This noopept has me feeling some type of way so let's go
The first thing I'll say that it's hardly a surprise so many people offering editorials links are scammers, there are a few legit ones but I think most of you would be surprised at how easy it is to do yourself. There is no magic or special connections here because these large websites are after the same thing you are: traffic. They need it for their ad views and while some journalists and editors are blowhards who think their views are what should influence the world most understand that without that glorious ad revenue their out of a job and that their quarterly performance numbers are dependent on finding fresh and exciting content. That's where you come in.
There is so much content out there and so few skilled writers that these large publishing sites just don't have the time or money to go after it all and if you can deliver it then they are more than happy to publish it for you. The problem most people run into (especially the service providers who are legit) is that first most affiliates are promoting burner pages or maybe a local client who has a coffee shop and they write the standard 500-1000 word article that's not the least bit engaging, interesting, or informative. You can get those types of articles published on lower tier sites but if that's the case you might as well just use an auto-submitter because the real power isn't in getting your story published in 1 or 2 places.
The real power of editorial links is when people see content posted on an established and authoritative site which then gives you the privilege of dumping that link onto any major site, subreddit, forum, or competing news site and say 'hey look at this cool story' which then gets you even more high quality links and direct traffic. If somebody came here and posted a story linked to their own blog they would probably get rekt even if they had something interesting to say. If they linked to a major news site or trusted industry source like seobook.com or adage.com the their thread would probably get engagement, responses, and would be more likely to be shared by people in other places.
So how do you do it? Well it's easy there are tons of sites out there that accept contributors and getting approved as one is as easy as submitting 1 really great story and building a relationship with the editor. I could write 1,000+ words on this easily but I think listening to this podcast episode from smart passive income will be a lot more interesting:
SPI 145: How to Become a Contributing Writer on Large Media Sites
TLDR:
Find major media sites
Look for the editor of the section you want to publish in
Create a story with engaging content
Insert your link/business, but not in a blatantly spammy way
deliver real value to the readers
Email them your story and ask if they would like to publish it
If yes then congrats, if not move on to the next editor
Yea it's that damn easy. The easiest sites to get into are inquister.com, examiner.com, blogher.com, buzzfeed.com, and huffingtonpost.com but of those huffingtonpost is the only major one. The rest are kind of eh but still useful.
The key here is that you can't submit the same story or just take the same idea and rewrite it 5 different times and send it out to 5 different editors. What you want to do is prioritize and put the most established and trusted sites first and work your way down the list. Those sites syndicate their content all over so if you want to fap to thought of hundreds of links don't worry you'll get them but if the editors see that a bunch of other sites posted the exact same story you did then they lost their scoop and your post is useless. They'll never publish your content again if you just send out for everyone else to use and monetize. If content is king, then exclusivity is the queen.
You also need to make sure that whatever you post about is interesting, doing something like 'Top 5 garcinia cambogia supplements this summer' isn't going to get you on cnn and 'Best Miami SEO Company' isn't going to get you on techcrunch or businessinsider. It's important to know your audience, what catches their attention, and the type of stories that they want to share with the people they know.
You guys are marketers so I think that this goes without saying that once your post is live on a major site your job is to market the shit out of it anyway you can. The great thing about having your content posted on a major site is that you can put it on any social media site, blog, forum, or comment box and nobody will accuse you of drive by link dropping. Heres the process I use:
Get post published
buy likes/tweets to that post if it shows the like/retweet count (social proof)
post it on reddit in a good category
send it out as a "news/story tip" to any blog that has ever mentioned anything about that industry or competitors
post the story on any related forum
if there are any recent blog posts regarding the topic, i leave a comment with that story
mine other major news sites for any reporter/contributor who has written similar stories and email them about it.
You'll want to hire a VA for all that and it's best to have all of that ready to go so that you can hit the ground running the moment your story goes live. Time & competing attention are your 2 biggest enemies.
When you email the story out to other reporters you'll want to make it relevant to something they've written about in the past. Don't go full on press release mode and just send them a 'hey check this out %link%' email, they'll delete that.
Your goal shouldn't be link building but rather referral traffic, if you do it right the backlinks will follow. Websites, apps, kickstarter campaigns, physical products, etc can all be launched very effectively if you can do 2 things:
1) Capture somebody's attention
2) Give them a reason to share it
Obviously this is a lot of work but I think it's worth it. You can always train your VA's to do most of this but make sure you don't cut corners on 2 things:
1) the story idea
2) the content
If you get sloppy on everything else that's fine but don't think that you can create a boring story and use a $5 article to get published anywhere serious. If you suck at ideas, steal one from somebody else and hire a good writer, like
wordagents
