THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 21
Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 21 of The Digital PR Observer Newsletter.
If you missed last week’s issue, or any others, you can always catch previous issues of The Digital PR Observer Newsletter here.
Here’s what you’ll get in this newsletter:
The latest Digital PR news and resources
5 quick fire tips to enhance your Digital PR activity
5 data sources you can use for Digital PR campaigns
5 successful campaigns from the archives
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Here is the latest Digital PR news and resources from the last week that you might have missed.
Digital PR Tips: PR Campaigns I Saw and Kinda Liked Volume 2
Linkifi: We Analyzed 2366 Winning Expert Quote Pitches!
Matt Black on Medium: Why Digital PR Needs a Rethink in the Age of LLMs
Bottled Imagination: How To Land PR Campaigns on April Fools Day
The PR Insider: How The Digital PR Industry Has Evolved and Where It’s Headed
Motive PR: A Guide to Digital PR Trends and Tactics in 2025
Grace Burton on LinkedIn: What's happening in April for social and PR opportunities?
Saskia Fryer on LinkedIn: April dates to use this month as newshooks
Holly Scott on LinkedIn: April newsjacking opportunities
The Press Gazette: Reach CEO Jim Mullen steps down with immediate effect
Wordlift: SEO KPIs in 2025: What Really Matters in the Age of AI and Changing SERPs
BuzzStream Podcast: Link Building Tactics for a Brand New Site with Nathan Gotch
Webinar w/ Alex Murphy and Emma Hull - April 29th at 10am GMT: How To Drive Better Search Results Using Digital PR
Five quick fire Digital PR tips to help make you better and more efficient at getting SEO results via Digital PR:
1️⃣ Look through the headlines that a Journalist is using for their stories. If you notice certain words, phrases, puns, etc being used then incorporate these into your subject line to make it look more like the headline they may end up using. If you have access to Ahrefs Content Explorer you can do this at scale as you can search for articles by a specific Journalist and export them all as a csv ready to do some interesting data analysis.
2️⃣ Don’t neglect the impact of sharing your campaigns in relevant Facebook groups. For very niche topics, Journos will be checking communities like these for relevant stories.
3️⃣ Give the Journalist everything that they'd need at the start. Don't ask if they'd like you to share more images with them. If you've got them just share everything at the start rather than making them spend more time asking first and possibly missing your window.
4️⃣ If you're taking on a new client don't neglect any content campaigns they've created in the past that didn't work. The idea and the data may be good but the execution may have been lacking. This could be time saving content that you can use to build links with a better outreach strategy or repurposing the data slightly.
5️⃣ The more content campaigns you read and study, the easier coming up with your own ideas will become. "Metro are doing a lot of [CONTENT TYPE] stories recently, maybe we can do something from this angle." "I've seen [CAMPAIGN] do something similar that we can use for inspiration."
Each week I’ll be sharing five data sources that you can use, either for content inspo, or as data sources for your campaigns.
1️⃣ US Workforce Data Analysis
This is a great page breaking down employment and pay data in America. Using the tool (which doesn’t load great on mobile fyi) you can view which States have the highest employment count and annual wages, and most jobs per 1,000 workers. What is really interesting though is how you can filter by different occupations allowing you to do some great data analysis on things like the top occupation in each State and which States certain jobs are harder to find in.
2️⃣ Weatherbase
There are a number of different sites that you can use for historical and expected weather data, one of the best in terms of variety of different data points available is Weatherbase. The site has data for countries and major cities on metrics such as average temperatures each month, highest and lowest temperatures on record each month, average snowfall, average days of rain, sunshine, wind speed, and more.
3️⃣ Does The Dog Die?
Does The Dog Die is a fascinating site that lists trigger warnings for Movies and TV Shows. It’s a great resource for your own personal use if you’re sensitive to any triggers, but also for researching things like the most common triggers, and the shows/films with the most triggers.
4️⃣ Global Life Expectancy 1960 - Present
Life Expectancy is a very common metric used in Digital PR campaigns, particularly index campaigns. This Kaggle dataset can be a huge timesaver if you’re looking to analyse life expectancy rates across different countries. What I love about this dataset is that it also has historical data going back to 1960 which is great for comparison purposes.
5️⃣ Pokédex For All 1025 Pokémon
This final one is definitely a bit niche. It’s a Kaggle dataset that serves as a Pokédex for all 1025 Pokémon, listing statistics such as height, weight, health points, attack, and defense as well as evolution groupings. Like I said, niche, but if it’s relevant to your brand/client it could make for a great campaign.
In this next section, I take a look at five campaigns from my archive of campaign inspo, with some quick fire analysis of what I liked about them and what made them work. Referring Domains (RDs) figures are taken from ahrefs.
This week is a pet themed special and a preview of a post I’m working on around inspo for pet campaigns.
1️⃣ Life Expectancy Calculator by Blueprint Income
📊 342 RDs, 61 DR 50+
I love a good calculator and this life expectancy calculator from Blueprint Income is a great example of how effective these type of assets fan be at earning links, both at scale and sustainably over time. The tool itself is very well produced going into a lot of detail with the questions asked such as your physical attributes and general health and lifestyle activities, to work out what your personalised life expectancy figure is.
As well as being a great link building asset, it’s also a strong performer at driving organic traffic to the campaign page. The page ranks for over 5,000 keywords globally driving 7,600 monthly sessions from keywords such as “how long will I live” (6.2k MSV for position 2 in US) and “life expectancy calculator” (23k MSV for position 10 in US).
2️⃣ Best & Worst Run Cities in America by WalletHub
📊 858 RDs, 294 DR 50+
WalletHub is one of the best sites out there for producing index campaigns and this is one of the most in depth studies that they’ve produced. For this campaign they’ve ranked the best run cities in America by analysing how they perform against six different categories - 1) Financial Stability, 2) Education, 3) Health, 4) Safety, 5) Economy and 6) Infrastructure & Pollution. It’s essentially six different index campaigns that they’ve then combined together into one massive index which makes for a great methodology and an incredibly detailed study.
WalletHub first launched this campaign way back in 2016 and have been updating it every year since, which allows them to build up such a huge backlink profile for one url. Campaigns like this aren’t always an instant hit either, and often start performing better after a few years of running them as more people become familiar with the study and start associating your brand as the go to source for that type of information. In the last two years the number of referring domains has more than doubled, with the page now ranking for over 1,700 keywords.
3️⃣ The Largest Vocabulary In Hip Hop by The Pudding
📊 323 RDs, 98 DR 50+
The Pudding is a goldmine for data-led creative content and this is one of my favourite posts that they’ve ever done. For this project they’ve analysed the lyrics of popular rappers to work out which use the most unique words and have the widest vocabulary used in their songs.
As always with The Pudding landing pages, the design and interactive graphics are amazing. The comparison of modern rap to other music genres to show how the rap genre has changed over the decades is such good analysis too. I think there’s loads of really cool content that could be produced around song lyrics similar to this piece.
4️⃣ The Largest Residential Home in Every U.S. State by Angi
📊 172 RDs, 18 DR 50+
This is a good example of a campaign that be effective at earning a good number of links from a really extensive desk research project. Angi researched what the largest residential home was in every State and ranked the States that had the largest homes.
Campaigns that look at the [insert topic] in every State are great for giving you 50 instant angles that you can pitch to regional news sites in each State, which is ideal for reducing the risk of relying too much on one or two angles to make your campaign successful.
5️⃣ Superhero Salaries by Vanquis Bank
📊 29 RDs, 20 DR 50+
I’m a big fan of campaigns that take two popular topics and combine them together in creative ways. That’s what Vanquis Bank did in this campaign analysing what salaries Marvel and DC superheroes would earn from their day jobs. In terms of execution it’s pretty quick and easy to research the salaries but the landing page looks super slick and really adds to the campaign.
And that’s a wrap for Issue 21. Same time again next week ✌️
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Each week in the newsletter, you’ll get:
The latest Digital PR news and resources
5 tips to enhance your Digital PR activity
5 data sources you can use for Digital PR campaigns
5 successful campaigns that we liked
If you’ve missed any previous editions of the newsletter, you can go through the archive of issues on the Digital PR Tips website.
Have any feedback for the newsletter? Anything you liked, disliked, or want to see more of? Send an email to matt@digitalprtips.com and let me know 🙂
2 April 2025
