The Public Relations Blog

Keep your news contacts updated so your company can quickly earn media coverage.

A media list is a resource your company and PR team utilizes throughout a PR campaign to build relationships with contacts at specific outlets. A strategic media list will help the PR pro know who to share your company’s newsworthy information, such as the opening of a new location, new products, new hires, donations to nonprofits, and more. 

Effective newsjacking injects your ideas into a breaking news story to get media attention, but it requires careful execution.

Newsjacking is a technique media relations professionals and agencies use to hijack trending news stories, inserting their brand into the conversation. PR practitioners must stay current on trending news topics to quickly identify newsjacking opportunities. By injecting their brand’s unique, provocative, or contrarian views into breaking stories, they can earn media coverage and bring attention to their organization or clients. 

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust will boost your content marketing strategy.

Producing high-quality online content is a vital yet challenging part of content marketing. To cut through the competition of billions of web pages, use EEAT. The acronym stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness and acts as the set of criteria search engines use to evaluate content quality and usefulness.

Make sure your company is prepared when catastrophe strikes.

From a PR lens, the fires that devastated parts of Maui stand as a stark example of the public relations challenges natural disasters can pose. With record-breaking wildfires becoming more frequent, PR experts must analyze past disasters to identify communication gaps and empower future readiness.

Tracking and building domain authority scores can amplify the SEO impact of earned media coverage.

Domain authority is a metric developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. It's calculated based on an analysis of over 200 ranking factors, including the quantity and quality of links pointing to a domain. 

For public relations professionals, understanding and tracking domain authority is crucial in four key ways.

News releases focusing strictly on news value are more effective than press releases in today's media landscape.

In the world of public relations, there are two main types of releases organizations use to garner media attention: the press release and the news release. Though they may seem similar, news releases are more valued in today’s media landscape due to their higher news value and more journalistic style.

So what’s the difference?

To better the PR pro/journalist relationship, avoid these common mistakes.

Public relations professionals and journalists have a symbiotic yet strained relationship at times. As a PR veteran who worked with the media for over 15 years, I've encountered recurring habits among reporters that annoy even the most experienced PR pros. 

Though many journalists are a pleasure to work with, a few key etiquette tweaks could go a long way toward smoothing out communication.

Avoid beginner PR mistakes by understanding important industry terms and how to properly use them.

Though the difference between “communication” and “communications” is only one letter, these two terms have distinct meanings in strategic public relations. Understanding when to use each term is critical for PR professionals, as misusing these words can undermine carefully crafted messaging strategies.

Strategically optimize for autocomplete to boost your website traffic and convert more leads online.

Google's autocomplete search predictions operate like free advertising space on the world's most popular search engine. When relevant keyword phrases pop up in the user’s search, companies receive prime visibility to countless people. For any organization, a high ranking in autocomplete results can be transformational, funneling customers straight to your website. 

Commercial newswire news releases may be an asset, but they must be used judiciously.

Companies often use commercial newswire services to distribute news releases with the goal of securing media placement and reaching a wider audience. But do these paid distribution services actually help with search engine optimization? The short answer is yes, but there are caveats.