The Digital PR Newsletter #14

The lazy way to earn PR coverage (5 min set up)

Konnichiwa! I’ve just got home after an incredible trip to Japan with my girlfriend Alex.

Alex is a psychotherapist in spe, and she specialises in relationships.

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After setting up her website RelationshipTherapist.com (yes that is a great domain, thanks for noticing), she asked me how I could help her to get coverage and links to it.

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Besides testing what I said in my digital PR course made sense, Alex had never done PR before, she had never created a campaign, written a press release, or pitched a journalist (and she still hasn’t).

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Yet she’s been able to get coverage in The Huffington Post, Newsweek, Stylist and even the dating app Badoo's website.
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The best thing is this was all done through a system that I created for her that took me less than 5 minutes to setup.

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It's possibly the laziest, easiest, and most time efficient way of earning coverage.
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Journalists require commentary from people to help them write their stories. Every day they share these requests for help on Twitter, using the journorequest hashtag.

Just last week there were requests for gardeners, interior designers, property experts, and many more.

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There are constantly journorequest posts being tweeted (you can check them out in real time here)

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The problem is, there are so many being added, keeping on top of them can become a time consuming task, and most of them won't be relevant.

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But the system I set up for Alex means she gets an email alert every time a journorequest tweet is shared that IS (likely) relevant for her.

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That'll tend to be tweets that include the words dating or relationship, like this one below.

To do that, I've used a tool called IFTTT (short for If this, then that). While it's not free, it only costs me like $3 per month.

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What I've done is created an instruction which says, IF a new tweet is tweeted that includes the word relationship and #journorequest OR dating and #journorequest, then send an email to Alex.

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That means Alex gets email alerts like this

About tweets like this

She can then decide herself whether she wants to get in touch with the journalist for the story to get coverage and hopefully a link.

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Now Alex is a bit fortunate, in that there often requests for people with her expertise almost every day.

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Below are alerts from the past week.

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Some niches or industries get more journorequests than others.

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For example, I have them set up for my Christmas tree website, and every Christmas I only see a couple of journorequests come through.

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Last Christmas I got this alert

And I was able to respond to that to get coverage and a link here​

Regardless of whether you work in an industry that gets lots of requests or very few, it's still worth setting up for the industry you work in, because these opportunities are the easiest way to get coverage.

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It takes less than 5 mins to set up, and when a request does come in, you can quickly respond and hopefully secure yourself some coverage.

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It should be straight forward to set up, but if you get stuck drop me an email.

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Set up instructions

Head to Ifttt.com, and create a pro account (the cheapest paid plan should work fine), click create, then click add, search for Twitter, then select 'new search from tweet', enter in your trigger keywords, then click 'create trigger', then 'add' again, and this time search for email.

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That's all for this week. Thanks for reading!

Mark Rofe I run DigitalPRCourse.com where I teach people how to build links and gain coverage with digital PR. You can find me on Linkedin, Twitter, and Tiktok​ Need help with Digital PR? Book a consultancy call with me here​