Digitalks #15. Understanding Digital PR and Journalism
What are digital PR and digital journalism? How do they make a difference in society?
Digitalks is a virtual brown bag meeting by Breadnbeyond’s Digital Marketing team where all valuable information, feedback, ideas, seminars, and training sessions are shared.
With a major switch to the digital environment, as simple as the way we look for the latest news has transformed significantly.
It’s getting easier for people to get information through devices and search engines.
In addition, expanding businesses and capturing potential customers have become more convenient as well.
Digital PR and digital journalism are new terms that have emerged among businesses lately.
Breadnbeyond’s junior writer Alif Nur shares a brief overview of digital PR and digital journalism and some practical insights.
Keep scrolling to explore the essentials!
Digital PR
Alif Nur shared some insights after joining Semrush’s online class with Brian Dean about digital PR.
In a nutshell, digital PR refers to tactics to earn backlinks to support SEO strategy.
Getting many quality backlinks makes your site more recognizable and discoverable on search engines’ result pages.
A way to earn backlinks is by creating linkable assets known as source magnets.
A source magnet contains citable data from a study or survey, including numerical results and graphs.
In Brian Dean’s digital PR, he refers to the five stages of creating a source magnet.
#1. Choosing a Topic for Source Magnet
Choosing a topic for your upcoming source magnet is tricky, but it’s best to stay on track with your niche.
Besides, pick a trending topic that many are still interested in and hasn’t been covered by other bloggers. Consider some points below.
- Choose a trending topic
- Look for topics that lack data source
- Find topics that haven’t been studied many times
- Consider tangential topics
You don’t have to cover a broad topic for your survey or study. It’s better to focus on a tiny niche topic.
Creating a source magnet can also be done by creating a curated report that doesn’t require you to generate data.
A curated report allows you to take data from other sources and present it interestingly.
#2. Generating Data
A source magnet must contain data for others to cite. Before generating data from your survey or study. Here are some points you need to do:
Choose data points (What results do you want to attain from your survey?)
- Brainstorm data points
- Use statistic pages to find data points
- Trim your list to 12–15 data points
Collect and analyze data
- Big enough sample size
- A survey should include 250 people
- A curated report should have 50–100 items
#3. Creating Source Magnet Report
A source magnet report is written as a blog post and should be accessible for free.
The structure of a source magnet report includes an introduction, summary, body text, and conclusion.
You also need visual assets such as graphs or charts to complete your source magnet report.
Below is the structure you need to work on to write a source magnet report:
- Introduction: consists of the study overview and a few data points details.
- Brief: consists of 10–12 key statistics in one or two lines.
- Body text: includes background, results, visuals, and context explanations.
- Conclusion: explains finding more details and mentions how the findings may impact the real world.
#4. Promoting Source Magnet
After publishing your source magnet online, you can’t just sit back, hoping search engines do their magic exposing your page.
You still need to promote your source magnet to gain popularity and drive traffic to your site.
Some ways you can do to promote a source magnet include:
- Influencers commentary technique
- Press release distribution
- Strategic social posts
- Source magnet cross-promotion (guest posting, email marketing, podcast interviews, etc.)
Related:
#5. Scaling Source Magnet
Being consistent is one of the most challenging things to do.
You can apply some steps below to keep you motivated in producing source magnets.
- Use a consistent layout and design for the source magnet report.
- Use consistent charts and visual templates.
- Create a system for choosing source magnet topics: complexity, relevancy, and potential for coverage.
Digital Journalism
Other than digital PR, digital journalism has also been on the rise as we see more newspapers going digital.
However, writing a source magnet and a news article have distinct strategies as they have different natures and goals.
The difference between blog content and news articles relies heavily on SEO practice.
Let’s take a closer look below.
#1. SEO on Online Media
Unlike digital marketing, online media SEO focuses heavily on long-tail keywords.
Micro keyword phrases are preferable in a competitive nature among digital newspapers.
Long-tailed and micro keywords give a higher chance of winning the top rank of result pages.
Moreover, link-building practices are less common in online media, especially news-centered platforms.
Nevertheless, inserting authoritative links is still possible whenever writers need to cite other sources.
Related: How Can Video Content Help Your SEO?
#2. Content Sources
In digital journalism, journalists and writers don’t always rely on incidental events.
They can still create news even though no significant events have happened recently.
Journalists can still write evergreen articles that many are interested in.
The role of Google Analytics and Google Trends are vital in deciding on what evergreen content to produce.
Other than that, social media is an excellent source of information.
They can get many topic articles ranging from entertainment, education, and business on social platforms.
Digital PR is a new approach to expanding a business. It’s a way to stay relevant and thrive in today’s market.
Creating a source magnet is among the best strategies to improve brand awareness through cyberspace.
Not stopping there, digital journalism is also getting more applicable in this day and age.
As we go outside, we see fewer people reading newspapers, but you’ll find more people scrolling through online media on their handy-dandy smartphones.
Breadnbeyond helps you to create high-converting animated explainer videos.
Check out our useful resources to hone your social media marketing skills. Or, you can subscribe here to get free e-books!
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