Fery Kaszoni

Fery, with his extensive experience in the field, is eager to share several practical ways of building links. His love for sharing his knowledge with other specialists is palpable, and it creates a sense of connection among the audience.

Fery, a digital PR expert, is enthusiastic about sharing his knowledge. He firmly believes that PR is a cornerstone in link building, particularly in the long term. With PR, you can ensure a consistent link velocity, a crucial factor in SEO success, providing a sense of reassurance about its significance.

Types of PR

First of all, there is reactive PR. When something happens in the news, and you have a client in the related field, you can use this news to promote the product or the service. Fery provides an example of the alleged fight between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Fery’s team had a fitness client, and they used this hype to promote the brand with titles like “Who Would Win?” which brought them around 50 links in an instant. Even Wikipedia quoted their article.

However, in reactive PR, timing is everything. There’s no room for delay-you only have a few hours to react. The quicker you voice your opinion, the higher your chances of success, underscoring the urgency and importance of timing in this strategy.

Next comes expert commentary. It is all about preparing an expert commentary for an event that you know about in advance. For example, your client is a VPN provider, and it is Black Friday soon. You can come up with a title like “Experts Reveal 5 VPN Scams during Black Friday.” This way, you can react to any event or any popular topic. Here, you should be more creative.

Expert commentary works because journalists can’t have an opinion. They need to find an opinion and share it with readers. Moreover, this opinion must have some credibility, and this is where PR and SEO help their clients.

Finally, there are data campaigns with which you can leverage your time. Journalists don’t have time to analyze tons of data, and they need somebody to help them. PR can leverage this kind of gap. As an example, Fery shows an article written for a job aggregator about the real-life earnings of fictional video game characters. It is fun to find out how much an Italian plumber would earn, as everyone knows and loves Mario.

Ideas and Inspiration

Fery states that the best ideas are not the new ones. In digital PR, the ideas that have never been done before are probably the worst ones. They are risky, and nobody knows whether they will lend links or not. The best way to find ideas that journalists would want to write about is through Google Search.

Another way is to look through websites that are known to be doing digital PR and examine the most popular pages. Some big companies are doing asset-based campaigns. As an example, Fery demonstrates the WalletHub website, which is known as a “monster” of PR with thousands of campaigns. Using Ahrefs or similar services, you can find the most referring pages and use them as inspiration.

Journalists

How do I find the right journalists? Fery uses two tools specifically for this purpose:

1. https://app.roxhillmedia.com/search/new/journalists
2. https://search-intelligence.muckrack.com/search/?result_type=person

Both sources are not cheap, but they are very effective for a PR team. There are numerous filters and thousands of journalists to choose from. The first website is better for the UK, and the second one is a better choice for the US. However, you can use both for both geos. Next, you can send your press release to chosen journalists.

Email

How do you send your press release to a journalist? Let’s start with an expert commentary campaign. The title and the first line need to be catchy to interest the journalist. Next, introduce the client. The whole press release looks like an article; however, it is not. This is just an inspiration for a journalist for a future article. In the end, you need to provide a link for crediting. Fery shows an example of such an email in the video (the link leads to a corresponding section).

In the case of a data campaign, the first line and the title are of high importance. Compress all the information into three or four bullet points at the top. The body of the email is pretty similar to the expert commentary one. Present all the data in a simple and engaging way. Always be polite when asking someone to credit you and link to your client.

Finally, Fery talks about the reactive campaign. In this case, you don’t even need to back up the facts (not always, at least), and you can also ignore a detailed methodology. This is the simplest form, as it must be published really fast.

Data Sources

Fery concludes his presentations with go-to data sources and encourages everyone to use them as the sources of unlimited link building assets:

• Office for National Statistics
• UK Police Dara
• YouGov
• US Census Bureau
• Canada Open Source Data
• United Nations Data
• US Government’s Open Data