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If you want to get noticed by both journalists and Google, digital PR might be your secret weapon. Vince Nero shares practical, ethical strategies for earning high-quality backlinks, building trust, and creating content that media outlets – and your customers – actually care about.
The Impact of Digital PR on Your Visibility, Credibility, and Business
For those of you—like me—who always hated link building as an SEO tactic, this week’s newsletter is for you. It’s not that getting inbound links to your website is bad, and it’s not that it can’t help with your SEO…it’s just that so much of it is a mix of spammy behavior and brain-dead grinding.
Google dropped the hammer on paid link schemes in 2024, and suddenly thousands of “SEO experts” who built their entire business around guest posting networks found themselves scrambling for new tactics. The casualties were massive: sites with sky-high domain authority ratings that existed solely to sell links got obliterated overnight.
But marketers who saw this coming had already shifted to something much more sustainable—digital PR.
I learned this and a whole lot more from my conversation with Vince Nero, BuzzStream’s Director of Content Marketing, and it changed how I think about link building.
Vince has been in the SEO trenches for a decade, working at agencies like Siege Media and watching the industry evolve from the Wild West days of paid link schemes to what he calls the “digital PR revolution.” And after hearing his perspective on where we’re headed, I’m convinced most marketers are still fighting the last war.
The Great Link Building Reckoning
According to Vince, Google’s helpful content updates didn’t just hurt some websites—they obliterated an entire ecosystem of fake authority sites that existed solely to sell links.
“Up until March 2024, the primary link building tactic was guest posting through these super large databases where you could essentially just go and buy links from sites that only exist to create guest posts,” Vince explained. These weren’t real publications—they were digital shells with names like “tech123.com” that covered every topic imaginable with zero editorial standards.
Vince saw this coming. While other marketers doubled down on shortcuts, he and the smart operators pivoted to something more sustainable: creating content that journalists want to write about.
What Digital PR Really Means (According to Someone Who Actually Does It)
When I asked Vince to define Digital PR he responded, “Reaching out to top tier, high end news publications to get backlinks and mentions for your site.”
He also shared that it’s not just about the links anymore. “With the advent of AI and AI overviews and ChatGPT, there’s a lot of research coming out now where it seems like brand mentions are highly correlated with showing up in AI results.”
In other words, when ChatGPT cites your company as an authority or when Google’s AI overviews reference your brand, that’s partially driven by the same digital PR efforts that earn traditional media coverage. You’re getting multiple forms of visibility for the same work.
The Tactics That Survived Google’s Algorithm Apocalypse
Vince walked me through what’s working now, and it’s a completely different playbook than what most people think of as “link building”:
Becoming the Expert Journalists Call
“For smaller businesses, the couple of things that I’ve seen that really work are expert commentary where you’re looking for opportunities to get a brand spokesman or CEO injected into the conversation,” Vince told me.
This isn’t about cold-pitching random journalists. It’s about monitoring Google Trends (which Vince noted has a much-improved interface), signing up for platforms like HARO and Qwoted, and positioning yourself as the go-to expert in your specific niche.
The key insight from Vince: specificity wins. Don’t be “a marketing expert”—be the person journalists call when they need quotes about B2B SaaS conversion optimization or small business cybersecurity.
Data Studies That Don’t Break the Bank
When I asked Vince about creating original research, I expected him to say it was too expensive for small businesses. Instead, he laid out a surprisingly accessible roadmap.
“Through like a SurveyMonkey, these are kind of lower cost consumer survey platforms,” he explained. “If it’s general population, you want at least 1,500 to 2,000 respondents. But if you’re going to a specific industry, you might be able to get by with 500 or 250.”
The real secret sauce? Finding something unexpected in your data. Vince emphasized that obvious findings don’t make headlines—you need that “wait, really?” factor that makes journalists look smart for covering your research.
Seasonal Opportunities Everyone Ignores
Vince also mentioned that “manufactured” holidays like National Ice Cream Day or Small Business Saturday are actually gold mines for PR.
“Getting on a journalist’s radar ahead of time, that sort of thing helps,” he said. “Maybe it’s two weeks from now is National Ice Cream Day and your brand is doing a giveaway or something.”
He even suggested using ChatGPT to brainstorm these opportunities; I might also recommend NationalDayCalendar.com.
The Relationship Reality Check
One thing Vince was brutally honest about: building relationships with journalists doesn’t guarantee coverage. “That’s not to say that if you have a great relationship with a journalist, they’re going to give you a link or they’re going to cover your stuff. Your story has to still be newsworthy.”
But relationships do matter in other ways. Vince told me about using journalist contacts for feedback on story ideas before publishing: “Hey, is this idea, does this have legs?” That kind of insight is invaluable for refining your approach.
How to Find the Right Journalists
When I pressed Vince on how small businesses can find the right journalists to pitch, he broke down a simple process:
Start with Google News searches for topics in your industry. Look at who’s consistently covering your space. “Understanding who is writing about these things typically takes a little bit of Googling,” Vince said. “You want to understand who is writing about these things and understand what they’ve covered.”
When it comes to pitches, less is more. Vince emphasized that quality, targeted pitches vastly outperform spray-and-pray approaches. “I think those things are less and less of the norm these days. Quality backlink, quality mention from a relevant publication is going to go a long way.”
The Credibility Factor That Trips Up Small Businesses
One thing I wasn’t expecting Vince to mention was how your online presence looked. “If you have like a garbage looking site, and you expect to then be cited as an expert in the field, journalists are going to go and do their due diligence on who you are.”
It’s not about having a million-dollar brand, but about basic credibility signals. Professional website, updated LinkedIn profile, clear bio that establishes your expertise. “You can’t cut corners these days with some of these things,” Vince warned.
The Industry Reality Nobody’s Talking About
Some of the changes are coming from the larger media landscape. “Journalists are getting laid off, they’re turning freelance, publisher sites are losing traffic in big ways to AI,” Vince explained.
This creates both challenges and opportunities. More competition for attention, but also more freelance journalists who need to pitch stories to editors—which means they might be more receptive to genuinely newsworthy pitches that make their job easier.
What To Do Differently Going Forward
“Building your own personal brand could be something as easy as sprucing up your LinkedIn profile. Make sure you’ve got the right stuff on there. Have a bio on there. Spend some time communicating with people.”
Based on what Vince said, here’s your playbook moving forward:
- Audit your credibility: Would you quote someone whose online presence looks like yours?
- Get specific about your expertise: What unique angle do you have that journalists might actually need?
- Start monitoring: Set up Google Alerts and sign up for HARO to understand what journalists in your space are looking for.
- Create one piece of genuine value: Whether it’s original research, expert commentary, or just a unique perspective on industry trends.
The Bigger Picture
After talking with Vince, I’m convinced that digital PR isn’t just the evolution of link building—it’s a return to traditional content marketing: creating genuine value that people want to share.
The shortcuts we’ve used in the past are dead, and honestly, good riddance. The opportunity now belongs to marketers willing to do the work of creating something worth talking about.
Are you up to the challenge?
Digital PR Strategies That Actually Work Episode Transcript
Rich: My next guest has been in the SEO industry for the past 10 years, working in agencies like Siege Media and The Grit Group. And now he’s director of content marketing at digital PR tool, BuzzStream. Today we’re going to be looking at how digital PR can improve your search visibility and drive more business your way with Vince Nero. Vince, welcome to the podcast.
Vince: Hey Rich, thanks so much for having me.
Rich: So how did you find yourself at the intersection of PR and SEO? What was that path like?
Vince: It kind of depends on how far you want to go back. But I originally have a degree in music, and I studied in New York City, played saxophone, tried to make it as a professional jazz musician for a long time. And decided I needed a little more routine, income, and fell into a job working at a nonprofit where I worked with a lot of startups in the New York City space and just felt like marketing came natural.
At the end of the day, I feel like marketing is easy to do, as long as you don’t get too bogged down with all the crap and the spammy techniques and whatnot, which maybe we’ll get into. But I eventually I got a job at Siege Media, and that was really where I cut my teeth in the industry. And I had great mentor, Ross Hudgens was the owner, CEO of Siege Media.
Then I went from there and we did a lot of what is now known as digital PR slash link building and slash regular PR. These terms all kind of blend together these days. But with a focus in SEO, I’d say Siege was where I got my start. And like I said, a lot of it just seemed to come natural just because I maybe came at it with a very different mindset than most people.
Rich: Alright. I actually also played saxophone growing up. Never considered going pro like you did, but yeah. So we have that in common, besides our love for nerdy comic book stuff as well.
Vince: Yes.
Rich: So ultimately you ended up at BuzzStream. So just tell me a little bit about BuzzStream. What do they do and what do you do for them?
Vince: Yeah, so BuzzStream was actually a tool we used to do our email outreach and manage those campaigns when I was with Siege Media. So it actually was almost like a dream job for me. When I left Siege I pestered the BuzzStream team for a while to see if they were hiring, and they weren’t. And I kind of went back and forth for a few years until they were ready to hire me. So it fit naturally into what I have done.
And the thing that I like about the job now is that I’m marketing to myself in that I know the customer persona intimately. BuzzStream, for those who don’t know, we are an end-to-end email outreach platform. We’ve now added a secondary feature, a secondary tool called ListIQ, which helps build media lists from the ground up directly from Google News search. So we now cover the whole outreach, like PR strategy from start to finish, from the list building to then the kind of outreach and kind of relationship management with these journalists and helping to build trust and that sort of thing.
Rich: Alright. Vince, you mentioned the term “digital PR” a couple times. What does that mean to you, how do you define it?
Vince: Yeah, this one really, again, depends on who you ask. The way that I think it’s roughly defined for people in the industry is reaching out to these kind of top tier, high-end news publications to get backlinks and mentions for your site. So you can do that through pitching them studies, data studies that you’ve created, content you’ve created, proprietary data, that sort of thing. Or expert commentary.
A lot of times journalists are looking actively for people to comment on their stories and provide value that way. And so there’s plenty of platforms that kind of help you do that to connect you with journalists. So I think a lot of this bleeds into what is called just link building, because I think it came out of link building initially. The SEOs of the world realized that they could use journalists as a lever to get these high domain authority links for their brands and for their clients. And it has since gone through a lot of different iterations.
And I think we’re at a point now where with the advent of AI and AI overviews and ChatGPT, and there’s a lot of research coming out now where it seems like brand mentions are highly correlated with showing up in the AI brand mentions. Or sorry, AI results be that ChatGPT or AI overviews or whatever platform you’re using. So a lot of people are now gravitating more towards that once again including these kind of traditional link builders who are now just remarketing themselves as digital prs.
So it’s taken a lot of different pieces at this point. And if you ask someone from the UK, which is 50% of our audience, I’d say it’s a very kind of down the middle representation of what they do, and the brands that hire them for digital PR understand it. Whereas in the US, it still feels maybe five or six years behind, where the UK has this kind of polished deliverable kind of repeatable thing. Whereas yeah, in the US it’s a mishmash right now.
Rich: All right. You had mentioned link building and maybe some of the changes that’s gone on. As an SEO tactic, do you feel that link building is dead? Should it be dead?
Vince: That’s the million-dollar question these days. No, I don’t think it’s dead. I don’t think it should be dead. I think it’s gotten a bad name over the years. I think there are two ways to look at any of this stuff. It’s, what can I do to leverage growth right now, kind of damn the future of it all. Or there’s the more holistic approach and the more evergreen approach of doing stuff the right way. You might not see it the biggest gains right away, but you’re building a brand basically.
So the stuff that doesn’t work these days seems to be that quick shortcut link building. So there used to be, up until midway through last year, and Google kind of blasted a lot of these sites out of the water with the helpful content system core update. So I’d say the primary link building tactic that, again, up until March 2024 of last year was what’s called ‘guest posting’, where people have probably heard of this or done it.
But the way it manifests itself in link building is that there’s these super large databases where you can essentially just go and buy links from sites that only exist to create guest posts and place links for you. You might have seen these and you might come across them where it’s just a catchall site. They cover all kinds of different news topics, and they have new names like Tech123.com, whatever. And there may be a high domain authority, but there isn’t really much to them once you start digging into it.
And so what we saw was Google finally was able to do something with the algorithm that devalued a lot of those sites. And it came down to the fact that they weren’t generating quality content whatsoever. So I would say that it was the main link building tactic. There were also more traditional tactics, I’ll call them in air quotes here, where it was like inserting a link into a post that already existed. That was something you could also do through these link databases, these paid marketplaces.
There’s also broken link building. If you found a link that was broken on a site, you go back and recommend a replacement. But then, the people that kind of were thinking long term, I think, were the ones that were doing link building and where they would create an asset. For a long time it was infographics, right? Like you create this big, long infographic about a data study or whatever, and you’d reach out to a blogger and ask them if they wanted to share it, and oh, I’ll write you a custom intro or a custom post around it. Essentially the same thing, but you weren’t paying for it. I think bloggers got wise to that as well around the same time and started asking for money. So no matter how you slice it, it was a pay to play ecosystem.
The evergreen approach then became, let’s create our own data studies, let’s create our own whatever content that’s going to really stand out, and do it from a perspective of I am doing this because it’s news. I’m doing this because it’s interesting. And links are going to be a happy byproduct of it rather than let’s just chase links for getting links for link’s sake. That is where I think the link building, when you ask, is it dead? No, I think there’s still people doing it. When they’re doing it the right way it’s through that. I’m creating something that can actually provide value, creating a great tool, a great, maybe it’s a calculator. A great resource that people actually want to link to.
You still see this a lot with these kind of big trends reports or even statistics reports is something that we call, like it has a high intent to link where it’s like a journalist might be writing about a topic and they’re Googling or ChatGPT-ing what’s the average population of whatever? And these are statistics that you can post on your site and often get links back from. I think those tactics are alive and well, and those are the ones that are moving the needle for people. And that really crosses over into the digital PR side of things.
Rich: So if I can pause you there. So if I’m looking at the timeline here, Google comes out in 1997 and very soon differentiates themselves, because they start paying attention to links. They see this as a way of really identifying the high-quality pages on the internet. Then of course, all the marketers ruin it for everybody by saying, let’s just completely abuse this system. And link building becomes its own industry.
And if I’m understanding you correctly, link building is still a thing. There are unethical ways to go about it, which mostly have been destroyed by Google. And there are ethical ways to go about it by creating something of true value that reporters, journalists are going to want to link to and maybe bloggers and other and other content creators as well. So this is the next evolution and hopefully a more ethical period of time of link building, even though digital PR certainly could contain more than just link building these days. Is that a decent summary? Is that accurate?
Vince: Yeah. And I think the other side of this that is worth talking about is, the main kind of audience for this, the pool of journalists and publishers, because of AI, are starting to shrink. And there’s this whole kind of infighting going on between the publishers, these news sites and AI, where AI is taking their content and repurposing it, using it as training models, and there’s copyright lawsuits happening.
And it’s a very interesting time to get into all of this stuff because we are seeing a lot more competition now in this space, where a lot of people are jumping on board the digital PR train. But at the same time, journalists are getting laid off, they’re turning freelance publishers, sites are losing traffic in big ways to AI. Not to mention people are just using different platforms to get their news now.
I think for the first time ever, was it a Nielsen study? Like for the first time ever, people are getting their news from YouTube and social media over online publications. So you know, there is this drastic shift that’s happening on the other side of things where I think it’s getting harder and harder to do this kind of spammy kind of stuff, where it’s getting harder to ruin these tactics. Because everything’s moving so fast, and before you know it, the rug is pulled out from under you. It’s an interesting industry to be in, I think, right now, regardless.
Rich: Absolutely. So what are some of the digital PR campaigns that a small to medium sized business might be able to engage with to get the value out of digital PR? What have you seen working?
Vince: Yeah, so I think that for the smaller businesses, the couple things that I’ve seen that really work are this extra commentary piece where you’re looking for opportunities to get a brand spokesman, CEO or high-level C-suite person, injected into the conversation.
Now, what this takes is a lot of kind of monitoring the news and understanding where you can jump in there. But it’s totally doable. Google Trends has actually revamped their whole interface somewhat recently, and it’s easy to find things that are trending and jump on those trends. So that’s one aspect is like inserting yourself into the news in that scenario.
There’s also inserting your yourself, if you have a resource, it’s like the step two of that is like you’re not just providing a quote, you’re giving some type of resource. So say it’s going through a heatwave, and your company provides free air conditioners. You are not only providing some quote that talks about how much power it takes to power or to cool down a house or something. But then you’re also saying, “we’re running a promo right now that offers this”. Trying to be the solution to the project to the problem.
You could also think about this proactively. There are plenty of what are known as these social media days. It’s National Taco Day, it’s National Ice Cream Day, it’s national whatever. If you go online and go to ChatGPT, you can find hundreds of them for any niche, seemingly, these days. So what that takes is just a little foresight, where maybe it’s two weeks from now is National Ice Cream Day and your brand is doing a giveaway or something. Getting on a journalist’s radar ahead of time. That sort of thing helps.
And then there is responding to journalist requests. I mentioned this a little bit, but there’s platforms out there called, Help A Reporter Out (HARO). There’s one called, Source of Sources. There’s one called Qwoted, Q-W-O-T-E-D, where journalists actually ask for, “Hey, I need an expert in whatever”, “I’m looking for a quote about whatever”. And they’re typically online databases or an email newsletter that you can get that just has these listed out.
There’s a lot of solutions for people who are not looking to spend a lot of money. I think you have to just have that creative thought process of how you can get yourself inserted into the conversation. And honestly, ChatGPT can help a lot with that and just getting your brain thinking the right way. I found it’s a great brainstorm buddy, and to me, that is a big hurdle for a lot of people. I know what I’m supposed to do, but how, what do I do? Like I know that I’m an expert in wine sales or something, but how do I then turn that into content or into a quotable, digestible thing? And I think AI can help with that for sure.
Rich: How about creating data-driven pieces or surveys, research pieces like that, that might be attractive? Have you found that to be successful? And if so, how do we actually get this in front of the journalists who might cite us, might link to us?
Vince: Yeah, so that’s probably like a step up above some of these small businesses are willing to do. But in terms of wrapping your head around what goes into it. But I do think it’s actually a pretty fruitful tactic and it’s not as hard as you might think. The only reason I didn’t mention it the first time around is because having worked in an agency, that’s the kind of thing that people scoff at once you have to start spending some money.
So to get this data typically, unless you have proprietary data, which is great if you do have it, it becomes how can you tell a story with it? And again, that is something that ChatGPT can help get the wheels moving on for sure. But then it just becomes packaging it the right way.
But the other option is to get your data externally. So through a SurveyMonkey or Pollfish. These are lower cost consumer survey platforms where you can go in add the questions you want, identify demographics. And I think there’s a couple key things when you think about surveys and data studies is you want to make sure you’re hitting the right audience size. So typically, if it’s like a general population, you want it to be at least 1,500 to 2,000 respondents. I think journalists are going to not really look at anything under that in terms of if it is general pop.
Now if you’re going to a specific industry, say you’re a small business and you’re trying to interview small business owners, you might be able to get by with 500 or 250 or something. What it depends on for all of this stuff is understanding what’s out there already, and you use that as a guide. What I like to do, if you’re getting into something like this, again, you can ask ChatGPT for some solutions, but you could also just dig around the different news sites news in your industry.
So it’s not necessarily always about getting on your Fox News and CNN’s it and can be if you’re in the construction space. There’s construction industry news, and understanding what they write about and who they cover. So there’s a little bit of research that I think always has to be done at the onset of these to understand and make sure there is a market, and understand what it is they want to hear about.
And that can inform the second piece of your question, Rich, which is how do you then pitch it? To me there’s two things that always have to happen is your studies, your data has to have either some type of timeliness to it. So that gets back to that social media days, it could be seasonal, like the holidays.
Rich: Popular costumes for Halloween, or whatever it might be.
Vince: Yeah. So that is a foot in the door for a lot of people because it provides a lot of value, because journalists are always looking for things to write about around these times.
But the other hook aside from timeliness is some type of emotion. And the way that I like to describe it is, is there something unexpected? You don’t want to present them with obvious information. Because typically, think about this perspective. If you’re pitching someone, you need to make them look good, right? If you’re trying to get your study published by someone on a third-party website, a news site, they have their own goals, right? They need to bring traffic to their site. So you want to provide something with value. So thinking about from that perspective is important.
And then once you have all this, you have your studies, you have your hook, and it comes time to pitch it. It’s finding who to pitch it to. So it gets back to what I was saying, where you want to understand who is writing about these things. And typically, that takes a little bit of Googling.
The way that I was always taught, there’s kind of two options. It’s like a media database is something that’s costly, like a Muck Rack, Cision, something that small businesses don’t typically have the budget for. So really, and this is the way I learned doing it, was just through Google News search where you say you’re pitching your Halloween costumes idea, then you’re just searching for Halloween costumes. You can search last year around the same time to see who was writing about it. And those become your key journalists that you want to reach out to. So having that kind of connection to a previous piece helps decide whether or not this journalist is actually relevant, or it’s at least a shortcut to it.
One of the reasons we created this new list IQ product was to help people do this Google news search media list building at scale, where typically it’s like you do a Google News search, you find all your results, you have to click in, and then you’re trying to understand what this journalist has written about, right? Especially if you’re looking at content they’ve written last year. Are they still active at the publication? What’s their bio? What do they cover right now? What’s their beat? What’s their industry? Is what I’m pitching them going to be reliable or relevant to them? And then you have to dig and find their email address, and sometimes it’s written on the site, but other times you got to go find it on a LinkedIn post or their Facebook profile or Twitter or something.
So with ListIQ, it pulls all that stuff for you. And again, this is a big problem in the industry from the journalist side, is getting pitched these irrelevant pitches. There’s been a lot of studies that just came out from Cision and Muck Rack, both of them have done these big state of the industry reports. And the top gripe from journalists was, people just send me irrelevant pitches all day long. If it’s something like 4% or 5% of journalists never receive an irrelevant pitch.
Rich: That must be their first day on the job.
Vince: Yeah. So for the most part, they’re fed up with this, they’re fed up with the PRs, they’re fed up with getting pitches. And like I said in the very beginning, there’s a lot of competition in this space, so you have to just be laser focused on who you want to reach out to. And I think less is more with all this stuff. You hear about these people that do a campaign and “I got a thousand links”, “We got mentioned in all these places”. I think those things are less and less of the norm these days. And I think it’s okay to have a post that only gets picked up a couple times from relevant news stations. And that type of backlink quality mention from a relevant publication is going to go a long way these days.
Rich: Yeah. And by niching down into a specific industry, if you’re in manufacturing or lumber or Halloween costumes. Or niching down into a geography. Like we’re here in Maine, so perhaps is if I was focused on B2B in Maine, that might be a really easy niche for me to own or get coverage for.
And like you were saying earlier, maybe my data set, if I was doing some research, wouldn’t need to be as big as if I was trying to pitch consumer level stuff for the entire US. So there’s probably better ways to connect.
You had mentioned LinkedIn, and I know that recent reports have shown that journalists now prefer LinkedIn over Twitter for media outreach. What does that suggest for brands that are trying to build relationship with journalists as we look forward?
Vince: So I actually heard a slight tweak on that stat, which is not that they prefer LinkedIn for media outreach, but I’ve read that they prefer it for promoting their own work.
Rich: Oh, okay.
Vince: What that tells me, and specifically they were asked those two different questions, and it was like, no, I prefer it for promoting my work and not necessarily finding stories. And the kind of story, the trend or whatever that I took from that, was this idea that social media is just like a slop fest these days. Journalists are having a hard time finding the things that are newsworthy and almost sometimes what is real, right?
But at the other end, they’re definitely using it to promote. Because that stat I said earlier, people are finding news in all different ways, right? It’s not just, I’m going to publish this on my site, on the news publication, and thousands of people are going to see it. It doesn’t work that way anymore. So they are incentivized to get their content out in as many avenues as they can. I think for us what that really means for a small business or someone that’s in PR is, these become great places to build kind of a relationship with these journalists.
Now, that’s not to say that if you have a great relationship with a journalist, they’re going to give you a link or they’re going to cover your stuff. No, your story has to still be relevant and be a good story. I feel like I need to kind of preface that because when I say “building relationships”, a lot of times PR pros roll their eyes at that terminology because it’s not that cut and dry. They need you when they need you, right? Like they might go get a cup of coffee with you, but these days, they got a million other things going on. They’re not just going to cover your stories because they know who you are. It might help you get a foot in the door, but I think the issue is you want to build trust with them.
One of the ways you could do that is getting on their radar so that when they see your name in their inbox, it’s like, “Oh yeah, that guy. He likes my stuff on LinkedIn a lot. He shares my stuff, he comments on it. He has insightful comments. Maybe I’ll at least give his pitch a read, maybe I won’t just delete it right away. I’ll archive it instead of deleting it.” So it’s about building that trust and notoriety so that you show up a little bit.
Now with freelance journalists, it’s a little different because they have other goals, like you’re pitching them stories that they then have to pitch to editors. So I think in those cases, maybe building a relationship can be a little more beneficial. I’ve had relationships with journalists where I’ve used them to get feedback on stories before I’ve published it. “Hey, this idea, does this have legs?” And that’s been super helpful.
So I don’t want it to sound like you shouldn’t spend time doing this. I think it really benefits you, especially if you’re a small business, to understand exactly who it is that are the key people that are writing about your industry, and do what you can to get on their radar, even if it is, “Hey, just reaching out to let you know that I’m an expert in this. Here’s a little bit about my background. If you ever need a quote about these things, I’m here for you.” Get you in their Rolodex, that sort of thing. And then maybe if you do have something that you want to pitch them down the line again, they’ll connect the dots in their head.
Rich: So if we wanted to take one practical step today to start improving our own digital PR as a small business owner or marketer, what would you recommend that first step or first action be?
Vince: Honestly, it’s something that we didn’t really talk about yet, but in improving your image first and foremost. So if you have a garbage looking site, you’ve spent no time on your online presence, and you expect to then be cited as an expert in the field, journalists are going to go and do their due diligence on who you are and what you are. If you have a site that doesn’t work or it doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence, I think that is going to hurt you in the long run.
Now if you do have a great story and a great piece of data, it might not matter as much. But remember, there’s a lot more people in this business now, a lot more people that are pitching journalists these days, and they are going to do their work. They’re going to do their homework.
Again, get a lot of benefit out of building your own personal brand. And it could be something as easy as, let’s spruce up your LinkedIn profile. Make sure you got the right stuff on there. Have a bio on there. Spend some time communicating with people. Spend some time on the platform. You can’t cut corners these days with some of these things. And it used to be that you could have just a cookie cutter site and expect that to do the job. But I think these days, you got to take it a step further if you really want to stand out in this industry.
Rich: Awesome. Vince, if people want to learn more about you or learn more about BuzzStream, where can we send them online?
Vince: Buzzstream.com is our website, but I’m super active on LinkedIn. Just check me on there and I’m happy to connect if you have any questions about this stuff.
I would say again, another pro tip, If you connect with me, make sure you send some type of message. If you send a request, a connection request, make sure you send some type of message. I think again, that goes a long way to people. Because I get connection requests all the time and if I don’t know who you are, I’m probably not going to connect. So it starts there, that kind of networking thing. And you take that along the lines with the journalist, too. It’s got to show me that you’re a real person.
Rich: Excellent. Alright Vince, thank you so much for sharing your expertise today. I appreciate it.
Vince: Yeah, thanks so much, Rich, for having me on.
Show Notes:
Vince Nero is the mind behind BuzzStream’s content strategy, where he blends his agency-honed SEO skills with practical PR know-how to help businesses win trust (and links) from top publishers. He now teaches marketers and small-business owners how to pair data-driven content with ethical digital PR to boost search visibility and revenue.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.