That’s an interesting one – both of these techniques have become more common in the last few years and companies in the UK that support this approach, such as Adfero and Newsvend, have shown impressive growth.
I’m assuming your goal is to build awareness of your brand through articles referencing your site through links being syndicated to press-release feeds and included within Google News. You will also get some search benefits from links back to your site from press-release sites which include your article. You can host the content directly on your site to gain increased traffic from the natural listings as well.
For any readers not familiar with this concept, I have a post from a couple of years ago that explains the concept of paid for content and gives two examples.
I have spoken to many companies that have found this approach worthwhile in terms of traffic, cost-per-click and backlinks, although usually a commitment to invest in several articles per month is required over a period of months, so it’s not really something you can trial.
When I probe, it seems that the quality of traffic may not be of as good as existing natural traffic since often the journalists will write about topics tangential to your products. However the technique is good for expanding the keyphrases you agree to target with the agency – for example through targeting long-tail phrases.
There may also be problems with the content on your site not integrating well with product content.
On balance, I think it’s worth considering, but try to work out what the cost-per-click will be in advance and compare it to other online traffic sources such as paid search or affiliates.
Finally, for completeness I should mention that there is another approach to paid-for content where you pay site owners, and in particular bloggers (or supply them with samples or other incentives) for articles with links back to your site. There are some brokers such as Pay Per Post that facilitate this. I would caution against this approach since Google takes a dim view of paid-for content or “paid conversations” as they have been called.
This post on paid links from Head of Google’s Antispam team explains Google’s viewpoint.
Dr Dave Chaffey is director and lead consultant at Market Insights Limited, an independent digital marketing consultancy, and author of internet marketing books including eMarketing eXcellence: Planning and Optimising Your Digital Marketing, co-written with PR Smith.
You can read more of Dave's Insights on digital marketing on his Right Touching Digital Marketing blog
E-mail your digital marketing questions and problems to Dave at digital@themarketer.co.uk
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