Using your expertise to gain links with digital PR

If you care about ranking your ecommerce website in Google, then you’re gonna want some nice juicy links to your site, some sweet, sweet, links *drools*

Sorry, I got a little excited there. 

I’m Mark Rofe, creator of DigitalPRCourse.com and owner of ChristmasTrees.co.uk. I’m here to show you how you can gain links to your ecommerce site by utilising your expertise in the industry and then by simply sharing that expertise with journalists. 

So before I get into it, you may already be thinking ‘what if I haven’t got any expertise to share?’ 

Forget about that for a moment, I promise you, you do have some sort of expertise that journalists will find newsworthy, and I’m going to help you, so park that self-doubt aside, and let’s get down to business. 

The Newscycle Repeats 

The first thing you need to realise is that the newscycle repeats itself. Once you learn this, getting coverage (and links) with digital PR becomes a lot easier. 

Let me show you what I mean. 

This is a search for ‘how to thaw frozen pipes’, and we can see there were a few articles written about this between January and April of 2021.

Now by going to Google News and playing around with the dates, I can see that these articles are written basically every single year. 

Each of those articles have included a comment from an expert, often with a link back to their website (this could be an idea for a plumbing store). 

So, the news cycle repeats itself, because every year some of the same things happen, the seasons change. 

And articles for winter skincare tips are written (an idea for beauty/skin care stores)

We have a heatwave, and there are articles about heatwave sex positions (an idea for adult toy stores)

Flights get cancelled or travel companies go bankrupt. And we see articles about that appear each year

Holiday celebrations come and go, and people wonder what to do with their leftover pumpkin (an idea for gardening stores)

Find What Repeats In Your Industry

So the first step is to find out what stories repeat in your industry. For most ecommerce sites you should be able to find SOMETHING. 

To do this, you’re just going to have to get a bit creative with some Google searches.

Here’s a two step approach I’ve found that can help

Firstly, search Google News for your niche, and then add the word ‘expert’ after it. For example, if your niche was gardening, you’d search ‘gardening expert’, for cars you may searching ‘motoring expert’, interior design perhaps ‘interior design expert’, and for … actually, you know what, I’m sure you get the idea. 

Next, you’ll want to head to the date section of Google News, and then enter the above search I just mentioned, and then it’s a case of filtering through each month and year until you think you may have something repeatable. 

For example, I’ve searched Google News for ‘gardening expert’ between November 1st 2022 and November 30th 2022, and it’s surfaced this article in the Express.co.uk on when to stop cutting your grass for winter. Some quick research shows me that this is a repeatable story, with articles about it in 2021, 2019, and 2018 (there weren’t any in 2020, most likely for reasons related to covid). 

If you are in a super niche industry, try to think more broadly. For example if you have CarMats.co.uk, there probably aren’t repeatable stories about car mats, but if you think ‘automotive’ instead, then you’ll be able to find that angle that does repeat itself, again, and again. 

Writing Your Expert Comment

Once you’ve found your repeatable story, you’ll notice that with a lot of the expert comments they are either a hack, tip or piece of advice, and while they are certainly useful, aren’t exactly complicated.

So when it comes to writing yours, often all you need to do is look at what those comments have looked liked in the past, and try to write something similar, but better.  

To write yours up, you can use a format, similar to the one I’ve used here. 

The main piece of advice I’d give when writing yours expert comment is to make sure you are using lots of quotable content, it builds your expertise and credibility within your industry, it makes sure you and your business get mentioned by name (so you can get a link), and journalists love to be able to quote experts too. 

Sending Your Expert Comment 

Once you’ve found your repeatable story, you’ve written it up, all that’s left to do is send it out to journalists, and you’ll have those links coming in, in no time. 

But hold your horses, because this is only going to work if your expert comment is TIMELY.

It’s no good sending out your comment about ‘when to stop cutting your grass for winter’, in the middle of summer. No journalist is going to cover that then, but if you’re the kind of person that would do this, I admire your optimism. 

So, get your comments written up in advance, but send them out when it’s timely, basically when it becomes relevant. 

When the time does come to send your comment to journalists, you can find relevant journalists to contact by simply using the search I showed you earlier, search for your niche plus the word ‘expert’. 

Try to send it to as many relevant journalists as you can find (this will differ depending on your niche), and don’t be afraid to send it to more than one relevant journalist at the same publication, and follow up if you don’t get a response after a couple of days. 

Does This Really Work?

If you’re wondering whether this really works, here I am live on a Sky News panel talking about Christmas tree shortages back in 2021 with the MD of the road haulage association, CEO of the port of Dover, & a professor on supply chain logistics, after sending out an expert comment for my Christmas tree website. 

Sky News didn’t tell me who else was going to be on the panel before I agreed to it, and yes I felt very out of place, so as you can see this really can work (sometimes too well). 

Anyway, I hope you found all this somewhat useful, and if you thought it was bad, then definitely don’t check out my digital PR course, because it’s full of more bad stuff like this.