How To Use Newsjacking To Boost Your Website’s Authority
Do you watch the news? If you said yes, you most likely were thinking about the evening news when events at home and around the world are broadcast on your TV. The news in this instance is the news that relates to the niche or industry you are in, and if you’re not keeping an eye on that, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to use it for SEO purposes.
The opportunity relates to a technique known as ‘Newsjacking‘ and it is a great way to gain quick and easy boosts in traffic and ranking. First, you must be aware that this is not something you set up and then forget about. This is a technique that requires you to be quick off the mark and acting without delay. For this reason, many website owners outsource this work to a freelancer.
What newsjacking involves, is keeping a sharp lookout for events, announcements, press releases, product launches, and any other type of news that relates to your niche. There are several ways this can be done.
1) Subscribe to as many email lists and newsletters within your niche as you can, albeit use an email address that you don’t use for normal email.
2) On social media follow those accounts which release news and updates within your industry.
3) Bookmark websites that tend to carry news stories, and announcements within your niche.
4) Use software or a social media monitoring tool which alerts you to news and updates.
5) Do a google search each day for the terms [your niche] + ‘news’, ‘latest’, ‘press release’, ‘announcement’, etc.
As an example, let’s say you are in the health and fitness niche and on your website, you promote various health products including supplements. One morning a news story breaks about a well-known weight-loss supplement that has suddenly been banned from sale due to numerous users having side effects. This is the sort of story you can ‘newsjack’.
The next step is to do some keyword research relating to the story, and specifically the keyword that you are going to target in relation to it. Look for variations, synonyms and longer tail keywords which are closely related to your main keyword as well.
You also need to ensure that you fully understand all the specifics about the news story in question. Go to the main source of the story and look for other news websites and see what they have written. This does two things. First, when it comes to writing content you need to ensure you have got your facts correct. Second, having seen what has already been written it allows you (or your writer) to write something which is original, which is the next part of the plan.
The content you write needs to talk about the story but approach it in a different way than has already been written. Use examples of similar events in the past, add in personal experiences, use previous quotes from some of your subscribers, or highlight what this might mean for the future of the industry. The ways you can add your own ‘spin’ to the story are endless, but however you do it, the content needs to be interesting enough that others will want to share it and link to it, once you have published it on your website.
Lastly, we come to the point where you let everyone know that your content exists. Reach out to other website owners within your niche or industry, post it on your social media accounts, comment on other social media of those you follow or send an email to your subscribers. In every case encourage people to share the content, especially as it is the very latest news, and something others might want to know about.
Every share and every backlink to your website adds to its authority. Some of those backlinks may come from high authority sites which add even more. You may also get some organic traffic from the search engines due to people searching for the story. Now isn’t that good news?