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A crash course in getting press and building backlinks!

Carrie Rose is the co-founder of Rise at Seven, a creative SEO agency.

Over the last year I’ve been consistently blown away by how easy she makes getting press look.

And it’s not press for press's sake.

The reward is high quality backlinks which help her clients rank for ultra-competitive search terms.

Lets start with an example

Missguided is a fashion retailer who started working with Rise last year.

Carrie looked at their site for 5 minutes, saw they sold dog jumpers, and knew there was a story there.

So she found some similar looking regular jumpers, and wrote the headline:

Missguided launch matching jumpers for you and your dog this winter

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The media loved it. The campaign pulled in 80 links. And Missguided soared from #30 to #1 for the search “dog jumpers”.

No big budget or photoshoot. Just the idea to link two pre-existing products with a clever headline.

Another example

November 2019, Game came to Rise.

They'd just launched a new webpage full of gaming chairs. The challenge was to rank this page in time for Christmas.

Now, getting press to link to a bunch of gaming chairs is near impossible. So, instead, Carrie dreamt up The Christmas Tinner.

A 3-course meal in a tin for hardcore gamers. And it was this page that then linked to their gaming chairs.

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The Christmas Tinner went viral.

“SEO juice” passed down. And within 3 weeks Game's gaming chair page was ranking for over 400 keywords.

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Honestly, I could tell a dozen more stories like this.. But I think it’s more important to try and understand the process.

Carrie tells me the trick is learning to think in headlines.

For example, last Easter she worked with a sex toy startup. The first thing they do is figure out the headline:

The world’s first Easter egg with a sex toy inside

Then they work backwards until it becomes reality.

Most people plough ahead with an idea. And, only when it's too late, realise there's no “hook”.

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Once you've got your story the next step is pitching it. Here's Carrie's crash course:

  • 1/ Journalists are busy. Make their life easy.
  • 2/ The email subject is my headline. I outline my article in the body. Embed my best image. And link my “campaign page”.
  • 3/ Timing is key. Journos open laptops at 8:30. So schedule outreach for 8.

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So there you go

14 months ago Rise launched with one client at £2k / mo.

Today revenue is £2M / yr. And yes, that is crazy!

It reminds me that nothing moves the needle like genuine creativity.

One 5 minute idea can have more impact than 100 guest posts.

Thanks to Carrie for sharing her wizardry. She's told me she's happy to answer any questions. So ask away and (fingers crossed) she'll make an account later today.

If you enjoyed this, maybe I can tempt you with my marketing newsletter. I write a weekly email full of real world examples like this 🤞

  1. 3

    Thanks a lot @harrydry, you keep bringing IH a lot of super valuable content!

    1. 1

      Cheers Clément. Appreciate it :)

  2. 2

    Bookmarking this! I spent all of July trying to reach out to press about Fantasy Congress to no avail. Thanks Harry!

    1. 2

      Ah damn. I think it's a good idea for the press. Just could do with a nice headline for them.

      Good chance with the upcoming election perhaps.

      Sorta thing that would do well on Reddit maybe :)

      1. 1

        I think it has something to do with finding the right "angle". Just saying "hey this exists isn't that neat?" wasn't enough. But now I know!

  3. 2

    This is really good - thanks for sharing!

  4. 2

    Nice examples, they really help get the creative juices flowing, trying to apply some of this thinking to metroretro.io!

    1. 2

      Wish you luck. All these example I gave are pretty “creative”.

      Perhaps worth listening to this podcast with @dragilev. He's got a more boring (but very effective) study based approach which I think might work well for Metro Retro.

  5. 1

    Hey. Just stopped by to say I like your site and newsletter. Especially enjoyed your article on No Name brand. Cool stuff.

    1. 1

      appreciate it. thank you

  6. 1

    New to PR. So journalists are willing to publish this for free (as long as it is interesting) without asking for payment?

    if you look at the hustling blogger groups, even they charge for a dofollow backlinks.

  7. 1

    Actually genuinely inspiring stuff. Thanks for sharing.

  8. 1

    Fantastic article. Thanks very much for posting this!

    I do have a question tho: how do you know which journalists to reach out to and how do you get their contact details?

    1. 2

      I think Buzzstream Discovery is pretty useful. You can filter by “search terms”. And then use Hunter to find email addresses from there!

  9. 1

    Great read! Thanks for sharing.

  10. 1

    Incredible piece here, @harrydry – thank you.

    1. 1

      Cheers Jay - Appreciate it :)

  11. 1

    It is interesting
    thanks

  12. 1

    I'm really curious to know how Carrie is able to improve RemoteWorkJar.com overall ranking if she ever happens to visit? 🤞

  13. 1

    Another amazing article Harry! You are killing it.

    1. 1

      Cheers John. Appreciate it man. I think I can do better. Things take me a too much time!

  14. 1

    Great examples @harrydry !

    "Create the headline, work backward to make it a reality." Love it.

    1. 1

      Cheers Yannick. Yeah, i love that line.

      PS. I signed up for Hypefury a while back. Love it. However, doing threads (which I rely on a lot) didn't seem to work too well. I like to do it tweet by tweet. Not sure if that makes any sense?

      1. 1

        Hmmm, we made a lot of improvements since but I'm very keen to see you work on how you build a thread. We can use that input to improve it even more.

        (Sent you a LinkedIn invite. Maybe we can schedule a video call too so I can see how you work?)

        1. 1

          hmm - well i think my issue was Hypefury separated tweets automatically into a thread. Which seemed kinda odd to me. I could be making it up

          I'll give it another try and lyk. And chat on LinkedIn :>)

          1. 1

            Ah yes, It still does that. I'm gonna check and see how hard it is to give people the option to separate the tweets themselves because I've also sometimes had that itch :)

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    This comment was deleted 3 months ago.

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

    1. 2

      Pleasure. I learnt a load writing about this one.

      The one thing I didn't really cover is the “coming up with ideas” part. Would love Carrie to expand a bit on that.

      I know she runs DigitalPrExamples where she sorta “collects” examples.

      So I'm guessing she relies on good ol' combinational creativity.

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