You mentioned in Chiang Mai that there was a much higher ratio of bloggers over time

that have gone from accepting free guest posts to only doing paid. What ratios are
those exactly according to your data, why do you think it’s changed and how do you
think it’s best to position yourself?

I think it’s much harder today to get bloggers to publish an unpaid guest post than it was a
few years ago. Ahead of my Chiang Mai talk I reviewed the last 1,340 blogger emails we’d
send in 2019. Here’s what we found:

• 73% responded with a rate card

• 21% didn’t respond
• 6% came back with other types of response

So from that 1,340 emails, we actually only even had any sort of unpaid opportunity with 80.
Just under 54% of those turned into an unpaid link.

In other words, from 1,340 emails we landed unpaid links on just 43 website. That’s 3.2%.

I don’t have data from every single year available, but from what I do have:

• In 2012, we landed unpaid guest posts on 41% of blogs we emailed

• In 2017 it was 9%
• In 2018 it was 6%
• This year it was 3%

So the returns are clearly diminishing.

I put most of this down to the fact that bloggers are much savvier now. They get what we’re
doing in a lot of cases and they know our clients are paying us. Bloggers increasingly set up
blogs as a side income rather than simply a passion project.

Most of my clients do literally no blog work now, partly down to their perceived risk and
partly down to the fact that there aren’t that many blogs that can move a needle on their own
like some bigger authority websites. I still use blogs fo r a lot of my own projects and a lot of
test sites I do all sorts of link building on.

In terms of positioning with bloggers, I think a transparent approach is what’s needed. I don’t
focus now on landing guest content unpaid. It’s hard to justify the time it takes to land an
unpaid link compared to the cost of a paid one, if you see what I m ean? Particularly if that
paid one is product rather than cash.

So I adopt a transparent approach. I’m clear on what I want and what I have in return from
the outset. It results in less time wasted on both sides and time (my own or my team’s) is the
single biggest cost to me.

DO YOU THINK BUYING LINKS IS MORE NICHE

FOCUSED? IS IT HARDER TO GET FREE LINKS IN
CERTAIN NICHES THAN OTHERS?
Absolutely. I find travel bloggers, parenting bloggers and finance bloggers amongst the
likeliest to come back with rate cards, making very fair points that our clients pay us!
In some very niche areas I find it a lot easier (funeral bloggers – they’re a thing). Generally, I
think blogs where the blogger is likely to receive fewer emails requesting editorial are those
likelier to be responsive.

You said in CM that you were working more towards journalists because the links are
of better quality and they’re often easier to acquire for free than from bloggers. How
would someone who’s never gone about it before, start link build ing to their site
through journalist connections?

So, for my clients (not my own projects) almost all of our outreach activity is journalist led.
SO instead of pitching guest posts to small blogs, we’re pitching to big magazines, niche
trade publications or even national and international press sometimes.

Instead of sending products to bloggers to review, you can send them to journalists and get
a much higher authority link.

Journalists all over the world follow ethical codes, so I hardly ever encounter a journalist who
responds looking for money. I find them almost always much more interested in what you
can offer in terms of story, editorial or idea.

There’s a lot of talk about relationships when it comes to talking to journalists and, make no
mistake, knowing people does give you a leg up sometimes. But journalists are looking for a
story constantly. It’s their job! So I think anyone can start.

The main thing is making sure you’re pitching something genuinely of interest to the right
journalist. So if you have a product to pitch for Christmas, go check out the journalists who
did the Christmas gift round ups last year and pitch them.

If you’re pitching a heartwarming health story, find journalists who actively look for this stuff.

The single most important thing you can do is make sure you’re pitching to the right person.
It can be manual and laborious but worth it.

ARE THERE ANY SPECIFIC SITES, COMMUNITIES

OR BOARDS YOU CAN USE TO ACQUIRE THESE
JOURNALISTIC LEVEL LINKS?
Yes. Lots of great starting resources.

• Google News is your best friend. Get on there and look at patterns for what people
talk about and when, find the right journalists based on their topics through Google
News too
 • Response Source Media enquiries (available in the UK and France) is a s uperb
offering. Journalists go here to ask for help or stories. They’re asking for experts
sometimes (because a health reporter isn’t a qualified GP in most cases. So if they
want to write about a health condition, then they’ll seek a qualified expert to
comment). Here’s an example of us achieving that through a simple Response
Source response: thesun.co.uk/news/7700763/krokodil-uk-drug-problem/ Journalists
often ask for experts here in legal, property, business, accounting, finance and even
look for psychic readers!

• Twitter’s #journorequest hashtag is another place journalists often go to find sources

like this

• Pressplugs.co.uk is another UK specific one where journalists go to find experts or

even products for a round up

• Check out media kits for the publications you want to be seen in. That gives you an
idea of who their target audience is and in some cases, they even include editorial
calendars and the topics they’re covering at various times of the year. Those are
such a great way to help you decide what you should be pitching and when. Just
Google those. “Men’s health media kit,” or similar will yield result s. You can also
make searches like: “editorial calendar” uk filetype:pdf to find calendars

These are a great starting point.

DO JOURNALISTS PREFER CERTAIN TYPES OF

LANGUAGE?
When writing pitches to emails the first hurdle is getting them to open it in an inbox that
could see 500 or even more new emails a day. This is all about your email subject. I find I
have more success in getting emails opened if I write the subject in a way that mimics the
house style of the publication. So if it’s the Daily Mail, wo rds like “REVEALED” in caps lock,
for example. So do familiarise yourself with how the publication writes its headlines.

Ahead of Chiang Mai SEO, I went through this year’s data from open rates in our team to
identify the phrases we had the highest success on open rates with by including them in the
subjects.

• For pitching product for round ups:

o Can we send you our {product type}
 o Your recent {product type} round up
o Forthcoming {product type} round ups

• For pitching news stories:

o Story tip
o New research
o Revealed
o Story idea

• For pitching features:

o {Topic} feature idea
o Feature idea
o {Suggested feature title}

In terms of the language itself within an email, I find different people like different things.
Some journalists have told me they like no attachments and all the information in the body of
the email. Others tell me a small attachment and a very concise em ail is the. Way to go.

Personally I tend to:

• Skip the small talk

• Get to the point
• Answer as many of the following as possible in the opening 4 sentences – Who is it
about? What is it about? When did it happen? Where did it happen? Why did it
happen?
• Include a link to a Dropbox folder with lots of further information and images

DO BLOGGERS PREFER CERTAIN TYPES OF

LANGUAGES?
If you’re going straight for the paid post and you want to stop beating around the bush and
get to it as quickly as possible, I’ve found the following words in an email subject get the
highest responses:

• Advertising
• Sponsored Posts
• Paid Post
• Budget
• Rate Card

When you’re scaling your link building from blogs, what are some of the best tools
you’ve used to grow a link building campaign?
Remarkably I still rely HEAVILY on Google Sheets for managing processes. I have
previously used tools like Buzzstream but it tends to be overkill for me these days with a
relatively small team and most of my blog led work being on internal projects.

But I do use Facebook a LOT. I have a series of groups on Facebook for bloggers looking for
brand collaboration opportunities. I have different ones for different niches in some cases
and different countries in others.

If you optimise the group’s name and description for things like “blogger opportunities” you
find people joining of their own will with no advertising. One of mine, for example
(https://www.facebook.com/groups/1442403722481438/) hit 1000 members with no
promotion spend.

So instead of sending cold emails out now, I tend to put a brief in the group with a link to a
Google Form that asks all the questions I need answering and then I can filter through. This
saves days and days.
I let other brands join too and post their own opportunities because that keeps the group
busy enough to keep the interest of the bloggers.
This makes opportunities slightly more inbound and honestly is such a time saver for my
team.

How would you define relevancy and it’s application within lin k building in 2019 and going
into 2020?
I think relevancy is only going to become more important as time goes on, both in terms of
Google’s improving interpretation of search intent and in terms of how links are valued. It’s
by no means a new factor, but probably the first one I look at these days when deciding
whether a link prospect is a good prospect.
This applies hugely to outreach with journalists too. The main question I ask myself now is
“Is a link editorially relevant here?”

If it’s editorially relevant and a human journalist thinks it’s editorially relevant, then I’m happy
that Google shouldn’t disagree no matter how sophisticated the algorithm gets.
I like to keep links on topic (but not necessarily bang on topic). For example, I launched a
piece for a client https://www.forthwithlife.co.uk/blog/great-britain-and-stress/ with a core
objective from an SEO point of view of improving rankings on a product page for a cortisol
blood test. Instead of making the content about cortisol, we made it about str ess (cortisol
being the marker that indicates stress). The press and general population don’t care or think
about cortisol, but they do care about mental health and stress. So we could create an
interesting press piece but where the links back to that piece are absolutely relevant to
cortisol.

Are there any other best practices you use for your current link building projects to future
proof vs the algo’s Google are throwing at the SERPs?
For my clients, paid link building isn’t a thing for most of them at a ll. Not even an option.
Some are incredibly risk averse or have bad experiences of past penalties. Some simply
want to do things more organically.
So for years I’ve been really focussed on editorial relevance and the value of the link.

Going back to that stress piece above… We made it our mission to use outreach enough to
build sufficient links to get that piece ranking for “stress statistics.” The result of ranking for
that was this:
There are now 177 domains linking to that piece and the last 160 or so have been
completely passive. Completely. We haven’t sent an email out to anyone or anything. And
without then going out to build any direct links to the cortisol product page, that now ranks
too, presumably off the back of the relevant internal link from that power content page.

So I really focus on building assets that I can rank for what I call “source -to-cite” queries –
queries I feel imply a user searching for source to cite in their own piece.
Stats queries fall into this category a lot and so do template queries like “business plan
template.”
I do a lot of this for clients now. Not only does it make link building much more scalable, but
it’s incredibly low risk.

I also still do lots of Creative Commons attribution image link building (it’s a while since I
updated this piece but the gist is much the same:
https://www.staceymacnaught.co.uk/image-link-building/)
Ultimately, if you go by the book with Google, anything you do that has a link as an objective
is technically not ok. So arguably there’s no such thing as white hat link building and that’s
what I tell clients who come to me saying they want everything “by Google’s guidelines.”

That said, if press naturally link to something I created (even if I did create it with a link as
an objective) or a blogger links to me because they used my image and that is appropriate
attribution, then I’m comfortable that it’s scalable, it works and the links are comple tely
justified.
Ultimately, I just don’t ever like to have all my link building eggs in one basket. I like to have
multiple tactics and multiple assets generating links at any one time.