Earn the best backlinks with high-quality content and digital PR

Amanda MilliganContributorShare on TwitterAmanda Milligan is the marketing director at Fractl, a prominent growth marketing agency that's helped Fortune 500 companies and boutique businesses alike earn quality media coverage, backlinks, awareness and authority.More posts by this contributor

• We throw away 80% of our content ideas, and you should too
• What we've learned from building 40,000+ links for clients

A lot is debated in the SEO world, but nearly everyone can agree that links are and will continue to be vitally important to the health and rankability of a website.

Luckily, link building and brand awareness goals can be built into your content marketing strategy, which can be vastly elevated by combining your efforts with digital PR.

I'll walk through how creating high-quality content and pitching it correctly to top publishers can earn you the valuable backlinks you've always wanted (and if you employ this strategy on an ongoing basis, the increase in organic traffic you've always wanted, too).

Choosing the right content idea

I have to start by saying that the most important thing about being cited in news sources is that you have to be newsworthy. Now that might go without saying, but what we as marketers might consider newsworthy about our brands isn't necessarily newsworthy to a writer or to the greater public.

Content ideation tip #1: The best way to ensure your newsworthiness is to gather and analyze data. Even if the data set already exists, if it hasn't been analyzed and presented in a straightforward, applicable, easy-to-understand way, your illustration of the data could be considered new and valuable.

I'll touch on this again in a moment. But first, let's dive into the content example I'll be using throughout this piece.