What it actually takes to earn a link from a publication you did not pay.
The angle
We had access to anonymised payments data from a fintech client. The instinct was to publish the average. We did not. Averages are boring. We published the outliers.
The story became a city by city ranking of where small businesses were getting paid the slowest. Local news desks love a ranking that includes their city.
The pitch
- One sentence subject line with the headline number.
- Three sentence body. The finding, the city specific number, the link to the methodology page.
- An attached chart. No PDF. No deck.
- A name and a phone number, not a no reply mailbox.
What did not work
We sent a national pitch first. It got us thirty links. Then we segmented the same data by region and pitched local desks one at a time. That second wave got us three hundred and eighty more. Lesson learned. Local angles compound.
The other thing that did not work was a follow up cadence longer than ten days. After that, replies dropped to almost zero. We stopped chasing.