Wouldn’t it be great if all of the boring prospecting for PR and link-building opportunities could be automated? Well, thanks to a wide number of free and paid alert services, it can!
We use a number of the resources below, plus some more hands-on techniques, to generate a daily list of potential opportunities for our clients…
PR services
Journalists, publications and online platforms will often request help with information through PR services platforms. This provides a great opportunity to get media coverage and links for clients by offering a client’s expertise where it is required and would be useful. National publications, such as Men’s Health, will put requests on such platforms and we have achieved coverage in the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph for our clients before – so the sky’s the limit!
Free options
HARO (Help A Reporter Out) is perhaps the best known of these platforms. However, we have found that good opportunities are few and far between. This may be because there is a major difference between the UK and USA/international versions of HARO and it is better suited to other markets than the UK.
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Sourcebottle is something we’ve had a lot of success with in contrast. It is similar to HARO in that it’s a resource that connects journalists and publishers with sources. It also covers and wide variety of geographical areas and industry sectors. We’ve found a number of good opportunities with it both for ourselves and clients, and it comes highly recommended despite being relatively little-known. An email from them may look like this:
Paid options
Some paid options for PR work include Muckrack and Responsesource. These generally offer high-quality publishers for sources, however, there is a fairly large price tag attached. For large or enterprise-level businesses though, they can be a great complement to PR and organic SEO efforts.
Alerts services
With a little creativity, free email alert services can be great for monitoring newly created online content for promotional opportunities. This can take the form of:
- Guest posts
- Brand, website or product mentions
- Content that already mentions multiple competitors
- ‘Newsjacking’ opportunities (a hot new topic, where little is known, and there may be a chance to create content around it)
- Content inspiration
We can see this in action below with Google Alerts. In this example the content would be delivered to an RSS feed, although an email alert would be the usual way.
Free Options
Google Alerts and Talkwalker Alerts are both great free alert services and can be customised in various ways to deliver alerts at appropriate times e.g.certain geographical areas etc. Google Alerts can be used with their advanced operators which is very useful for narrowing down opportunities.
Paid Options
Other options for this include the paid service mention.com. Many SEO tool providers also offering some form of content monitoring.