As a journalist how many times have you seen this type of exhortation in Press Releases that hit your inbox:
If you use this information, please add credit with a link to this website (https://SomeWebSite.com). This will help us to continue to provide you with quality content.
Let’s break it down:
In a large newsroom the journalist has no to very little say on editorial content at all – sub editors and editors will take the raw material and bend it to their editorial policy.
Buried in that editorial policy will be a very large resistance to freely giving hyperlinks/outlinks (outlinks take the visitor away from the site whilst hyperlinks can refer to internal or external links) away to anyone who asks without a large monetary consideration attached – that is called advertising and carries a large cost.
Bottom line – asking for a link (with the implied threat of not providing the journalist with more content) does NOT work.
Let’s look at the sentence; “This will help us to continue to provide you with quality content.” and, after snorting our morning coffee through our noses, remind everyone that what is said there is closer to the untruth than the truth. A link out from a news site is ADVERTISING, plain and simple and MAY, in a very roundabout way, help provide you with more content.
BUT, the primary reasons for asking for a link from a news site are: To sell product and gain SEO rankings.
Here at MyPR we allow outlinks for Featured Press Releases as a means to make journalists lives easier to develop a story.
Here is a (not so) radical idea:
When providing outlinks in any press release provide links to more detailed information that the journalist can interrogate.
Provide outlinks to an ALTERNATIVE view to yours (inherent in here is the principal of ‘hearing the other side’).
Provide outlinks with the intent to allow all readers to find out more and make up their own minds.
At all times before providing outlinks stop and think; “Is this for more and better information or just for SEO?” Obviously ‘more and better information’ is the holy grail!
Think back to the start of the internet when web site owners would link out to other sites in the same industry in order to help internet users learn more – it was done in a helpful sharing manner until the search engines started rating the popularity of sites based on how many outlinks pointed to individual sites. From then the game was on.
One of the most famous set of keywords was ‘Click Here’ – a search on Google for ‘Click Here’ would lead you to the Adobe site. How did they accomplish that? By giving away their PDF reader which site owners when uploading PDF documents would ‘helpfully’ provide a link to Adobe’s PDF reader with the simple ‘Click Here’ exhortation!
CLICK HERE to submit your press release to MyPR.co.za.
Alan Straton
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