Welcome to today's session on the sustainable content and link building techniques you can use that will ensure you not only improve the performance of your website in the short term but maximize its potential sale value in the long term.

Joining me today is Thomas Smale from FE International, I'll give him the chance to introduce himself in just a moment.

First a bit of housekeeping; we'll be recording this session and the download link will go out to all participants after the presentation is finished.

If you have any questions, I prefer to not break the flow of the session today and so at the end we'll link to a form where you can submit questions for myself or Thomas to answer. Then we can ensure we answer it as comprehensively as possible.

So who am I?

My name is James Agate and I am the founder of Skyrocket.

We’ve been in business since 2010 and we’ve worked with some Fortune 500 brands, FTSE250 companies and a whole host of digital agencies from around the world.


What do clients hire us for? Mainly activities connected with link building so content creation and promotion of that content to secure links to our client websites resulting in an improvement in rankings.

And now my co-presenter for the day Thomas Smale...

I'm Thomas etc etc

The format of today's presentation will be 7 factors that Thomas has identified as being key selling points of a website (from an SEO and content point of view).

What we will do is go through each of these factors individually and then dig deeper into why buyers prefer it and then we'll talk specifically how you can achieve each one - discussing the right techniques and processes.

I think Tom is exploring

[JAMES TO ASK THOMAS WHY HE THINKS PRESS MENTIONS ARE IMPORTANT]

2 key tenets to getting mentions:

1) Be a brand
2) Have a decent product or service (of course the absolute easiest way to get coverage is to have a really shitty product or service although I don't subscribe to notion that all publicity is good publicity.)

Getting press coverage in a lot of cases is easier than it appears. Obviously national or international coverage can be quite daunting and may be hard to break into unless you are a large brand but regional and industry press coverage is a lot easier to achieve.

In a lot of ways it is as simple as reaching out to a relevant party and making yourself known.

You've probably heard about sites like HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and perhaps we're using it wrong but we've only managed a handful of mentions in the number of years we've bene using it. I would imagine it is because each request gets inundated with offers.

In a lot of ways getting covered by national and international press comes down to a bit of luck and being in the right place at the right time unfortunately.

There are of course ways you can increase your chances:

1) Be visible for your areas of expertise

2) Get a press area on your website - this is one of the simplest ways of improving your chances of being covered. It adds value right away as it gives the perception of your web business being much larger than it is (it adds credibility because people are used to seeing press areas on large websites). Nobody needs to know that you've not had any press requests yet! It provides clear information about your company and your story (as there might be an angle there e.g. young entrepreneur, faces adversity etc etc) also makes it really easy for journalists to grab stats/quotes/images to help them with their story.

Adding a press area is something that I mention quite often when putting together one of our 5-point content and link opportunity reports ... You can find out more about these at http://skyrocket.digital/report

Connect your core expertise to topics that mainstream media care about. Essentially play join the dot so that any curious journalist knows they've found someone that can help with their story.