Last week while researching a topic for one of my favorite clients in Los Angeles I bumped into a KTLA article which caught my eye. The title of the page was right up my alley. Eager to read it, I clicked on it waiting to see if the reporter had covered my client. I rejoiced, as they had. Unfortunately, there was no link. I scrolled to the bottom of the article and kept seeing my client’s name over and over. Then at the bottom of the article I noticed that the article was syndicated. Whoah!!

I quickly Googled a sentence of the article in quotes, and there it was, on CNN. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I clicked on the article and scrolled through it, and there they were, links!! Links to my client’s site. My friend Jesse, one of the only other copywriters and SEO gurus on the planet that I trust was linked to as well. Whoah!!

I logged in to Google Analytics and looked at the spike in traffic and clicked on referral traffic for yet another “Whoah!!” moment. This, my friends, is what it looks like to see referral traffic coming in from CNN:

cnn traffic

This is what referral traffic looks like from CNN.

Is it hard to get a link from CNN?

I know people and I know reporters. If I want a helping hand getting mentioned on a major news site, I can make it happen. This was 100% natural and unexpected.

This link is to a local company doing white hat SEO via content. It is TOUGH. Back in 2003 one of the sites I was working on obtained 107 natural links to a product page. That was tough and it is tougher these days to even get a single link. If you press on long enough and cover a wide variety of relevant topics if you will indeed get natural links.

To get referenced by the news, you have to have unique content up, and be the first to get it up. You will see articles over and over and over which SHOULD have referenced you. People steal my content ideas all the time, especially lazy reporters. But if you keep at it, and you’re good at it, and people are finding your content in search, you will be rewarded.

Len
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On May 5, 2016   /   Content Creation   /   Leave a comment

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