The Tabloid Technique: How to Easily Land Local Links With Digital PR

For example, if you search for pages about “tax” and filter for those with links from 100+ referring domains, this list of countries where you have to pay tourist tax pops up:

My guess is that if you mapped the countries with the least and most expensive “tourist taxes” and reached out to journalists in each country, you’d get some coverage.

If you’re looking for trending topics, Google Trends and Google News are good sources.

We use lots of techniques from monitoring news sources in real time to conducting research with Google News to understand the types of topics that have been previously covered at specific times of year.

You can also use the Growth metric in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to find trending topics.

For example, let’s search for a boring topic like “food” in the UK, set the growth period to the last three months, and sort from highest to lowest. Immediately, a trending topic stands out: searches related to Christmas food in various UK supermarkets:

It doesn’t take a genius to start coming up with potential local campaigns here:

• Compare how much the average family will spend on Christmas food in different parts of the UK
• Compare the most popular Christmas foods in different parts of the UK.
• Compare how many families will be relying on food banks for Christmas dinner in different parts of the UK. (Grim topic, I know, but highlighting societal issues like this is kind of the point of journalism!)

And before you think “but Josh… I’m not that creative!”… the truth is that ChatGPT came up with all of those ideas:

My advice here is to brainstorm as many ideas as possible and get the whole team involved. Even if an idea sounds terrible, write it down. The more ideas you have, the higher the chance of there being a hit or two in there!

this campaign from the folks over at Digitaloft, for example. They pulled data from the UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) to find out which areas of the UK have the shortest wait times for driving tests, and which have the highest pass rates:

This campaign earned backlinks from 59 websites…

… including many local newspapers:

You can even merge data from multiple sources…

This is exactly what Darren Kingman did to create this campaign mapping lifetime tax paid in each US state (check the methodology section for his sources):

This campaign earned links from 188 websites:

But relying on existing data isn’t always possible. Sometimes you have to go out and source your own data.

This might sound scary, but it doesn’t have to be…

For example, Amanda Walls, Head of SEO & Digital PR Cedarwood Digital, used simple freedom of information requests to compile data for this piece on the UK’s illegal vape hotspots:

This campaign earned links from 72 referring domains and got featured in many online newspapers:

And if you’re not sure where (or how) to source data for your campaign, try asking ChatGPT:

Just make sure to publish everything you find on a journalist-friendly page with all your data, sources, methodology, and ideally some visual assets they can use.

Here are a few examples:

email lookup tool like Hunter. (It doesn’t always work, but it’s worth a shot!)

You can also plug any newspaper website into Content Explorer to find which journalists are currently the most active. Just sort the “Authors” tab by the number of pages published by the author in the last 30 days.

This can speed up discovery and ensure you’re not wasting time reaching out to journalists who no longer work for a publication or rarely write for them.

Here’s an example of the kind of email you should send, courtesy of Darren Kingman (Root Digital):

And another one from Amanda Walls (Cedarwood Digital):

Did it work for you?

Let me know. I’d love to share more examples of this technique in action.

If it didn’t work for you, let me know that too! No technique works every time (it takes a bit of luck for sure), so I’m also interested in sharing flops.

Got questions? Ping me on X or LinkedIn.