The Digital PR Newsletter #51

One Mistake That Could Be Costing You Links + Remove Paywalls

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If you’re reading this, then it means you’ve successfully made it to February, well done you!

This week I’ve got a couple of simple tips that are going to change your life*

*probably, maybe, I dunno.

🔗 One Mistake That Could Be Costing You Links

First up, let’s talk about one mistake that could be costing you links.
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I’ve mentioned in a previous newsletter that I use Buzzstream to track whether my emails get opened or not, but some tools (including Buzzstream) can also track whether a link gets clicked or not.

It can be tempting to keep this switched on because a journalist clicking on a link from your pitch to your campaign page is a strong indicator that a journalist is interested in your story (hooray!).

However, the downside of doing that outweighs any potential benefits (booo!). Here’s why.

In order to track whether your link gets clicked on, tools will wrap your original link with some tracking.

So your link might go from looking like this https://www.digitalprcourse.com/

To something like this http://74n5c4m7.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me/L0/http:%2F%2Fdigitalprcourse.com
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That means when the journalist clicks that tracking link above, sure, you’ll know that they clicked it, and it will redirect them to that clean looking url, but it also opens the possibility that the journalist will just copy and paste your link WITH the tracking link.

You can see an example of that in action on this story from a few years back here (hover your cursor over that link and you’ll see it’s got some ugly tracking on it).

And that’s a problem, because if you care about SEO (and I’m assuming you do), then those tracking links that redirect can negate some/a significant amount/maybe all? of the SEO benefits you can get from it.

Basically it’s not good. So yeah turn that thing off would be my advice. On Buzzstream you can do that by going to this section here

🔓 How to Remove Paywalls

I’m assuming that you already have paid subscriptions to support journalism right? RIGHT?

Ok good. It’s obviously not possible to have subscriptions to everything, I get that, so in those instances where you’re being blocked by a paywall, here are two tools that might help you out.

1. ​Removepaywall.com​
2. ​12ft.io​

They probably won’t work in all instances, but hey, it’s worth a try.

📢 ICYMI

Here are other things you might have missed from this week.

🎤 Digital PR Summit — tickets have now gone live for Digital PR Summit taking place in Manchester on the 8th May. Yours truly is going to be speaking (I guess they let anyone speak these days). Tickets are £127, see you there?
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📊 State of Digital PR Report — Buzzstream has released their beastly 2025 State of Digital PR Report, which you can check out here.
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🎧 Embracing Marketing Mistakes Podcast — I recently spoke about ALL the marketing mistakes I’ve made (including the time I bought 1,4000 England car flags and couldn’t sell any of them). You can check that out here​

Thanks all for this week, thanks for reading!
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All previous newsletters can be found below.

— Mark

When you’re ready there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Book a 1 on 1 call​ - let’s chat :)

2. Take my Digital PR course​ - learn all I know about earning links with digital PR