THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 38

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 38 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

If you're not already signed up, you can do so at using the button below.

Here is the latest Digital PR news and resources from the last week that you might have missed.

Digital PR Tips: Digital PR Learning Resources You May Have Missed From July

uSERP: The State of Backlinks for SEO in 2025: What 800+ SEOs Think About Link Building

Ahrefs: Only 12% of AI Cited URLs Rank in Google’s Top 10 for the Original Prompt

Search Engine Land: ‘Search everywhere’ doesn’t mean ‘be everywhere’

Honcho: How Google’s AI Overview Is Reshaping Digital PR

The Drum: What besieged brands should do in an age of fake viral apologies

metehan.ai: Perplexity’s 59 Ranking Patterns and Secret Browser Architecture Revealed

Gabriella Sheerin on LinkedIn: PR is not a lead-gen channel, it's an awareness channel

Tom Chivers on LinkedIn: If you want to avoid feeling like you're spending a Saturday night in A&E, here are three tips to keep you sane if you've chosen a life of PR

Shakira Sacks on LinkedIn: How to come up with ideas when your brain isn't cooperating

Press Gazette: Reach hiring journalists in Australia to cover UK overnight hours

Finchling: A new monitoring system for brands

TechSEO North Webinar: Technical SEO for Digital PR w/ Tom Chivers, Liv Day, George Adams and Dan Nutter

BuzzStream Podcast: How GEO Is Changing Digital PR w/ Oliver Sissons

Digital PR Explained Podcast: How To Pitch Your Founder Story (and Actually Get a Response)

Five quick fire Digital PR tips to help make you better and more efficient at getting SEO results via Digital PR:

1️⃣ The ideas you get from a brainstorm will only be as good as the brief you provide for it. If you just have an "open brief" thinking that means no creative restraints, a lot of the time it actually does the opposite, as people have no starting point or prompts to spark their creativity in a specific direction.

2️⃣ Pay attention to what stories are getting coverage in other markets and other countries. The majority of the time what works in one space will work in another space. Plus you’ll have the advantage of being the first one to introduce that type of story to your market.

3️⃣ =RANK is a very useful formula for ranking your index campaigns when you have a tie and you're confused about what the number following your tie should be (it should be =6,=6,8, not =6,=6,7). The formula is - =RANK(A2, A2:A101,0) where A5 is the cell you want to rank and A2:A101 is the range of your data. You then add either 0 (ascending order) or 1 (descending order) after depending on the order you want to rank the data in.

4️⃣ A handy Google Sheets shortcut - cmd + ; automatically adds the current date to your cell. On Windows it's ctrl + ; (likewise in Excel).

5️⃣ It’s not coming up with ideas that’s the hard part. It’s knowing which to move forward with and which to leave behind that’s the hard bit.

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 The Top 200 Most Spoken Languages in the World

The Ethnologue 200 is an annual list of the most spoken languages in the world that has been published for the last 15 years (we always love datasets with a long publication history for comparison purposes!). Unfortunately a fair bit of their data is for paid subscribers only, but you can still get a lot of really good stuff for free, especially if you dig around into the insights section where you’ll find gems like the language with the most native and total speakers in 2025 which also includes a great map on the percentage of each country’s population that speaks English, and this one on the countries that speak the most languages.

2️⃣ QS World University Rankings

In this newsletter I’ve previously shared The Times’ University Rankings list. Well here’s another great but different list from QS that ranks the world’s top universities and includes a load of great data points on each one. Some of the interesting rankings include employer reputation and outcomes, international student diversity, and academic reputation. Possible uses could include the countries with the best graduate employment prospects, or the most welcoming countries to international students.

3️⃣ Average Car Insurance Rates by ZIP Code

This tool from Carinsurnace.com is a really great tool if you’re looking to compare car insurance prices across America for a campaign. The site lists the cheapest and most expensive states, but where the interesting analysis would come from is by adding more variables to the data, such as the states where car insurance costs the highest percentage of your annual income, or the states with the biggest disparity between insurance prices for men vs women, young drivers, old drivers, etc.

4️⃣ Community Notes Leaderboard

Elon really has done his best to destroy Twitter but one of the very rare good additions has been Community Notes which display below a post with factual misinformation. This tool shows you which users have been flagged with the most community notes. You can also search for community notes listed against a specific user too, which could be valuable if you wanted to rank a set of users by which receive the most community notes (for example Elon Musk has a crazy 104 noted posts on his own platform).

5️⃣ PhotoPie

This last one is a bit different but I think there’s definitely some really creative uses for it. PhotoPie is a tool that transforms your photos into pie charts that reflect the colours present in the photos. What’s really cool is that you it also works on groups of photos as well as individual ones, meaning that you could upload for example, a series of photos from a country/city and see if the colours reflect their flag, or which places are the brightest, darkest, etc.

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.

1️⃣ Is Your State's Highest-Paid Employee A Coach? (Probably) by Deadspin

📊 340 RDs, 134 DR 50+

As someone who doesn’t live in America but somewhat follows U.S. sports, the U.S. sports culture, and in particular college sports, is really fascinating. For sports fans in the UK, the whole concept of college sports and their popularity is just so different to our sports culture. But in a really interesting way. This map produced by Deadspin way back in 2013 does a really great job of visualising the cultural impact of college sports by mapping out the occupation of the highest paid public employee in each state, revealing that it’s pretty much always either the college Football coach or the Basketball coach.

I’m a big fan of analysing the backlink profiles of your target publications to see what their most linked stories are, because a lot of the time you’ll find some amazing content inspo from original stories that they’ve published themselves. This is a really great example of just that, with Deadspin’s piece earning over 2,000 backlinks over the years from a whole host of leading media publications like New York Times, HuffPost, and The Atlantic. The page has been earning links for years too as a reference point for a wide array of different college sports stories that Journalists have covered, showing the value of creating a story that generates such a vast digital footprint, and being rewarded with sustainable organic coverage and links.

2️⃣ Fashion Footprint Calculator by ThredUp

📊 143 RDs, 49 DR 50+

Speaking of sustainable link building, this campaign by ThredUp is another example of a campaign that has been earning new links consistently since it was first launched in 2019. The fashion footprint calculator is a 10 question quiz that asks you about your clothing buying and washing habits, and then at the end reveals how eco-friendly you are.

Calculator tools like this can be great evergreen link building assets when they’re created around a popular topic that will naturally provide plenty of newsjacking opportunities throughout the year. Go too niche and the attention might not be there, but with a topic like sustainable fashion, ThredUp have really benefited from creating a great asset early on in the growing stage of a popular and long-lasting trend.

As the trend peaks in popularity and significant news stories around the topic emerge, this gives ThredUp lots of opportunities to newsjack those conversations and introduce (or reintroduce) Journalists to their calculator tool. And probably my favourite benefit of calculators is that even link shy Journalists pretty much have to link to them, because telling their readers about a tool and then not making it simple for them to access it is kinda lame.

It looks like ThredUp were also smart with their outreach activity by tying it in with the announcement of their partnership with Emma Watson. Which is a great example of how tools like this can also be incorporated into other brand stories that the press are covering. But the key is relevance to the brand. ThredUp’s key brand identity is tied around sustainable fashion, so a tool that tells users how sustainable their fashion footprint is, perfectly ties in with their brand and won’t feel like a forced addition to any of their press releases.

3️⃣ Ghost Towns of America by GeoTab

📊 474 RDs, 89 DR 50+

The concept of ghost towns is pretty fascinating to me. Maybe because it’s one I don’t see talked about a lot, or maybe it’s another thing that’s more of a U.S. thing than here in the UK. I think topics like that which fall into that category of high intrigue but not necessarily high popularity can make for great campaign topics when done correctly. This campaign from GeoTab that breaks down the number of ghost towns in each state is a really good example of how a brand can create a SERP dominating piece of research on a topic that has search interest but not a huge amount of competition for really great pieces of content ranking on page 1 (at least based on the search results I just looked at).

As well as clearly being a very successful link building page with over 4,700 backlinks on 474 referring domains, the page also drives nearly 3,000 monthly organic sessions, showing the value of creating content that has keyword ranking potential, especially when it nicely fits in that gap of good volume but not super high difficulty competition wise. That also helps make your content more evergreen by turning it into a go to resource that anyone writing a story on ghost towns will find when they search for ghost towns and want a reference point, made even stronger by all of the regional data to make it a relevant source to link to from regional news sites as well as national ones.

4️⃣ The Most Timeless NBA Plays by The Pudding

📊 6 RDs, 2 DR 50+

As far as content pieces created by The Pudding go, this one is actually a pretty low performer on a link building front, but I think it’s a really good content format that could work well for sports campaigns. Here, they’ve researched YouTube views of historic NBA moments to rank the most timeless NBA plays.

As well as being an interesting data format (imo at least), that if done right and with a big enough scale of data, can produce plenty of outreach angles to work with, I think it’s also a format that lends itself to a really impactful landing page that keeps users engaged and earns a strong session duration. A lot of the time we fall into the trap of creating content purely for the purpose of earning links, forgetting that Digital PR should be about more than just link building, and part of that is creating on-site content that will not only attract new users, but keep them engaged enough that they’ll remember the content, and hopefully the brand that created it too.

5️⃣ This is what your hand would look like if it was designed to deliver an incredible orgasm by Love Honey

You know the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words”? Well… here’s a picture.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 38. 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 🙂