Approach
Every placement starts with something worth publishing. That is the whole method, and everything else is logistics.
One
Outreach fails when there is nothing to write about. So the first thing we build is the thing itself, normally original analysis of public data: census figures, federal filings, court records, licensing databases, whatever the subject actually runs on.
It gets published on your site, not ours. That matters, because every link the research earns then points at an asset you own and keep, rather than at a page we control.
Two
Each pitch is written for the person receiving it and references what they have already published. Reporters can tell the difference immediately, and the ones worth reaching filter hard for it.
The audience is wider than journalists. University resource librarians, government program pages, and institutional guides all link out to material they judge useful to the people they serve, and that is how the placements on the work page happened.
You get the target list every time, before and after, so you can see exactly where your name went.
Three
We keep our own database of 16,000+ named staff writers and editors across 2,076 US newsrooms, built in-house rather than bought, with direct contacts at USA Today, The Guardian, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Seattle Times, the LA Times, the Dallas Morning News, Newsday, Newsweek, Business Insider, Fortune, WIRED, BuzzFeed, Semafor, and TechCrunch.
Every outlet is mapped to its parent network, which matters more than it sounds. Certain local papers feed Yahoo News, MSN, and USA Today automatically, so one study can be aimed at national desks and at the locals that syndicate upward on the same day. That is how a county story we placed in a single Michigan paper ended up on MSN without a second pitch.
Four
Authority is wasted if it points at a page that cannot convert. We write the long-form blog and service-page content behind it, built on search intent, keyword research, and competitor gap analysis. We have run that across a 25-client portfolio where organic traffic tripled, so the coverage and the page it lands on are doing the same job.
Five
What ran, where, and on what date. Nothing modeled, nothing projected, and no traffic estimate presented as a fact.
If a placement later disappears, that goes in the report too. The work page is built the same way.
Earned coverage moves in weeks rather than days, because an editor has to say yes. The first placements on a new campaign usually land three to six weeks in, and the pace picks up once there is published work to point at.
Anyone promising you a fixed number of placements next week is buying them on your behalf. That is the thing this practice exists to not do.
For agencies
A good share of this work runs underneath other agencies who would rather not build an off-page function in house. Your client never hears our name, the reporting arrives in a form you can hand straight on, and nothing in it will contradict an off-page policy that excludes them, because there aren't any.