“In the press” is a link building tactic that simply works

Today I have prepared a tip for you on a neat link building tactic. I have been using it sucessfully for years and the number of opportunities is generally in the hundreds of thousands of pages. Are you curious?

I originally published this link building tactic in 2014 in Czech language here.

One of the biggest reasons why people would share is being proud of something. Our ego can’t simply help itself.

You can observe this behaviour also with brands.

There really are companies out there who are eager to be mentioned or have their products mentioned. And when they succeed they proudly show their mentions at the places that are designed just for this purpose.

Have you ever seen a page like this on any website?

What does the heading say? In the press.

This page – basically a board of pride – is a collection of links to articles where the brand was featured in the media.

So how can you use this in your link earning efforts? I know few ways to go!

What to check before you start

If you find a “in the press” page you need to validate there is a real chance of a link addition.

Check if the mentions are a real hyperlinks to the original source pages. In many case the brand links to the print screened articles of pdf copies.

It’s also worth checking the date of the latest media mention. Some pages might be internally abandoned and the company may not care about refreshing them.

Last, but not least. If you mind nofollowed links, check how they handle external links at the target page. I have also spotted few pages with noindex rule in the meta robots directive.

Ready to for the links? The following works for me.

Expert opinions

I like this strategy for ecommerce sites. You need to find someone who can naturally expand your own blog content with the useful information.

Say you are selling running shoes. You may create a content how to protect your health when running. So you need an expert opinion from a physiotherapist.

Then use “in the press” physiotherapist in Google to find experts in this topic who share their media coverage. Get in touch with them and ask for an expert opinion on your topic.

Once the content gets published, don’t forget to remind them nicely that their In the press page might be updated with a new media mention.

Brand introduction

This one works nicely for a magazine content. Again, use “in the press” + your keyword in Google to find the brand for the topic you want to write about.

This topic must be something that fits into your usually covered topics and you would write about it sooner or later anyway.

In this case you don’t need to reach out before you publish the content. Just let them now after.

Results

In my experience the success rate is between 30-50%. So it’s pretty high compared to other link building tactics. On the other hand you don’t get plenty of new links at once with a single piece of content.