THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 50

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 50 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.

The latest guest contribution on the Digital PR Tips blog comes from Ellie Sumner, Digital PR Director at Prosperity Media

Digital PR in Australia: How to land links down under

Want to contribute a post of your own to the Digital PR Tips blog? If you have an idea for a topic that you want to write about, please fill in this quick form here.

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 October

PR Newswire: 2025 State of the Press Release Report

Cision: How to Introduce AI into Your PR Workflow: 5 Tips from an Expert

Agility PR: Digital PR vs. traditional PR: Why integration wins every time

PRmoment: Going it alone: tips for becoming a successful PR freelancer

Ahrefs: How to Earn LLM Citations to Build Traffic & Authority

Neomam: Why Our Small Business Chooses Human Intelligence Over AI

Vogue: Teen Vogue Is Joining Vogue.com

BuzzStream Podcast: What is Reactive PR and How to Master it? w/ Leah Daly

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

1️⃣ AI when used correctly can help to improve your pitches and press releases, but don't use it to do the job for you from scratch. That's when you end up with AI slop. Write the first draft yourself and then ask AI tools the right questions to spot mistakes and areas you can improve the language for example. And remember, changes AI tools make don't have to be used - use them as suggestions and trust your own gut above all else on what you think is right.

2️⃣ Don't worry about using formatting techniques such as bullet points, tables, certain words, different lengths of sentences, or even em dashes for fear of your writing looking like it's AI-generated. All of these have existed in writing long before AI, and are often good writing techniques.

3️⃣ When writing your follow up emails, rather than just writing a generic checking in on this message, also include a quick bullet point overview of the key points from your pitch so the Journalist doesn’t have to scroll down further to get an idea of what your story is about.

4️⃣ Don't embed hi-res images in the body of the email. Share any images you have in a Dropbox/Drive folder. And make sure those folders stay live in case a Journo wants to use them for a different story in the future.

5️⃣ The timing of when you launch your campaign can be the difference between good results and great results. Look at what events are coming up in the short-medium term that you can tie your story in with to make it more newsworthy.

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 UK Government Rejected Petitions

Every petition, good, bad, or stupid, gets listed on the UK Parliament website. You can view all of the petitions but I particularly like the list of rejected petitions and the possible creative content that could be made from them. I also love that there’s an option at the bottom of the page to export the full list to a csv file which includes the name of the petition and how many signatures it has.

2️⃣ The distribution of household wealth in Britain and the impact on families

Resolution Foundation has released a series of really interesting reports this year on various finance topics, including this one which has a lot of data on wealth inequality in Great Britain. In basic terms, the report analyses the difference in wealth distribution between income classes, showing how the gap in distribution of household wealth is significantly increasing. Lots of interesting data points that could be great starting points for expert commentary campaigns on related topics.

3️⃣ U.S. Monthly Immigrant and Nonimmigrant Visa Issuances Data

These reports provide great data on U.S. visa’s that are issued. The reports break down the number of visa’s issued including to which countries and for what type of visa, which could be very useful for analysing different types of visa’s such as student visa’s for example. The reports date back to 2000 which is great for trends and comparison points.

4️⃣ Zillow Housing Market Reports

As well as being a great resource for looking up property listings and scraping data from listings, Zillow also has a housing market report for every state, city, and zip code in America. I’ve linked to an example of the report for Cleveland, Ohio which shows you some of the cool data points on these reports such as the average home value, YoY comparison, number of listings, median list price vs median sale price, and average rent prices.

5️⃣ PION100 US Edition

The PION100 is a super detailed report that ranks brand performance among U.S. consumers aged 16-24. This is a fantastic report for analysing audience insights for the youngest adult market in America, what appeals to them, and what brands across different sectors are leading the way with this audience.

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 When Do Americans Leave For Work? by Flowing Data

📊 20 RDs, 10 DR 50+

For those of you not familiar with Flowing Data, I highly recommend checking it out as it’s a fantastic site for data-led stories, primarily U.S. based. This is a really cool example of the type of content that Nathan produces, analysing data from the American Community Survey to create an amazing interactive map showing the volume of Americans around the country leaving for work at different time intervals.

The post is from 2015 now so the data is pretty outdated but it’s still a great example of how datasets can be transformed into interesting content pieces, especially if you have the resources to utilise data vis pieces to enhance the storytelling aspect like Nathan does. I always enjoy finding posts on sites like this that aren’t produced as PR campaigns to see how sites find content organically and link to it. This post earned links from sites such as Bloomberg and regional news sites, and the Flowing Data domain has nearly 10,000 referring domains. Great content gets links, PR helps it get more links.

2️⃣ Job Hunting Icks by StandOut CV

📊 21 RDs, 12 DR 50+

This is a really good example of a survey campaign conducted by StandOutCV, who surveyed 1,000 people about the biggest red flags they consider when job hunting. In my opinion surveys can sometimes fall into the trap of having questions for the sake of questions, which becomes not just wasted content, but also wasted money as survey’s don’t come cheap. This one includes a lot of different topics but for me at least, all of them are interesting, easy to relate to, and cover unique ground.

I also like the campaign page as good evidence for how valuable even just basic infographics can be at making data easier and quicker to digest, especially with survey campaigns where this is naturally a lot of data and the copy has to work harder to pick out and summarise the key themes of the responses. The campaign earned links on sites such as Fortune and HR Dive.

3️⃣ Best Summer Travel Destinations by WalletHub

📊 560 RDs, 306 DR 50+

Another classic WalletHub index campaign here, this one ranking the best summer travel destinations in America. As is nearly always the case with WalletHub’s campaigns, the methodology is very thorough and provides great inspiration for metrics you could analyse in your own index campaigns. This one covers 41 unique metrics, which is obviously a crazy number, but they do divide them up into six categories to avoid the index being a total mindfuck to try and understand. Indexes don’t need 41 different data points but by grouping them into categories it does add a much stronger layer of validity and reliability to the final ranking.

As well as producing great data content, WalletHub also do a brilliant job of using campaigns like this to build their E-E-A-T signals, not just through topical authority but with the “Ask the Experts” section that they have on most campaigns. This is a great way of promoting your experts and their expertise while also providing extra content to the user that serves genuine value in the case of this example.

4️⃣ 20 Years Later: The Lingering Health Effects of 9/11 by Asbestos.com

📊 100 RDs, 28 DR 50+

This campaign is a great example of how brands in serious sectors can still use creativity to tackle serious topics. When you think of 9/11 deaths you don’t really think about the long-term casualties, despite the fact that according to this piece nearly 60% of deaths related to 9/11 have come following the attacks, with more people dying from toxic exposure than in the attack itself.

The post does a great job of combining data from sources such as World Trade Center Health Program with survey responses they conducted themselves. These allow them to reveal surprising facts and which of those facts shock Americans the most, as well as using survey results to compare what people think is the case vs what the reality actually is, for example 41% of Americans underestimate the number of first responders that have been diagnosed with at least one medical condition since 9/11 by at least 3x.

I would imagine that the first step for this piece of content was researching and analysing data from different datasets that they found to discover what stories the data tells them and what makes for a surprising and engaging story. I’m a huge advocate for finding data sources and analysing them before you come up with ideas as you’ll often find much stronger and more interesting stories by looking for the data before the idea, and this is a great example of how effective changing up the structure of your processes for campaigns can be.

5️⃣ Introverts Guide to Job Interviews by CashNetUSA

📊 27 RDs, 17 DR 50+

This final campaign is a very old campaign from 2017, so old in fact that it’s an infographic campaign. Infographics used to be the go to format for link building assets around a decade ago when I was first starting off in SEO, and while the format itself is probably an outdated tactic, I do think there’s still learnings that people in Digital PR can apply to their content creation strategies.

A post like this now wouldn’t be as visual, but the content itself would absolutely still work. It’s full of useful tips with a really clear structure that takes the reader on a storytelling journey with actionable advice that serves as helpful content. Formats may change, but successful content became successful for a reason, and there are always useful learnings we can take from analysing old pieces of content.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 50. 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 🙂