope.
Does that stop legitimate news sites and other websites from linking to their dopey cheese post?
Clearly not:
Here’s How They Did It (Probably)
I don’t have direct insight into their emails and shit, so this isn’t EXACTLY how they did it, more like: here’s how YOU can do it.
First: they found a topic that everyone can relate to (cheese).
Next: they interviewed 2,000 people from around the country. I don’t have a lot of insight into how exactly they did this, but you can use a service like Centiment to put together a survey and get it in front of people for your “data set.” I’m actually a bit interested in this, so I might dig into a bit more–how can you quickly put together a significant list of people and get them to answer your question so it looks legit enough to present it as data.
Then: they put together a nice shareable graphic and wrote up their findings:
Finally: I assume they juiced their efforts with a press release campaign (see below). I also wouldn’t be surprised if they engaged in some targeted outreach at journalists that like to write about shallow topics FOR THE CLICKS. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if the link I saw in the /r/vermont reddit was posted by a Reddit account that exists to just spread posts like this on behalf of that company or some service. It’s what *I* would do–you KNOW journalists are just cruising subreddits for shit to write about.
This is what people mean when they say “digital PR.”
You can see from the anchor text spread that most of the links are coming from the press release campaign:
But it’s still early days, and Ahrefs is just starting to discover these links, so I am assuming over the next week or two we’ll see many more link coming in both from the PR campaign AND from other writers seeing the post and writing about it.
Here’s what the two non press-release looks like.
This one is from PennLive.com:
And this one from a Texas newspaper:
Why It Matters
You have to know that ****** sites are hard to get natural links to. The payoff is big for ranking well, and the competition is stiff. I know that ****** sites have stupidly large link building budgets to get links however they can.
So to set up a campaign like this for–I’m assuming–significantly less than their monthly link building budget–it’s a big win.
And the list I just described is probably pretty easy to pull off–even for a fairly small team with a relatively small budget. Also if you have ANY kind of business that’s more reputable than an online ******–bonus! You’ll have an easier time getting links I would think.
Also: the more you can make the post about your main topic, the more powerful the campaign and the links will be.
If you’re a pet food site and you do a similar survey about the most respected pet food brand or something, those links will juice the absolute shit out of your relevancy and authority. If you’re a CBD brand, no one cares about CBD (and no one wants to link you) so–like *******–you gotta write about stuff outside your sphere of relevancy…
Hopefully you can use this post as a springboard for your ideas–how can you get some stupid shallow, barely scientific post up that people are gonna **** to link to–and then take action and get it done.
If you do, shoot me an email and LMK!
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