Want to know how to get a link from the Wall Street Journal?
No ... I'm not talking about dropping some dopey, no-followed article comment or some black-hat trickery - those schemes don't count for anything and will probably land you in the Google SEO jail.
I'm talking about landing a real, legitimate editorial link from one of the most trusted and highest authority websites on the planet – it's an SEO's (or any marketer's) dream come true!! Sounds impossible?
It's not!
In my content marketing case study today, I’ll describe in detail exactly how my team and I recently did just that!
But first - this post reads best with the mission impossible theme song playing in the background, so, cue the Mission Impossible music!
1. Begin With the End in Mind
Every great content marketing operation starts with an objective. For this mission, I set a high bar. I wanted to try to acquire:
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Real, editorial links from the WSJ. But not just any link. Ideally, links in an article that:
- In some way mentioned WordStream (my company) so that we could get a bit of media exposure out of this effort
- Links to both our homepage and contained to a deep page on our site with relevant anchor text.
- Get links from least 500 other high value, unique business and IT publications, like Fox Business, the Motley Fool, or CNET, etc.
- Have the story go viral on Social Media Networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
- Generate a huge spike in overall website traffic that month
- Create a 10% uplift in our overall steady-state traffic from SEO
With these seemingly impossible mission goals clearly defined, we realized that we'd need super-viral-grade content – something new and exciting, as well as a methodological plan to succeed!
Your Mission, should you choose to accept, is to acquire an editorial link from the Wall St. Journal!
2. Intelligence Gathering
The Wall Street Journal is not just any old news organization – it’s the finest business news organization on the planet!!
Therefore we would need to create a story more powerful than the typical 'how to' or 'X ways to succeed at Y' kinds of articles that we usually run on our blog. Those angles are great for daily blog content, but are hardly newsworthy of the Wall St. Journal, and just not the right tool for this ambitious content marketing mission!
We started our intelligence gathering effort by closely analyzing the objectives and by reviewing the kinds of articles the Wall St. Journal had covered in the past, in order to get a clear idea of the kind of content that we’d need to develop.
To achieve our lofty objectives, it was determined that we would need content that was:
- Easy to Understand – We search marketers write about all sorts of dorky shop-talk about this signal or that metric. But since +99.99% of the readership of the Wall St. Journal aren’t search marketers, our story would have to be easily understandable to a broader audience of business people.
- Unique – Our content would have to be based on new, original data and new insight. You cannot get the attention of the staff of the prestigious Wall St. Journal merely by rehashing old stuff that is already out there.
- Newsworthy – new and unique is necessary but not sufficient. But is it newsworthy? Is the content timely in some way, such that it might merit coverage by the world’s most powerful business newspaper?
- Easily Sharable – We would illustrate the key takeaways of our content in the form of an infographic, to enable easy sharing and make the content more visually appealing.
Planning our Content Marketing Operation...
3. Gear-Up!
In order to achieve our mission we would need the right gear for the job.
Our big idea was to conduct original research into what industries contributed to Google Revenues. We thought that this idea was both relevant to our core business (search marketing) yet sufficiently generalized to be relevant to the business readers of the Wall St. Journal.
Last year, Google made $37.9 Billion in revenues, of which 95% came from advertising. But Google doesn’t provide detailed insight into exactly what industries and companies make up all that money. So, we thought it might be interesting if we could provide an answer!
But how the heck are we supposed to know where Google made their money from if they don’t share that information?!
At WordStream, we have access to a ton of search marketing data that nobody else does, for example:
- Our Free Keyword Tool which consists of over 1-trillion search queries – using this data, I can model what people were searching for in 2011.
- Our AdWords Grader has collected some AdWords data including average cost per click data across different industries, etc.
Using this data, along with our proprietary keyword classification technologies, and other data available on the internet (such as spyfu, etc.), it would be possible to develop a fairly sophisticated data model to figure out what people were searching for in 2011, and how much revenue Google generated for clicks on searches in different industries, such as “Travel and Tourism” or “Finance and Insurance” and many other industries.
But our content was still in need of a newsworthy angle. Since Google was announcing their 2011 year-end financial results on January 19th, it was decided that we would have to conduct and publish our data analysis within a day or two of the official Google 2011 earnings announcement. Our content would explain where all Google's money came from!
Finally, we partnered with my colleague, Mr. Brian Wallace of NowSourcing and his crack team of infographic design aces to convert my data into a nice infographic that illustrated the Google Earnings data, in order to make it more visually appealing and easily sharable. Here's what it looked like (Click to Enlarge)
In a nutshell, we had developed content that was easily understandable to business readers, unique, newsworthy and sharable –perfect for our mission!
Using the Right Gear (Content) for the Mission!
4. Mission Execution
Having set our goals, put a plan in place, and developing the right tools for the job, all that was left was to execute! We published our infographic just days after Google’s 2011 year-end earnings announcement.
And, as you probably expected, we were indeed successful in getting coverage of our story in the Wall Street Journal!!
Here's a snapshot of what that looked like:
And we also got crap-ton of coverage from many other leading news organizations, including coverage in: Wired, CNET, Fox Business, The New York Times, Business Insider, Inquisitr, The Guardian, Inc Magazine – too many to list out. In total we counted over 600 of the world's leading news sites linked to our Google Earnings article, thanks in part to a domino effect of link building!
And the article spread internationally, too. We found pick-ups from news organizations in Japan, Germany, France, Canada, Spain, Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa, and dozens of other countries!
The story went viral on Social Media Networks – our article and infographic racked up a combined:
- 2491 Twitter tweets
- 1443 Facebook Likes
- 554 Google +1’s
- 697 LinkedIn Shares
- Lots of traction on sites like Reddit, Stumble, etc.
We think that from an SEO perspective, the social shares are just as valuable as the link haul that we made off with!
All in, we estimate that nearly 1 million people saw our story, and we were fortunate to have achieved our all the goals that we set out to achieve.
Content Marketing Mission Accomplished!
5. Mission Debriefing
Every time we do a content marketing project it’s a learning experience, so I’d like to share with the SEOmoz community, a few key ideas we learned from this time around!
In my example, I was using interesting data that we had at WordStream to develop some unique content. Now you might be thinking to yourself: what the heck do I do if I don’t have access to a trillion-keyword database or other proprietary ideas to draw original ideas from?
Here’s what you do: Think about what’s unique and differentiating about your business and/or your customers – what kinds of trends are you seeing, what’s changing, then try to measure that. Every company must have something unique about themselves – start brainstorming ideas from there!
Another big learning we stumbled on was that the big media outlets really love brands! The more you can mention major companies in your story, the more likely you will succeed. For example, we included paid search advertising spend data for big name companies in each industry (see screenshot below) and this greatly broadened the appeal of our content. The reporter at the Wall St. Journal and many other news outlets reported on rivalry between brands.
Finally, don’t feel bad if you put in a lot of effort and your plan doesn’t quite come together. I definitely have had my share of content creation efforts that went absolutely nowhere. And sometimes you get incredibly lucky. Just keep at it, try to figure out what went wrong and plan to do things better the next time!
So there you have it. You can get a link from the WSJ, or New York Times, or whatever big news outlet you can dream of. No special tricks or hacks, just a lot of hard work, including planning, research, real content development, and executing on a plan, and of course, a bit of luck!
Copyright Notice: Mission Impossible is property of Paramount Pictures.
About The Author
Larry Kim is the Founder & CTO of WordStream, a provider of software & services for managing PPC. Larry helps out in both the Product and Marketing departments at WordStream.
I'm [edit: curious] how you actually got the WSJ's attention though. I might have missed that part, but I don't think I saw that anywhere. I ask because lots of people create great content. Content is always the problem. Exposure sometimes is.
Surely Virality on Social Media does the job for you?
Maybe not but that would be my guess.
yes - social media was pretty key. People really want to share stuff if they think it's cool and interesting. And of course manual content promotion is super important - I emailed everyone we knew to let them know. For example, I emailed Rand, who submitted the thing to inbound.org (thanks rand!!), which generated a few hundred clicks and more shares, etc. We also blasted our email subscriber list, blogged about it, etc. It's a marketing campaign around promoting piece of content.
I like Larry's response here. We actually just had coffee with a potential client today and reminded her that one piece of content can be used in so many ways if you plan/market right.
Remember one idea can be shared, blogged about and video taped in so many ways. It's important to remember that. Especially if you have a good piece of content like an infographic, it's definitely going to be shared, circled and liked.
Brilliant post and an Inspirational story.
Are you willing to share a few other results with us. What about traffic? Did you see a huge bump?
This really highlights the need for quality content. Infographics aren't something I would use as a first choice but there is no doubting their power when you get them right.
Did you consider using any other media? A video perhaps? Some interactive data display?
Do you think a regular article or blog post showing your analysis of the figures would have done anywhere near as well?
Sorry for all the questions Larry ... Just intrigued by your success!
Hi Sam, we hit all of the results we set out to achieve. They were listed in the top of the post - our 5 objectives. The traffic objective was #5 on the list - to grow the steady-state SEO traffic by 10% and we met that goal. Meaning, after the initial spike of traffic from coverage from news and social media had settled, the SEO traffic levels settled in at a higher level, after the content marketing activity.
We're very interested in leveraging other media. Particularly video. The challenge is just the complexity in producing great video content. And yes, I think a regular article or blog post of the analysis would be a logical next step, and that it could potentially do quite well.
(edited spelling error)
why is this post still in Youmoz instead of the main blog? Very handy post on link building for well, everyone.
Larry,
Great article, and you had me until the end. Your four articles that went "absolutely nowhere" have 75, 71, 54, and 21 linking root domains, respectively. I wish SEOmoz comments had emoticons, because I'd use the one for :shock:
Now I'm not trying to criticize your post and say it only applies to the big guys. I'm genuinely puzzled because the post you refer to as successful only has 25 LRDs. I'm also looking at social shares and not seeing any dramatic differences either.
EDIT:As for the post that you're referring to as successful, I now see that it's not the post itself, but what the post is referring to.
Hi - Thanks for the comment. Yes, sorry for the confusion - It was the infographic page itself (not the blog post that promoted the research) that ended up being the linkable asset!
But you got me curious when you posted the LRD data, so i checked again and I was pretty shocked to see that my History of Search article effort as a whopping 327 root linking domains (according to Google Webmaster Tools) - which I had previously thought was a flop. So I think what may have happened here is that because it's an evergreen article (The History of Search), that it accumulated links more passively over the last 3 years, as opposed to right away, so while the early returns weren't great, it appears to have paid off over time!!
I would have to say that is another lesson learned, and probably a good subject for another article. This one was great and informative, look forward to the next.
Excellent post. +1 from me!
Thank you Larry for sharing this case and your experience... Very useful.
Nice post Larry. I'm glad you included some comments in the take away section geared towards smaller companies, of which we are definitely one. We will never be able to invest in research to the extent you did, or have proprietary software that's going to give us industry data that no one else has.
We do, however, have a unique product and unique customer view that no one else has. You are right in saying that it's those points of differentiation that make one's company unique. I mean, if you didn't have any points of differentiation you wouldn't have much of a company.
You are also right in saying that sometimes a grand content plan just goes nowhere and sometimes you get lucky. The point is, you can't win the lottery if you don't buy a ticket. You just have to keep at it, and eventually, something will achieve results. Sometimes it'll be a bunt that gets you to first base and other times it'll be a grand slam. In the end, they all count for something!
Thanks so much for this comment. You're right that you need to play to win! Though it's not totally random - you can (over time) make your own luck! What I'm finding is that with more and more practice, that I'm able to be more consistently successful at this. Some idea that have helped my batting average was to (1) Review the most successful articles you've ever done in the past and try to pull-out the ingredients of what made those content marketing efforts successful and (2) try to figure out why various content marketing projects fell flat and make adjustments for the next run at it!
Excellent story Larry and appreciate the mention!
thanks for the awesome infographic design!
I'm a little puzzled here, how did you manage to get the attention of the WSJ?? Sure, I understand that your content was easily understandable to business readers, unique, newsworthy and sharable. But that would have worked with any business news outlet. So my questions here is, how specifically did you manage to get the WSJ to look at your blog and pickup your post? Also, how long did it take from the time you published it on your own blog to the time the WSJ published its own article? Thanks!
Hi Rob - Thanks for this comment.
That was the plan. There wasn't anything else.
I wish I could say that there was some better plan, like hire some expensive PR agency with connections with the editor in chief, but we didn't have that. As I said in the post, I've had plenty of failed efforts in the past, and the outcome of the these content development campaigns aren't guaranteed. You're basically only hearing about the one effort that worked here.
I guess it is a pretty surprising result in some respects, but on the other hand, isn't it the job of a news reporter to cover exciting/interesting/timely news? Then why should anyone be puzzled if the news ends up getting coverage. Provided that the quality/timeliness is there, and with a bit of luck (since it doesn't work all the time), your content can sometimes become the news.
So, again, (and i realize I'm just repeating myself here, and yes, i know you can say this for any publication) - the content development and research effort was our primary strategy to getting coverage.
Amazing. So my take away here is... the relevancy with the big news of the day, and perfect timing.Very nice. Congrats!
I'm not gonna shoot for big media outlets for now, but I'm gonna test your process and try to get something into a local media publication / outlet. If out of several fails I get a one win, that should be worth it. Thanks!
yeah! start with a local media pub or influential niche blog, and refine the process, then with each success, set your sights higher!
Very insightful post Larry.
I am totally in agreement with you on the link-building domino effect that you had mentioned in the blog post. This actually comes in very handy when anything to do with Money is concerned.
This again proves to show that focusing on one good website can get you much more value than taking the effort to get links from 20+ cheapo websites,
We have observed in many of our campaigns that the routine content remix is good for daily blogs posts on client blog websites, it adds content freshness to the overall website, but to get that sexy linkback from one good website takes a lot of thought. The best part is that when you set out to get that one link from that one great website, you tend to forget that there are over 100 websites just waiting to scrape content from there; and this works wonders for an SEO professional as he is getting 101 links by working for just 1 link.
However, i'm not quite sure of infographics providing link juice. They however give truckloads of visibility.
ha ha - yeah the big sites get syndicated everywhere so as a side effect you do end up piling on quite a few other links from scraper sites. hopefully that doesn't cause any negative SEO! :)
Awesome story. The design of the infographic was top notch to go along with the great info.
Thanks. I've worked with about 4 different design firms now and can strongly recommend Brian Wallace at Nowsourcing.
Hi Larry, I just wanted to drop a comment to say how inspiring I found this article. Nothing you say is completely revelatory but putting it together in this plan helps focus the mind towards quality content that will score those huge links. Thanks!
hey thanks for this note.
Larry, thanks for sharing. The below comments are not in any way meant as complaint or criticism. :-)
It sounds like the success you got was due to a savvy presentation of massive proprietary data. Without that data, it sounds like you would never have gotten the A-list coverage you did. (I'm guessing that you could have released the data without the infographic and still gotten some pretty cool coverage?) What can the small guy do to overcome the lack of proprietary data?
You mentioned that a company should see what unique they have to offer, what trends they are seeing, etc. and brainstorm from there. I certainly agree with that - it's amazing how (even in boring industries) you can come up with really cool content ideas. One strategy I've used is original manual research - a small guy can do that just as well a a big guy, in certain circumstances.
At the end of the day, though, media outlets like the Wall Street Journal aren't interested in reporting on what trends I'm seeing, unless I can back them up with massive proprietary data like you did. From my perspective, the data you have was the single most important component, and its the only component that can't be duplicated (and the fact that it can't be duplicated is part of what made it powerful).
Any thoughts? :-)
~Adam
Hi Adam - Criticism is welcome!! heh. :)
for anyone who thinks that you need a ton of proprietary data to be successful, i will just raise one point:
Even though I spent +2 weeks working on the proprietary research, the thing that got mentioned quite often in the subsequent coverage (including the WSJ article) was the brands and their annualized spend, which wasn't even a proprietary research. I had just added that data from spyfu to add additional context to my research.
We also did another content marketing effort in may that i wrote up as a case study here, that didn't rely on proprietary data - but rather relied on packaging a unique angle, comparing 2 similar things things (facebook vs. Google Display Network) using publicly available data points, in a way that hadn't been done before.
So i think that proprietary data helps, but isn't a requirement. There are other elements like timing, and presentation, having a unique point of view, and "so what factor" (was there an unusual or unexpected result?) that are also part of the equation.
Thanks, that's encouraging to hear that some of the positive response you got was due to the non-proprietary data that you presented via a unique angle. That's something that can be duplicated with creativity and a bunch of elbow grease. :)
Interesting stuff Larry. I remember seeing that infographic everywhere at the time. I'd love to know now whether that was before or after WSJ picked it up.
One question: With that great response, including at least 1 dream link, was it enough to move the needle in terms of pure search? (I'm guessing no).
Great result though, and it was a cracking bit of content
yeah we got a sustained, ~10% boost in our unique organic searches / week. We're finding that for a big site like ours, you kind of need to keep shooting for bigger and bigger stories to move the needle. Content efforts that generate thousands of links rather than individual links.
I guessed wrong! Very happy to though. It's heartening to know that 1 big win can still make a tangible difference to a site with such an established link profile. Nice - and thanks.
Awesome story Larry.
It just goes to show that if you really focus on your goal and prioritize it, results will happen.
This blog comment will self destruct in 5...
bwhahaha I love it. i should have ended the post with the self destruct thing. lol.
I think the key here is recognizing that if you want to get a link from a site like the WSJ you have to create something 100% and advanced enough to get people's attention, but not so advanced that only a small readership base can understand it. It's not an easy spot to find and your content could have easily missed the mark. But when you take into consideration who you are writing for and what you are trying to achieve it might be easier to hone your focus.
Very cool. I got link from a large regional newspaper a while ago. Unfortunately, it was behind their paywall ... and it wasn't the porous type like NYTimes or WSJ, google couldn't see it at all :( :(
So you're saying you guys set out with the silent goal of having The Wall Street Journal, specifically, pick up your story and a writer there just happened to do that?
Idk why, but I feel like there's something missing. If not, and you were able to make that happen organically, hats off to you.
Yeah. Basically we developed content that was easily understandable to business readers, unique, newsworthy and sharable – and combined with content promotion, the domino effect of social media / link building, and some good luck - that this was possible!!
First, this was just brilliant. Methodical, and brilliant.
Second, although it worked, you don't have to leave the "get media attention" element to chance.
When you've got a story like this, draft a press release and send it out. It works. I know of a real estate agent who sold a home for a million over asking price. She got a writer she knew to write a press release and within a couple of days had stories about her achievement in local newspapers...and a big national one, too.
If you've got a story, write a press release and send it to the the editor or journalists most likely to cover it.
(Tip: write the press release like a newspaper article. Lots of times media outlets - not the WSJ or NYT but the not-as-well-staffed entities - will run it exactly as you wrote it, word-for-word.)
hi kelly! thanks for this comment! agree that content promotion is key. I did a different article that talked more about content promotion here.
Great story- it's nice to see you find the intersection of "what am I good at?" or "what do only I know", plus make it interesting and easily shareable/linkable! Thanks for the sharing!
Nadia - that's a great way of putting it. "what am I good at?" or "what do only I know" is a excellent starting point for big content marketing projects. thank you for this note.
Waooo Larry such a great post. Its really difficult to get a link from journal or news sites. They always demand high quality content for this. You explain a great procedure about creating content and I really like the way you use the MI 4 pictures in its. Its really hard mission but let's go for this.
Hi Nouman - glad you liked it and love your attitude!
I did try your advice and the music at the background worked very well with your article ;-) It was fun. Thanks for your arrangement.
I just got to know Wordstream yesterday and I tried it. The Grader was a brilliant idea; people like me handle multiple accounts really need a good software to support. PPC Advisor can be a little faster tho ;-)
This is really great post to got link from WSJ, your strategy and case study is brilliant about the creating content. This really highlights the content is king. Infographics are good for understating your concept. Thanks for sharing this content marketing strategy with us.
thanks for this note, Sanket!
Producing a high quality piece of quality is definitely important. But what I'm interested to know is how you got the attention of that WSJ writer in the first place. Did you already had a preexisting relationship with him/her? Did you get a referral from someone?
I had no pre-existing relationship with the author. Never met him. No referral. Didn't even contact him directly. But afterwards, I thanked him for the post and now have some small relationship with him and will most certainly ping him about any future efforts. So i think everyone starts with a base of contacts that you can use, and every time you do something like that, the contact list expands a bit.
Larry Kim, thanks for the tip, I thought fantastic strategy and how executing it.
I translated into Portuguese and I'm posting in Brazil.
This is an informative, and truly inspirational article. It really shows that time and effort can really pay off. Congrats on your accomplishment!
thanks for reading my case study, zach!
Hi Larry
Thank you for sharing your experience.
This article seems to have taken many man-hours to create. How are you calculating the return on this investment?
You're right! It's not cheap. content marketing is probably one of the most expensive forms of marketing. one of the challenges is that even if you do all the work, often it doesn't work out. For example, I once did a content marketing effort then, a few hours later Yahoo announced that they hired Marissa Mayer and so the whole news cycle was just completely dominated by that story. I think this is a great idea for a follow up article.
Thanks for the great article. I would like to suggest that you really do not need extensive research capability or totally new material. If you can write an article on a well known topic and use a different approach to capture attention you sometimes, with a little luck, can get a link back from one of the big ones. Your objectives were clearly way up there and congratulations for meeting them all.
I couldn't agree more! you can take for example, existing data, but come up with a different angle. Like comparing things, or connecting the dots of exiting data out there to highlighting a trend, etc. Check out my other case study on seomoz which didn't rely on any proprietary data at all!
Hi Larry
Is it worth trying for every industry business?How much time does it take to compile a data like this and prepare a well structured and informative content?
Kindly advise..looking forward for your kind help.
Thanks a ton!!
i think the process that i outlined in terms of goal setting, then researching what types of content different news outlets cover, trying to have news/timing element to your content, focusing on some perspective / data that is unique to you, dumbing down the "shop talk" and making it easily understandable to a broader audience, content promotion, etc -- that process should work for any business. the thing is you don't have to set your sights on a moon shot on the first run. try something easier (yet still unique, easy to understand, etc.) and target a local publication or influential niche website first, then over time, as you get a track record of wins, raise the bar a bit.
Nice Larry, My company Vab Media got a link from abc news by being an expert in Youtube and video SEO marketing. look at this article- https://abcnews.go.com/Business/youtube-making-people-rich/story?id=17104798#.UD9xX9ZlRVV
You will be lucky if wsj will get your website link theirs. Say I have a domain name lambingan.net with content that very relevant to their current interest regardless of its nature, still even I will submit my link to them will not enough warrant for them to link my site whether I have the most interesting topic but when get lucky boom! the situation is like Sec. Clinton introduces you on Pres Obama.
link building is like referral, get referred by well known personality then you will be recognizes in the community within, same way in SEO SERP.
Cheers!
It is the proof that big contents require research efforts. It is what makes the difference between a post and a brilliant post. Afterwards, Wordstream has the big advantage of having at disposal of the statistics on important customers. ;)
Hi Jonathan, thanks for this comment. earlier in the comments someone made a similar comment. i had mentioned that while having proprietary data is nice, the thing that many writers were interested were statistics on large advertisers - that data was publicly available from spyfu.com and wasn't my own proprietary research. and that there are several factors beyond just proprietary data that contribute to the success of a content marketing operation including the presentation, having a unique point of view, an unusual or unexpected conclusion that is contrary to conventional wisdom, content promotion efforts, etc.
Hi Larry,
Thank you for the answer, I was too lazy to read all comments of this post. ;)
Statistics are always interesting, especially in our field.
P.S.: your tool is great, I've taken an one year contract ;)
Very informative. Basically it combines research implementation and execution. A well thought out plan versus the quick type of HOW TO article. Congrats.
thanks for this note. i think you summarized everything quite nicely here!
Informatie and statistics are news for a lot of companies. This gives your post interest. I agree with Jonathan in this. So this is nice to read, but not applicable to our company.
Thank you for this note. I believe that every company - big and small - has some unique perspective in terms of their customers, expertise and point of view.
start there. Gather your interesting information and statistics - just try to measure some of what is unique to your business, in terms of how big is something, or how many are there out there, or is it changing and what is the trend, and why people should care.
As nadia said earlier: ask questions like: "what am I good at?" or "what do only I know"?
then see if you can tie your answers to a larger trend happening in the news around you, to broaden the appeal, etc. i believe the process I outlined is applicable to any big content marketing effort.
That's great Larry you got link from WSJ, this thing again proved that content is king and we can get link from any reputed site if we have good quality informative content. Thanks for sharing such an amazing post.
thanks for this note! Glad you liked it.
Sometimes link-building does seem an impossible mission— I'm getting to the link-building myself.
thanks for the share, sean! i'm glad you liked the MI theme.
Bravo! Great post - you've made me a believer. I haven't achieved greatness of this level of the SEO game however I do spend most of my time these days curating content for my clients that I think local/national news sources might find relevant.
Tip - As with most, I maintain a file structure hierarchy for all of my clients shared within our office that we all contribute to. Within each client folder I keep Word docs containing active stories that may or may not go somewhere and our technicians grab data/content to contribute to these stories that will one day be a masterpiece worthy of being contributed to a news source.
In our niche (low competition small service businesses) we live and die by these links, 1 link could empower our sites to a permanent position at the top of the SERPS - and we've seen this time and time again.
Nice post Larry, My company vab Media got a link from ABC News for being an expert on on Video SEO and Youtube marketing-check out this link https://abcnews.go.com/Business/youtube-making-people-rich/story?id=17104798#.UD9xX9ZlRVV
congrats on your success, vab media!
This is full of win and awesome. Thanks for sharing your insights with the community Larry, it is appreciated!
Glad you liked it!
Hard work leads to success, this is living proof of that.
thanks charles!
Very useful, thank you. Anything can be achieved with the right amount of hard work, well done!
I think your key insight was to understand what WSJ was publishing in the past and reverse-engineer from there.
One technique I would also consider is writing posts that would be very relevant when a certain event happens and keeping them on hold so that you would be the first to publish a meaningful piece when it actually happens, almost like you did with Google's report but for less predictable events (e.g. Amazon AWS has a major outage, Startup Visa amendment finally passes etc).
I really like this article. I have started my blog and was looking for some link building ideas. I have read many useless articles and wasted my time. But this is a very nice article. Simple yet effective techniques. If anyone can help me in link building please help me out.
Thank You
Hi Larry! Thank you for sharing your experience. Yes indeed, content marketing is one of the most expensive forms of marketing. I think one of the challenges that we can encounter is that even if we do all the work, often times it really doesn't work out. I guess this is really the reality. Thank you for this nice article :)
I know this post is aging, I'd say it's pretty evergreen – and, I just came across it today.
After reading the comments, I think myself and others found section #4, "Mission Execution" to be quite terse.
Many pundits claim that the cost of outreach will/should typically exceed the cost of content creation in order to achieve success.
I'm not getting this sense here though... I take it that you don't necessarily recommend this approach.
To summarize, this reads as though you put it on your blog, emailed one person, posted it to your social media and bam, the whole world found out about it!
(and even that much wasn't found in the post, I had to read some 50 comments to piece that together)
You have to admit that this does seem incredulous, and probably not realistic for most businesses.
One specific question at least – was there a press release written?
Thanks, would appreciate your comments on this. :)
Many post on the internet on this topic, however in this article I have been able to better understand the subject.
Hi Larry,
Recently Wall Street Journal push to subscribe to have access it.
How to overcome to obstacles?
Thanks.
Donald
That's a very inspiring story, Kim. Thanks for sharing. Maybe you can talk a bit more about how you went about analyzing the data that you had in another post?
Hi, i also got a link from an .edu website (umbc.edu) but i didn't see increase in my page rank. It only increased by 1 point. I thought it would go to 5! Here is a linkback, that is dofollow too!
https://my.umbc.edu/groups/iscom/news/19537
https://my.umbc.edu/groups/iscom/news/19553
https://my.umbc.edu/groups/iscom/news/21600
Very nice article Larry.
I'm just curious as to the method you used to "get noticed" by WSJ. Did you contact them or use another indirect method?
a couple of people asked this in the comments earlier. the short answer is if your content is awesome and newsworthy, the news media will report on it. As matt cutts says: just be awesome!
Fantastic Post Larry!
Thanks for sharing all the details on how you achieved the link from WSJ. Anyone can learn from your post that you can achieve anything if you determine to do that like you've done. Hardwork + Smartwork & Planning which was in your favour.
Thanks for this note. I love your attitude!
I am new to this and so this is really inspirational. Thanks
thanks for your note. I think if you're new then i think it's important to start with a smaller goal, then over time, as you get more and more successful, set higher goals.
Thank you for breaking down AWESOMENESS. very creative Idea. Congrats on the links. Thanks for the real world example.
glad you liked it!
This post is surely inspirational for those who think quality link building is impossible. It just takes more time and imagination!
yes. time and imagination are always the limiting factors. I generally budget a full week or two for these kinds of efforts - including research, content creation and promotion.
Great post! A different angle to gain backlink from the best websites around. Again, content is king!
thanks Jenhao!
Hello, I have translate the content in french on my blog. (with the agreement of seomoz)
merci beaucoup!
you did some very original research there. you really earned and deserved so much notice. one of my best placed in search posts ever was some original research. Maybe I will have to think of something to go research now. Thank for the informative post and conradulations
thanks warner. i did some research on my own best posts. the ones that got the most mileage were detailed case studies and original research / data.
Thanks Larry. Everyone is searching for an edge. You got the edge, by hard work,and taking the next logical step. That is not to underplay your excellent newsjacking of the Google earnings results. You have taught a few of us a good lesson--Just Do It-Because You Can
thanks rob!
I really like your post...Very informative...Thank you very much ;) !
thanks for reading it, london massage! :)
Quite a bit of work, and I'm glad it paid off for you! Your story is very inspirational, and it looks like you had hugely successful results. It would be great to do this one day. Thank you for sharing!
This is so true.. the big giants picked your story randomly if found it interesting.. once at time happened with me.. wired pick from somewhere and they live in their own site with a small amount of editing.. similarly with lifehacker.. they picked one of my story..
yeah that's what i'm saying!! just be awesome. if you build it, they will come. Well - not guaranteed, but sometimes, and plus you still have to promote the heck out of it -- but the awesomeness part is a requirement.
The reality is that unless you previously had an awesome piece of content picked-up by a big media outlet, you will not understand what i am talking about here.
Nicely done! I think a lot of bloggers (me included!) sometimes set the bar too low, and just go for the low hanging fruit. There's definitely a lot of potential reward out there for someone willing to stick their necks out and try something ballsy. Kudos.
That's amazing. Seems like a lot of work, but I guess it really paid off in the end. Great job!...
We're finding that if you're doing blogging anyway, that seems to be worth it to trade quantity for quality. So instead of a blog post a day, maybe go with one big one per month instead. (or something like that - it doesn't have to be all or nothing).
my god. It pinches my heart (with joy) to see you have accomplished such exposure. However, would you be able to describe the actual moment of addressing the reporters? Did you do it by yourself or via an external PR service supplier?
it was mostly twitter, email and social media. We didn't have a fancy PR agency.
Awesome post Larry. I love that you started with goals and a plan. Aligning with Google's earnings release was brilliant and I assume that some of the pick up was due to search in terms of news outlets discovering your content.
Whether or not to use a PR agency is a budgetary decision and no doubt can help with editorial links, but more important is to build the content that meets the criteria described in your case study (easy to understand, unique, newsworthy, easily sharable) as this will result in links built over time.
Having the caliber of content referenced in your case study also makes it easier for those using PR firms to get editorial links as relationships are necessary but on their own not sufficient to garner coverage from top publications.
Thanks for sharing.
Great post Larry!
Not only for the end results, but most importantly for the methodology you followed throughout the process.
That was truly awesome listening to the Mission Impossible theme, while reading this. Thumbs up for great inspiration and a great blog post!
Fantastic story Larry - well done on your success! You'll get tonnes more shares from the SEOmoz community too (1 coming up from me).
Great post. Now I'm thinking deeper about planning and creating a link building strategy with very hard goals. Thanks for sharing this case and, indeed, you got another good link from SEOmoz.
I liked very much your link building K.P.Is (website target, traffic and social viralization). Awesome!
We do this everyday for our clients. If you want links from publications like the WSJ, Businessweek, Fast Company, PC Magazine, ad nauseum we have the editorial contacts and 30+ years of experience doing it. I know this is a DIY SEO forum, but it's worth mentioning, a great benefit of top notch PR are these high quality editorial links.
yeah link building / SEO is essentially the same as PR these days!
So I guess you just got your PPC spend totals and top keywords for the different brands from SpyFu? How accurate do you think SpyFu is? For example, I ran a report on a client of mine and they are overestimating spend by 156%-399%.
Yes - the spend estimates for top 5 advertisers in each industry was from SpyFu. The keywords were just example keywords that we pulled from google keyword tool external.
As for the reliability of SpyFu data, I believe it to be directionally correct, particularly for the larger accounts. I've found that for smaller advertisers, the error increases, probably because there is less data? I also think the trend data is correct - that you can see the relative increase/decrease of spend over time.
Masterfully executed.
I only have one complaint: You haven't stated anywhere that those figures are an approximation extrapolated from your data.
Yes - thank you for pointing that out. Our research was based on a model which I developed using the data that we had (keyword data, adwords data, etc.).
Hey Larry, great job. Good to see that your efforts paid off :). Plus, the content you built for this effort will have lasting power.
i am a big believer in big content. Internally at WordStream, we call it "Awesome Content" but the principles are pretty much the same.
The combination of large brandnames and infographs is amazing, even though the info seems fairly easy to find and aggregate. I wonder if this is also somewhat of a MacGyver approach next to an impossible one. An approach in where you build a tank with tin foil, and rubber band. Or to put it in clearer terms, using very few resources to achieve something this huge?
i like the MacGyver analogy! I picked the mission impossible theme because of all the planning that we did before hand on this particular project and i'm a fan of the theme song (lol). At the time, it was our most heavily planned content marketing operation that we had ever worked on. if it's OK with you, perhaps the next case study could use a MacGuyver theme?
Inspiring post! I already have a couple of great ideas churning for editorial content. Thanks!
Thanks Martin. Glad that you found it to be useful!
Great case study, Larry. You guys seem to do alright for high quality links like these ;-)
Good job!
Hi Larry, thanks very much for sharing your story! It's really awesome to hear that you achieved such ambitious goals with awesome content and awesome marketing efforts alone. Well done.
I love this - good work, Larry!
It just goes to show that carefully created content has a higher chance of winning the big, juicy links, while small/rushed content may not fare as well. That's not to say that it's an absolute, but there's certainly a correlation at the very least.
Also, I love the fact that you had a goal in mind - not just in terms of how many links but specifically where you wanted to receive a link. As you say in your post, having that goal in mind meant that you could create something with the WSJ in mind (that would gain more of a chance of being shared by them), rather than creating something that would please everyone/anyone, which incidentally might've fallen flat. Good work!
terrible anchor text but solid link
so .... look closely at the source of this page. And look for links to wordstream.com and the anchor text. :)
Great Post Larry , I Agree with your Opinion. I think This is the best way to got link from WSJ, your strategy and case study is absolutely Awesome . Thanks for sharing wonderful post with us.
Hi Rajkumar- glad you liked the case study. I appreciate your note.
Now this is some #RCS!!
Thank you for sharing, was also wondering:
How many people were involved in this project?
How much time did you guys invest in this?
the team was Elisa Gabbert, our blog manager. Victor Pan, our in house SEO guy, myself and we contracted with nowsourcing for design. It took about 2 weeks. But the returns of focusing on one big story far outweighed what we typically get in 2 weeks worth of the usual blogging/seo stuff. we're spending the time anyway, might as well go big.
I have been watching the growing number of likes for your article and eventually I had to read it myself. Now I understand why it was promoted to the main blog. This is a great motivation for me to try something similar.
thanks for checking it out and for this note. glad you liked it.
Looks like a bit of work and strategy, but it definitely paid off to get a link on WSJ! Good job!
Whoa!
I've been a constant commenter on WSJ, mainly on its political topics. Never occurred to me to comment from an SEO point of view. Thanks to this (and Man, the Mission Impossible insert is giving me life!)
Inspiring story Kim. Stuff like this is really motivating for people like me who are new to content generation. As ever, the guy with the plan wins.
I know you've put a lot into responding to comments here, but I'm curious to hear why "from an SEO perspective, the social shares are just as valuable as the link haul"? I was under the impression that social signals were still of minor importance in terms of ranking....
Hi - Thanks for this note. My understanding is that google increasing the value of social shares in the google algos, and to some extent they're devaluing links (though they're still very important). I could be wrong -- i don't work for google.
So, from that perspective, i thought that the huge social media share haul (thousands of shares) was pretty valuable - though i can't prove it of course. just a hunch based on the observation that the content on my site with more shares do better in seo than those with less shares. it's unclear of what is causing what, though.
Larry -- Love that you created an objective-driven strategy and executed your plan. Going beyond keyword stuffing and producing articles for the sake of having content is yesterday's news. Thanks for pointing out the "how-to" articles and "x ways to do..." articles are not the mission-achieving content readers and publishers demand.
Lastly, the music...giggle out loud. When I write, I always have some swanky tune motivating my rhythm, so I relate to reading and writing with music forming the mood.
ha ha. good to know it's not just me (about the background music). thanks for this note.
Great article, nice attention to the research used to create the content.
Thanks thomas!
Decent post, while this is pretty difficult to apply to some small town trade business, the concept is there. Small town businesses can do the same but i guess on a slightly smaller scale but still with some respected publications
yes! exactly. use similar process on the a smaller scale. then work your way up over time, as you get more and more successful at this.
Congrats on the promotion to the main blog! Great post Larry
Thanks dubs!
Great post and well done. This is also great ammunition for me to convince people in my business that putting together great content deserves a bit of hard work and a little (time and money) investment but that results can follow if done right.
I'm glad you found this to be helpful. Just be careful to set expectations properly - that it always take a few tries to figure out what works and doesn't work in your industry - that each campaign is a learning experience and that you want to embark on path to achieving awesomeness, not an overnight win the lottery kind of thing.
Congrats, this is like winning the lottery. How frustrating it is for the common blogger waking up everyday trying to achieve something like this. Good job Larry!
If you get good at this, over time you can make your own luck. i think the key is to start with something ambitious yet achievable - for example, a local paper or influential publication in your space. And with each success, set your sights on loftier targets.
Hi Larry,
Awesome story! One question though, how did you get the journalist to notice your post?
a couple of people have asked about this already in the comments (see above). I feel like matt cutts giving the dopey "just be awesome" response, but it is true.
I disagree. You have built relationships with influencers, which takes effort above and beyond "being awesome." As you said in a comment above, Rand shared your piece and that earned more shares. I bet with your social network, you're not that far removed from the WSJ writer. You should check on LinkedIn. :)
I don't think we're disagreeing here. I fully agree with your comment.
I wrote in the article that this wasn't our first try at this. That we had tried it many times before. But I think that every time you do a big content marketing push, in addition to getting more experience, you acquire more contacts, and as the value of your network increases over time, you can shoot for higher and higher targets with increasing success.
But the awesomeness component is necessary. Without it, nobody will want to share junk.
Nice one which will help lot to maintain those activity which are put importance in online market.
Great success story, and thanks for sharing. I love your summary: no tricks, just lots of research and hard work. There are too many false success stories that are only sales pitch texts for "the secret system", "the unknown tricks" etc. all promising explosive SEO/Link/Social buzz over "the system" that only takes an hour to do.
I also like how you start the article "Start with the end in mind", something we read in Dale Carnegie books, and it's good to see that "plan before you act" is the way to succeed online.
I'd join Mulith's question though. "Build it and they will come" isn't really the way to expect WSJ to somehow stumble over your great post. In all that planning, you probably had a strategy of how to attract the desired attention. Granted, we cant expect you to reveal it all publically, but maybe you could write up a text that piggy-backs this success story, something like "The Do's and Don'ts of Getting the Desired Attention Online"
Larry, excellent work. Did you get a response from Google at all about your numbers?
heh - as a matter of fact, we did. there was a bit of a firestorm, actually. there was concern that someone had leaked the numbers somehow. I guess my estimates were pretty close!
Thanks so much for sharing your experience. Its great to get an idea of the planning involved. Look forward to taking this and using it for myself in the near future
Thanks Sean and let me know how your efforts go!
An absolutely inspiring story. It is a clear example of how to get valuable links by creating good content (note, not any content). Perhaps to many people it may seem a pipe dream to get something like this, but hard work and love in what you do can deliver significant results.Thanks for the post. It makes us keep on going.
Thanks for this note, sergio!
Great post! It really got my imagination going with ideas for my company. Just wanted to clarify something. Did you actually send this to the editors at WSJ? Or did they just happen to find the infographic on your companies site when they were doing research for their piece?
This was a super cool article, to get a link on the Wall St Journal, you sure pulled that out of your hat. I'm working on pulling a rabbit out of my hat and it's working. Please take a look at my ad-free site and learn why this affiliate network is taking the internet by storm. Our top earner made $50K first 4 months in with this Company.
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