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My Weekly Marketing
Join conversations about marketing, business, and life-in-between with marketing strategist Janice Hostager and a variety of world-class entrepreneurs! We will fill you with step-by-step training, marketing strategy, and life experiences from where life and business intersect. We'd love to have you join the fun!
My Weekly Marketing
PR and SEO for Your Small Business with Chris Panteli
Getting press coverage and improving your search visibility might seem out of reach for small businesses, but it doesn’t have to be. In this episode, I’m joined by Chris Panteli of Linkify to talk about how small business owners can approach PR and SEO with simple, practical steps.
We chat about what helps your business stand out to journalists, why certain details on your website matter more than you think, and how visibility and credibility go hand in hand. If you’ve been curious about how PR fits into your marketing strategy, this one’s worth a listen.
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I'm Janice Hostager. After three decades in the marketing business and many years of being an entrepreneur, I've learned a thing or two about marketing. Join me as we talk about marketing, small business and life in between. Welcome to My Weekly Marketing.
Janice Hostager:Good PR meaning public relations is something that we'll all benefit from any small business. In case you're new to all of this, public relations refers to media coverage by a newspaper or blog or any news outlet that shines a positive light on your business. It's not paid, it's a cooperative engagement where you share your expertise with their audience. Just getting PR for your business can be powerful in any respect, but getting coverage from a tier one publication like the New York Times, USA Today or, say, NBC, can be really beneficial and, even better yet, getting backlinks from those top-tier digital articles to your website. That's what we're talking about in this episode.
Janice Hostager:Christopher Panteli is my guest today. He's an entrepreneur and digital marketing professional, brings a unique blend of traditional business experience and digital innovation to his entrepreneurial journey. He's the co-founder of Linkifi, a digital PR agency that offers ultra-premium tier-one coverage and authoritative link building, because PR is not just for getting seen by readers. It's also getting noticed by search engines and AI. He's got some great things to tell us about how to get your business noticed by the big guys, your audience and the search engines. Here's my talk with Chris. Good morning, Chris, or hello, Chris. I guess it's afternoon for you. Welcome to my Weekly Marketing, Thank you for having me.
Janice Hostager:So I read your bio in the intro, but I'd like to start out kind of showing my guests that everybody starts small, right? We all have a beginning point. So tell me your story. How did you get here?
Chris Panteli:Oh, that's a good question. So I went to university and got a degree in economics and then I immediately took over the family fish and chip shop business.
Chris Panteli:And then I immediately took over the family fish and chip shop business. So I'd always wanted my own business. But, um and I'd worked in the family shops from like 13 years old. I didn't really know what to do after uni, um, so I just went straight into that and I was doing that for about uh, 12 years, um, and then I could see the.
Chris Panteli:The fast food industry was sort of on the decline. It was becoming increasingly more competitive. You had like a healthier eating push as well. Prices were continually being battered across the board and I became a little bit disillusioned with it as a business model and as an industry. And that's when I started my first personal finance website. I thought I could leverage my academic background. So I started a personal finance blog and quickly started to get traffic and pretty quickly started making like a thousand dollars a month. So that sort of proved the viability of an online business and I was like hooked as soon as I earned the first dollar. But yeah, I was as soon as it started making significant money, I was hooked. And throughout that journey I started learning about the importance of getting free traffic from Google so SEO traffic and how valuable that was and that it was a long-term strategy Sort of half that formula was content and the other half was backlinks.
Chris Panteli:So I started trying to build backlinks myself and I came across a platform called HARO at the time, which stands for Help a Reporter Out, and that was a way that it would connect small business owners with journalists in order to provide expert commentary that they were sourcing for their articles. And if you impress the journalist and they liked your comments, they like your quotes then there's a good chance that they would quote you within their article and a really good chance that they would link to you as well. So I started doing this. I won my first link on New York Times. I think it was around Christmas. Yeah, this is brilliant.
Chris Panteli:Um, and and as we were growing, I thought, well, this is starting to get um to the point where I can start outsourcing some of the link building. So I started to try and outsource some of the like, the guest post, uh, link building aspect of it. And that's when I came across my now business partner. So, um, I found him, uh, on Upwork. Uh, he was running a marketing agency and um, I said can you do, you know, do this guest post campaign? Skyscraper campaign? It was called at the time and he started that.
Chris Panteli:And then he looked at my link profile and said, well, where have you got these links from, like New York Times, BBC, Forbes, Business Insider? And I said, oh, I've been doing this, HARO. And he said, whoa, these are like the best links you can get. Do you think you could do that for some of his clients? And I said, well, I don't see why, not as long as they give me permission to pitch as them. So we took on a few of his clients and then we took on a few more, and then a few more, and then we took on a few more and then a few more. And then, organically, it grew. I was able to leave my job and we started the Linkifi agency. That was about four years ago.
Janice Hostager:Wow, yeah, I mean that is impressive. I mean I kind of played around with HARO for a while and it's no longer in existence, of course, but you know it's hard to get picked up, um, and especially by the big names.
Janice Hostager:So you must have um some insight as to how to actually, you know, put together an email that actually gets attention and gets picked up by the reporters. Do you have any insight for that? Just in general.
Chris Panteli:Yeah, it's, it has changed a bit. Uh, it was a bit easier when I, when I was doing it. Um, okay, with the onset of ai, it's. It's really all all about, um, marrying the the two sides of the of the equation for what journalists want to see, and that is a good, strong pitch, but also, um, provable, verifiable credentials and expertise that align with the, the topic of what they're asking. So, for your audience and most people listening, um, if you are a real business owner, then then this isn't a difficult thing to do.
Chris Panteli:It becomes tricky like, a few few years ago, harrow and those sorts of platforms were getting spammed by people that owned multiple websites. Maybe they had a website in the gardening space, they had a website in the gardening space, they had a website in the CBD space and you know, they were just online marketers and they were trying to tell the journalists that they were an expert gardener and they were also an expert in CBD and it just doesn't wash. Now, like the journalists, they want to be including really verifiable, credentialed experts. But it actually has made it a lot easier to get world-class coverage, as long as you choose the queries that are suitable for you to answer and provide a good, solid piece of commentary that's unique and thoughtful, then you've got a really good shot of the journalist liking it and including it within their piece.
Janice Hostager:Would you say that that's kind of key to getting any kind of press coverage for a small business.
Janice Hostager:It's just making sure that you have...
Janice Hostager:yeah, okay,
Chris Panteli:and the way that most people fall down on this is that they just haven't got the basics in place. So you have to think that this engagement with the journalists in order to get coverage, it's a competition. There's many other people that are trying to do this because it's such a valuable thing to get, but the journalists they are working in a fast-paced environment and they want to get good commentary back and then they want to be able to quickly verify who you are. And this just goes down to super, super simple things like having a clear about button in the navigation of a website. So the journalist will come and look at your website and they want to click on the website and as soon as they can't see an about to like and they've got to go three levels deep to they'll just move on to another pitch and you'll lose that pitch. So clear, clear navigational ability within the website to find out who is behind that website. Then, when they get there, they want to be able to see the person that's pitched them.
Chris Panteli:So you're the CEO of the company. About page there's you, the CEO, your name and a picture. They also want to double verify that. So they're not just going to trust an about page. They'll want to see some social proof on social media and the most popular is LinkedIn. So it's good to have like a small LinkedIn favicon or icon on the website and then also have a well-built out LinkedIn profile with your name, your qualifications and also the name of your business. Like, I'll see so many potential clients come to us that own fantastic businesses and they're not on the about page and then you click on their LinkedIn page and there's no reference to their business on their LinkedIn page. So the journalists will just move on. But it's really simple stuff that can skyrocket your win rate when you're engaging in this sort of stuff.
Janice Hostager:And it's also important, right, because I got my start in PR years ago but it's really also important to keep in mind that you need to put yourself in their shoes and know what they are looking for in terms of quotes, in terms of what will benefit them, what make them look good too. So, like I think I never heard that about LinkedIn, though, so that's good to know, just really make sure that you're verifiable and that you are a real person and that you really are who you say you are right.
Chris Panteli:Yeah, and that's a great point, putting yourself in their shoes.
Chris Panteli:Like I remember when I first started and I was trying to like reference a blog post on my website to see if they would, if they, but that's not what they'd asked for. Like you've got to read really, really carefully what they've asked for. If they've asked for two sentences on you know, a two sentence opinion on something, or they've asked for a couple of bullet point suggestions on destinations that you could go to, or, you know, name a tool that you'd recommend one upside, one downside like, do what they've asked. Don't send them a two page PDF document when they've asked for three sentences. Don't, like shoehorn your product or your service into a pitch. Like, just do what they've asked. Know that they're writing an article for their editorial process of the publication that they work for. So if they're right, if you own a health clinic or a rehabilitation center and they've asked a health query and you are a health professional and they've asked for, you know three solid pieces of advice on X, Y and Z, then give them those three solid pieces of advice.
Chris Panteli:Don't try and promote your business, because that's not what they're looking for and they just won't engage with that.
Janice Hostager:Right, right, so your sweet spot is really using PR to get backlinks and help your search engine optimization, or SEO, right? So we'll talk about that in a minute. But since you also do PR, I want to know, like, if I'm a small business owner, what steps should I be taking when developing a PR strategy? Should I be going to sites like HARO, which isn't in existence anymore, but there are other similar ones, right? Be going to sites like HARO, which isn't in existence anymore, but there are other similar ones, right? So is that where you suggest or outreach, following people on Twitter or X, you know, just really reaching out? Or what are the steps that you take in terms of developing a strategy for getting press coverage?
Chris Panteli:Yeah, okay, so there are. We break it down into two forms inbound digital PR, which is where you are actively scouring for requests from journalists to quote experts within their articles. So HARO was the biggest provider of this service. It then switched over to Connectively. It was owned by Cision and it's now shut down. It no longer exists. The original founder of that, Peter Shankman. He's now launched a new service called SOS.
Chris Panteli:Source of Sources Works in the exact same way as HARO used to thrice daily emails Monday to Friday, lots of different publications, sourcing for different expertise, completely free. So 100% sign up there. And there's other inbound request opportunities as well. Qwoted spelled with a Q, uh, q, w. Sorry I spelled with a Q, but W, o, t, d, um. Another five free pitches per month, I think, um. And then also you have um, some paid platforms like press plugs. Editorial is another one. Another free one is press flow. So sign up to as many as you can and most of them have like a free sort of account and that's where you're going to be spending your time, setting aside a few hours a day looking for those inbound requests and seeing what suits you If you own an accountancy firm and you're a CPA or a CFP or an accountant, then look for those accountancy queries and broader finance queries.
Chris Panteli:So you want to go as broad as possible within your strict niche and that's basically inbound digital PR. You can also follow journalists across social platforms like X, Blue Sky and Threads are the three main popular. You'll want to find journalists that are writing about topics within your vertical and follow them, set alerts when they do a request. You'll see it and they'll often provide an email so you can freely reply and hopefully give some good commentary and get quoted. Then you've got outbound PR. So, rather than waiting for journalists that are actively working on a story, looking for experts to come to you with requests or or, you know, put a wide net out for requests this is where we're going to come up with a story and take that to the journalists.
Chris Panteli:Um, so it's another approach. You can sort of control the narrative a bit more, as as you're the brand, the business behind the story, but this starts sounding like quite, quite like quite a big task, as opposed to just looking for emails and replying to the ones that you like, and it can be, um, and when you start going like looking for that national coverage if you own an accountancy firm. You can't just contact journalists and say you know, hello, I'm Bob, I've got an accountancy firm. Tell everybody to make sure they do their taxes this year, because it's not interesting and it's not going to get picked up by anyone, so it's got to be newsworthy, um, which is where you have to start gathering data and finding interesting things. We that we can react to the current news cycle. So if, um, if a big firm, let's or let's say Beyonce, was in the news because she didn't file her taxes on time, then as an accountant firm, you could then react to that news and say you know, write a story about what are the consequences of not doing your taxes in time, as per what's currently happening with Beyonce. So you can see already why journalists are going to open that email, because it's going to be satisfying that current news cycle and the editorial pieces that are going out from their publication. But even that is can be a bit difficult and complicated.
Chris Panteli:So my advice for small businesses is you guys are have expert knowledge, really, really qualified and credentialed, and you just want to find that regional news within your, within your area. So normally there's going to be maybe 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, let's say, newspapers, tv channels, radio stations that have got websites within your local area or slightly broader area. Just find all the journalists that are covering topics related to the business that you're in. So if you own an accountancy firm, just find all the journalists that are covering topics related to the business that you're in. So, if you own an accountancy firm, find all the journalists within your area for those publications that are writing about accountancy and then just look for news, either national news that will affect your local area or local news which is obviously affecting the local area.
Chris Panteli:Let's say you live in a local area, you're an accountancy firm and that local jurisdiction raises local taxes. As an expert, you would just naturally have a very interesting and credible commentary to have about that and you can just send journalists an email. So there's no need to do big lists or cold outreach. You just you know this has happened in our area. I'm a professional accountant operating in this area and here on my opinions and how it's going to affect our area and what people can do and what people should think, and you know just a few paragraphs can build a list of those 30, 40 journalists and you can send off that information and you will be surprised how easy it is to get coverage, that local press coverage, for you and your business, just because of that topical relevance to the area and your expertise and the fact that your business is in that local area.
Janice Hostager:Brilliant, that sounds great. So now talk to me a little bit about backlinks and doing PR for SEO. Is there anything that needs to be done differently? Is there a difference between traditional PR and PR that's focused on SEO?
Chris Panteli:Yeah. So all it is is the end result, the deliverable. So as SEOs, we inherently know the value of the backlink for our organic search traffic. So the more high quality, strong backlinks you have pointing to your website, then the more that Google will trust your website, the more it's going to increase your rankings and send you more traffic. So if you run a local business let's say you've got a roofing company or an accountancy firm or a plumbing business or HVAC business in a local area a certain amount of your calls and your leads are going to come from people that have typed into Google plumbing company near me, right, and you're going to either be in the map pack you know, you know the little part of the top that's got the, you know the three locations in the map pack and then further down you're going to have those organic results. So Bob's Plumbing might be spot one in that local area and if someone clicks on that and they need a plumber, then you've got a good chance that they're going to call you and you're going to close that deal and do that business. Whereas if you're at spot 10, very few people are going to scroll down to the bottom of page one and almost no people are going to go to page two, um, so you want to be at the top and the way that you get the top is you make sure you've got good content, so content covering all of the services that you offer well written, some informational content as well, and then also backlinks, uh, but the thing is, people in small, local businesses. What they don't realize is realize is they are exactly what journalists want to quote, because they've got those expertise and those credentials and it's oftentimes is very PR friendly, like HVAC, plumbing, personal finance, accounting, roofing, even like legal Just all of these things are really really really always in the news. Journalists are always looking to quote those experts to provide like proof of what the content that they're writing in their story, to give it credibility. And if you can get those links, then you're going to start seeing that your rankings increase far above and beyond that of your competition.
Chris Panteli:There really isn't much you need to do differently other than just be, I suppose, disappointed if you get quoted in, let's say, realtorcom and they haven't linked. So, like, traditional PR is about coverage. How much coverage can you get? Can you drive brand and can you drive information behind a product and a service, whereas digital PR link building is about. Okay, that's great, all these people are talking about me, but I need a link. I want that link from realtorcom. I want realtorcom to say my name and then include that hyperlink so if someone clicks on it, it takes them to my website, because that is what the Google crawlers will see and that's the juice that it's passing to your site.
Janice Hostager:So there are follow links and there are no follow links, right? Can you ask them to link to your site?
Chris Panteli:Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, no, yeah, no follow, do follow, don't worry about that. That's, um, that's. Digital PR is inherently going to be a mix. Anyway, the journalists will have no control over the way the links are tagged. That will be down to the editorial policy of the publication. We used to think that no follow links didn't pass juice, but actually that's. That's really not the case. Um, we did a joint study actually uh, my agency and another chat called car roof, so we did a blind, single variable test. So we ranked five pages in lorem ipsum on Google, which is like made of gibberish language, identical pages, and we sent a no follow link to the page that was, to the page that was in spot three. Um, and that was the only thing that was different across those five pages was that single um no follow link sent to page three and within 24 hours that jumped to page one.
Chris Panteli:So that, as a single signal was was a ranking signal that Google noticed and immediately um put put, immediately put to spot one um. But also you want your link profile to look natural. So if you have got an unnatural looking link profile because, don't forget, links is something which can be gained like digital pr, link building is completely white hat. There's like two camps white, well, three camps white hat, gray hat, black hat. So gray hat, black hat, those guys are trying to gain the system because it is just a system, it's an algorithm. It can be cracked.
Chris Panteli:We know that links work. Um, we could get links many different ways pbns, niche edits, guest posts, lots of different gray hat, black hat ways to get links. Um, and we know links work, so people will get these. But google doesn't like to see you gaming the system and there is traceability to sort of all sorts of link building outside of digital PR, because digital PR is what all normal businesses engage with. It's just a completely normal thing to do and the link is a byproduct of a healthy business procedure which is engaging the media. But really we're just doing it because we want the link.
Janice Hostager:oh, that's good to know about follow and no follow. I didn't realize that, so that's awesome. What about social media? What does that play a role in? You know backlinks, and if somebody shares an article or something about you in social media, does that benefit the business...
Janice Hostager:in terms of SEO?
Chris Panteli:In terms of which way around.
Chris Panteli:So you've won the, the coverage, and then they share it on social, or just you get picked up about a story on social first.
Janice Hostager:I guess either one.
Chris Panteli:Okay so, yeah, so getting yourself quoted in a tier one publication is great because these publications will then share across their social platforms and the larger, bigger, more established publications will have sometimes fairly significant social followings, which means that that will get put out to a lot of people and they will go and read the article and then they will click the links within the article and then you will get a lot of referral traffic to your website. Google will see that referral traffic, um, they will track that in, like Chrome browsers and things like that, and they'll start seeing click data. If you've got a good website, they'll be staying on your website, so it's all positive signals being sent. So that's why it's so powerful. It's not just the inherent, inherent SEO value of the link, but it's you know, it's not a link you've bought off Fiverr and it's buried on some website that gets no traffic.
Chris Panteli:These are often very high traffic websites with also large social followings as well. So you get all of that juicy, good, good stuff in that way. And then the other way around, if you're getting, if you do, something which gets like picked up across social media, let's say you own a plumbing firm and there's been a flood in your local area, your firm decides to help out some homes that have been flooded free of charge and it all goes viral on socials because you've done this good thing, then that's great, Google still sees all these social posts and stuff, but you can then leverage that opportunity to get links. Like, journalists love to write about things that are doing well on social, so if that's already a story in of itself, uh, like, a classic PR hack is if you find a TikTok video which has gone viral, then you can just tell the journalists about that video and then either debunk or like support whatever they're talking about in the video, because journalists love that social proof of virality on social. So, yeah, it's all good stuff.
Janice Hostager:Great, great tips. So do you have some tips, I would say, for well? Actually, let me ask this first Now we talked about top-tier publications like New York Times or you know some other, really BBC, large organizations, news organizations Oftentimes on the sites such as HARO or some of the others quoted, bloggers will also request information for news stories. Obviously, they don't have the pull that a tier one organization has. Are they still worth responding to and doing, or is that a place you would start, for example, or how do you feel about that?
Chris Panteli:uh, as an agency, we we just don't engage those, but we we've got standards that we have to adhere to as part of our deliverables. So we only want tier one um for our clients, and so we just we blacklist and don't do anything that doesn't meet that um criteria. Um, however, if you, if you're able to, to validate the like authenticity of the, the site, and if it is hyper niche relevant, then I don't think that would necessarily be a bad thing. But you do need to be careful that the blog doesn't have a high outbound link profile, so it's not linking to, let's say, say, loads of casino sites which are paying it to have the links there, because then you're putting yourself in like a bad neighborhood. Um, you also want to be, you want to be careful that it's it's, it is. They're not producing an article that's like uh, that they're they're not doing for true editorial reasons. So maybe they um, they're requesting commentary and actually they're gonna. They're gonna take commentary from anyone you might be a plumber and they might have like 30 people's opinions like a plumber, an accountant, a lawyer, um a gardener and like it. Really, what they're doing is they're just then going to leverage that piece of content to then reach out to all of those people to then do something like there might be a hidden motive behind it. So you obviously don't have to worry about that with tier one like the bbc is not wasting its time doing stuff like that. That's why there's like no risk, um, but I know what you mean.
Chris Panteli:But personally I would say, don't be put off by the, the, the strength and the like, the power of of that big name. I mean, I remember when I first started I was looking for those smaller sites, thinking, you know, this is probably going to be easier, but it's just as easy. Like, if you are qualified and you are who you say you are and you're on your about page and you've got a strong social um proof on platform like LinkedIn and you take the time to write a good pitch and you've adhered to the journalist's specifications. They've asked you to give them two-paragraph opinion on something and they've said you must be a, let's say, licensed plumber. And you are a licensed plumber and you've given two paragraphs.
Chris Panteli:There is no reason whatsoever why you can't be in the BBC or realtorcom or nasdaq or the you know the biggest sites in the world. So I wouldn't be put off. Uh, just, it can take a lot of time. But just like, grind it out, set aside a bit of time each day and and you will, you will get there.
Janice Hostager:Do you, after a while, kind of build relationships with those journalists?
Chris Panteli:that's one of the nice byproducts and that's why it's quite nice to to sort of try and do this like in a community. Um, just because the journalists I mean, they're not lazy, but they everybody finds the easiest thing, sure they can do within the job they're doing, don't they? So, yeah, like, if a journalist finds, finds a source, and this source is like a really prominent plumber, and then they they're working on a series of articles in relation to plumbing, then it's much easier for them just to go back to this great source and say, hey, look, you know, I quoted you a couple of weeks ago, I'm working on a new article. Rather than having to take a resource for all new plumbers, then have to go through and check who are they, who they sell, it's much easier for them to just go back to the original plumber.
Chris Panteli:But what's nice is if you're, let's say, in a plumbing facebook group, like an industry plumbing facebook group or uh, you know, you and you're engaging with the media, like tell a couple of friends to do the same thing, um, and then you can leverage your network to sort of pass around these opportunities. The journalists don't mind that at all. Um, so if you're in a facebook group and you've been quoted on realtorcom, let's say three times, and the journalist comes back to you a fourth time and says you know, I've got another article I'm working on. You can just say look, you know, I'm on holiday for the next two weeks. I I've got a friend, he's also a plumber. He's fantastic. Would you like to take commentary from him? I can put you in touch. The journalist will almost always say yes, you're giving your friend that opportunity and then hopefully, they pay it forward the next time when they're also doing the same thing.
Janice Hostager:Brilliant, very good. So when I was in grad school, I had a public relations professor who also owned a big PR agency in the city I grew up in, and he drilled in us that no matter what you do for PR, it needs to be measurable, right? Can you explain the process of measuring the ROI for PR campaigns that maybe don't generate well? I suppose most of them would generate some backlinks, but are there tools or metrics that
Janice Hostager:you use to measure the success of a PR campaign?
Chris Panteli:Yeah, sure, so for us it's just the deliverable of the link. There is so many other like well, I say there's so many other, there's content and links, but we only do links. So we're not a full service agency, we only do digital PR links and clients that come to use us is because they're already doing their content, they know they need good links. So for us the deliverable is just the link. But in terms of the measuring, the the, the success or the quality of the campaign it comes down to, yeah, we use a third party tool called Ahrefs. Ahrefs um, which can measure the strength of a domain based on its link profile, um, inbound and outbound link profile. So, for example, bbc, I think, is like a 98, let's say, and then lesser sites go down um accordingly, uh, and then it also gives an estimated monthly organic sessions for each site. So I think the bbc is like 154 million monthly sessions, let's say. And what that means is how many times people go to that website per month as a direct result from a Google search. So they'll type something into Google and then click, and then they'll go to BBC and Ahrefs can calculate that, based on the number of keywords that that website's ranking for, and then the estimated volume of each keyword, and then from that it extrapolates how many monthly organic visitors it thinks that site's getting. So for us, a combination of those two metrics being the highest they possibly are is the the measure, the measure of a quality link. So very high DR and very high organic monthly traffic. And this essentially puts these sites into what people believe to be the essence of that part of Google's algorithm in terms of how it ranks websites.
Chris Panteli:So obviously, when Google first started, it was very difficult for them to decide. Well, look, we've got this index of sites now, so we've figured out how to crawl the internet and find websites based on words. But when we return results to users, how do we know the 10 results that we're putting on page one? How do we know that we can trust and that our users can trust the information that we're putting? It might've been like an article about something very serious like health or finance has been written by some nutcase, like we need to make sure that these 10 results that we're listing we can trust. So how are we going to measure the trust of that?
Chris Panteli:And one of the biggest signals is links. So if a website is brand new, it's got no content, no links, then it's going to have no trust in Google's eyes. So if that website writes an article about, let's say, cancer, like a very serious topic, there's no chance that Google's going to put that website in its results because it can't trust it in its results. Because it can't trust it If, over time, that website starts getting links from places like Healthline, very Well, mind the big health sites. These are the continual votes of confidence where Google's saying well, hang on a minute.
Chris Panteli:These sites, which we think are called seed sites, so like a handful of the most trusted sites in Google's eyes, if these seed sites are linking to this site, we trust these seed sites. So we must therefore, by association, begin to trust these other sites. So these seed sites are the big sites that you've heard of. So New York Times, New York Post, Forbes, the big sites that have got extreme high authority and massive amounts of Google organic traffic. Um, and that's the other way that you know whether or not you can trust the site is does it have huge amounts of organic traffic? Because google will only send free big boatloads of free organic search traffic from its search engine to sites it trusts. If it doesn't trust you, it's not going to give you traffic.
Janice Hostager:Right, yeah, oh, this is all such great stuff. Thank you so much, Chris, for filling us in about all of this. I think we get so focused on things like ads and social media, we kind of just like get into this little cul-de-sac where we're going round and round with the same things. Sometimes we leave out things as simple as this, where I mean it's not necessarily simple, but because it takes effort and it takes a strategy and it takes time, but the payoff can be tremendous, right?
Chris Panteli:yeah, well, just to leave your listeners, I would say get started, make sure you're about pages sorted and you've got linkedin and sign up to those free platforms, sos quoted, and start just trying to answer some journalists queries the benefits as well. Um, you'll get those logos, you'll be, you'll have been featured in those website with logos and you can. We call it the shark tank effect. Okay, if you've ever seen a product on shark tank, if you ever go to that website after, first thing you'll see is as featured in Shark Tank. So if you get quoted in like three, four, five websites which everyone's heard of, put that on the front page of your website because your customer conversions when they're looking for a plumber to use in your area and they click on one plumber's website and they click on your website and they go, whoa, this plumber has been featured in.
Chris Panteli:Like big websites. I've heard of instant trust signal high conversion. Also, we're seeing that large language models. So your perplexities, your Chat GPTs they are being trained on data and we think that the well, from sort of early results, that training data is much, much more leaning towards tier one trusted sources. So that's where it's getting its training data. And if you're getting your name, your brand, featured in these big publications. We're seeing clients that have worked with us for a long period of time now getting surfaced within those large language model results as well, so it's well worth doing.
Janice Hostager:That's awesome.
Janice Hostager:Where can people learn more about you?
Chris Panteli:I'm on LinkedIn Christopher Panteli, I think, or Chris Panteli P-A-N-T-E-L-I or Linkifiio, and then on YouTube as well, Linkifi.
Janice Hostager:Perfect. Thanks so much for your time, Chris. I have learned a lot, and I think my listeners have too. Thanks so much.
Chris Panteli:Oh, one more thing. They can grab a free cheat sheet if they want, where I break everything down, when to go. I've got a really good AI prompt in there which you can use to help speed things up with your format and your pitches. Loads of great information. Linkifiio slash cheat dash sheet.
Janice Hostager:Cheat dash sheet Perfect. I'll put the link to that in the show notes for today as well.
Chris Panteli:All right. Thank you so much.
Janice Hostager:Thanks, Chris.
Chris Panteli:Thanks for having me, Janice.
Janice Hostager:Alrighty. That's a wrap for today. I hope you're walking away with some fresh ideas and maybe a little boldness to reach out to reporters with some great ideas that will help you and benefit your own business. We'll share all the links we talked about in our show notes for today at myweeklymarketingcom forward slash 103. If today's episode sparked something for you, I'd love to hear about it. Share your thoughts by DMing me on Instagram at Janice Hostager Marketing. And hey, if you found this episode helpful, would you do me a favor? Share it with a friend who could use a little marketing inspiration as well, if you haven't already, make sure and hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. I've got some amazing guests and more actionable tips coming your way and, trust me, you don't wanna miss out. Thanks for joining me. See you next time. Bye for now.
