January 31, 2017 at 12:54PR for startups: which sites must write about your company
Well-known marketer Andrew Chen in one of the essays wrote that there are only a few channels for scaling audience growth:
The first two channels are usually quite expensive and not suitable for every company. Virality is almost magic, it is difficult to achieve it, it must be initially laid in the essence of your product. But SEO is available to almost any project.
In order for search engines to understand that your site is good and worth sending visitors to it, you need a quality product and many good links from other sites. The times of purchased links are gradually passing, link building is becoming a much more time-consuming task, it is closely fused with PR, each link requires a creative approach.
I analyzed which sites most often write about Russian startups. The data obtained in general terms makes it clear who willingly post information about young companies and who to go first. Each project needs to make a selection of sites on its topic, but for everyone to be interested, we will analyze the general lists of startups.
For research, I took the following lists:
The number of sites from the list for which in the end it turned out to collect data is indicated in parentheses.
I collected lists of page addresses, selected domains from them, led to one format (without “www.” And “http: //”), cleaned from duplicates, for the rest I collected alexa global rank from Alexa's site. I threw out very popular sites with a global rank of less than 5,000 (among IIDF links, there were often links not to a company’s site, but to a group on social networks).
For each of the final list of domains, I collected a list of sites linking to them, exported to csv. All received files were combined and calculated how often one or another donor site is found. For the purity of the experiment, this data was collected separately for each of the four source lists and for all together.
0. All sites:
In the general list of start-up press predictably takes a leading position.
1. Webready
Here the links from the contest website and Skolkovo come onto the scene, plus quite a few links from sites that automatically generate pages about all domains. The competition has been held for a long time, 54% of sites have links from the once popular Startuppoint.
2. FRII
For all sites there is a link with FRII (thanks, cap!). If you did not participate in the accelerator, you can still get the link by writing to their blog, as SkyEng did.
3. AngelList
More English-language sites, about 22% wrote the fashionable the-village (in others, this list is not close)
4. ProductHunt
The press is also in the lead here, but the sites themselves are much younger than sites from other lists, they have few links, few SEO traffic, direct hits and Ref traffic are leading among the channels. Therefore, it is natural that in the top 20 a lot of donors like prlog and Advodka made their way, which link to almost all at least some significant sites.
What to do next?
To primarily deal with priority sites, sort the resulting list by domain rank or by attendance and break into placement. There are many ways to post, they will not fit even in one separate article. The simplest is to simply analyze how other sites were hosted and do the same.
You can find a specific place where the donor refers to the site under study in the search engine using the “site:” operator.
In no case do not engage in spamming on comments and forums, buying links or other black and gray link building techniques. Such methods, even if they work for some time, still sooner or later the effect of them comes to naught. The maximum effect is provided by high-quality links from the text of articles that people interested in your product will click on. You can enhance the effect by additionally promoting the page on which you are located.
Links to specific promoted pages will give you more benefit and traffic than links to the home page. Look in the panel of the Yandex and Google webmasters for what search queries you have a lot of views and the average position in the search results from 2 to 15.
For example, for our site Alimero page alimero.ru/bljuda-iz-lavashait is located on Google in 8th place in the search results for “pita dishes”, this is a good traffic request, if you go up to the first place, it will give many times more traffic.
It’s not enough just to insert a link into the article (as I am here). You need to write a useful article and organically enter the link so that users are interested, for example, to write that the coolest two recipes are on the link above - this is pita bread with suluguni for breakfast on the second page and juicy homemade shawarma on the fourth, I’ll eat one right now .
You can do a similar analysis for your niche. It is useful to make a selection of sites:
All this can be done even without programming skills, right in Google Spreadsheets. In order not to overload the article, I omitted the details, if interested - write in the comments, I will tell you in a separate article exactly how to use Google Spreadsheets to easily collect and process the source data.
To make it easier for you to conduct a similar analysis for your site, I have prepared a list of the 25,000 most popular sites in Russia. Write to me in PM, I will drop this list and complete lists of domains that link to each of the four groups of sites from this article.
- Paid traffic
- Direct sales
- Virality
- SEO
The first two channels are usually quite expensive and not suitable for every company. Virality is almost magic, it is difficult to achieve it, it must be initially laid in the essence of your product. But SEO is available to almost any project.
In order for search engines to understand that your site is good and worth sending visitors to it, you need a quality product and many good links from other sites. The times of purchased links are gradually passing, link building is becoming a much more time-consuming task, it is closely fused with PR, each link requires a creative approach.
I analyzed which sites most often write about Russian startups. The data obtained in general terms makes it clear who willingly post information about young companies and who to go first. Each project needs to make a selection of sites on its topic, but for everyone to be interested, we will analyze the general lists of startups.
For research, I took the following lists:
- Finalists and winners of the webready competition (46)
- Companies that have passed the full-time accelerator of IIDF (199)
- The first 400 Russian companies with AngelList to raise up to $ 3 million investment (365)
- Russian projects on product hunt (45)
The number of sites from the list for which in the end it turned out to collect data is indicated in parentheses.
I collected lists of page addresses, selected domains from them, led to one format (without “www.” And “http: //”), cleaned from duplicates, for the rest I collected alexa global rank from Alexa's site. I threw out very popular sites with a global rank of less than 5,000 (among IIDF links, there were often links not to a company’s site, but to a group on social networks).
For each of the final list of domains, I collected a list of sites linking to them, exported to csv. All received files were combined and calculated how often one or another donor site is found. For the purity of the experiment, this data was collected separately for each of the four source lists and for all together.
0. All sites:
In the general list of start-up press predictably takes a leading position.
1. Webready
Here the links from the contest website and Skolkovo come onto the scene, plus quite a few links from sites that automatically generate pages about all domains. The competition has been held for a long time, 54% of sites have links from the once popular Startuppoint.
2. FRII
For all sites there is a link with FRII (thanks, cap!). If you did not participate in the accelerator, you can still get the link by writing to their blog, as SkyEng did.
3. AngelList
More English-language sites, about 22% wrote the fashionable the-village (in others, this list is not close)
4. ProductHunt
The press is also in the lead here, but the sites themselves are much younger than sites from other lists, they have few links, few SEO traffic, direct hits and Ref traffic are leading among the channels. Therefore, it is natural that in the top 20 a lot of donors like prlog and Advodka made their way, which link to almost all at least some significant sites.
What to do next?
To primarily deal with priority sites, sort the resulting list by domain rank or by attendance and break into placement. There are many ways to post, they will not fit even in one separate article. The simplest is to simply analyze how other sites were hosted and do the same.
You can find a specific place where the donor refers to the site under study in the search engine using the “site:” operator.
In no case do not engage in spamming on comments and forums, buying links or other black and gray link building techniques. Such methods, even if they work for some time, still sooner or later the effect of them comes to naught. The maximum effect is provided by high-quality links from the text of articles that people interested in your product will click on. You can enhance the effect by additionally promoting the page on which you are located.
Links to specific promoted pages will give you more benefit and traffic than links to the home page. Look in the panel of the Yandex and Google webmasters for what search queries you have a lot of views and the average position in the search results from 2 to 15.
For example, for our site Alimero page alimero.ru/bljuda-iz-lavashait is located on Google in 8th place in the search results for “pita dishes”, this is a good traffic request, if you go up to the first place, it will give many times more traffic.
It’s not enough just to insert a link into the article (as I am here). You need to write a useful article and organically enter the link so that users are interested, for example, to write that the coolest two recipes are on the link above - this is pita bread with suluguni for breakfast on the second page and juicy homemade shawarma on the fourth, I’ll eat one right now .
You can do a similar analysis for your niche. It is useful to make a selection of sites:
- which receive a lot of ref traffic;
- young sites with a lot of SEO traffic;
- sites with a lot of SEO traffic, but few donors.
All this can be done even without programming skills, right in Google Spreadsheets. In order not to overload the article, I omitted the details, if interested - write in the comments, I will tell you in a separate article exactly how to use Google Spreadsheets to easily collect and process the source data.
To make it easier for you to conduct a similar analysis for your site, I have prepared a list of the 25,000 most popular sites in Russia. Write to me in PM, I will drop this list and complete lists of domains that link to each of the four groups of sites from this article.
