Episode 669: How to Build High-Quality Backlinks for Your Food Blog with Chris Panteli

EBT669 – Chris Panteli

Intro 00:00

Food bloggers. Hi, how are you today? Thank you so much for tuning in to the Eat Blog Talk podcast. This is the place for food bloggers to get information and inspiration to accelerate your blog’s growth, and ultimately help you to achieve your freedom. Whether that’s financial, personal, or professional. I’m Megan Porta. I have been a food blogger for 13 years, so I understand how isolating food blogging can be. I’m on a mission to motivate, inspire, and most importantly, let each and every food blogger, including you, know that you are heard and supported. 

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I hear people in our space all the time asking how can I get high quality backlinks? How can I increase my domain authority? How can I do this quickly?

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 Well, this episode provides a lot of answers for those questions, so tune in. You are going to devour the information that Chris Panteli from Linkifi shares inside this interview. It is pure gold. He shares all the details. He does not hold anything back. He tells us how to get those high quality backlinks.

[00:01:11]   

 He gives us specific sites to go to, how to communicate with journalists, how to pitch journalists, how to prepare our website so that when they come and look to scope us out, everything looks great and they want to work with us. I mean there’s just so much information. I was writing like a lunatic as he was talking and I’m going to have to go back a couple of times and re listen to everything he said.

[00:01:36]   

 I really hope it helps you to get some high quality links to your site so you can be more authoritative and established and just get that domain authority up and get all of your goals for link building met. This is episode number 669 and I hope you love it. 

[00:02:00] Sponsor

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[00:02:42] Megan Porta

Chris Panteli is the co founder of Linkifi, a digital PR link building agency that specializes in securing high quality media links for clients. His entrepreneurial journey took an unexpected turn when he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age 33, leading him to sell his family’s fish and chip shop business. Pantelli holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Economics from the University of Liverpool. In January 2022, Panteli Co founded Linkifi, which rapidly grew to generate $50,000 per month within its first year. The agency focuses on responding to PR requests from journalists on behalf of clients, helping them secure valuable online links and enhance their SEO performance.

Panteli is also a podcast host, co hosting market movers, building brands and links with Linkifi, where he shares insights on branding, SEO and link building strategies. His expertise in digital PR and link building has made him a respected voice in the e commerce and digital marketing industries. Hi Chris, welcome to Eat Blog Talk. It’s such a pleasure to have you here. How are you doing today?

[00:03:52]  Chris Panteli 

 Thank you very much, Megan. Thanks for having me. Yeah, not too bad. A bit cold, but I don’t think as cold as you, so I won’t complain.

[00:03:57]  Megan Porta 

 Yeah, I think we’re breaking records today. Our kids are actually home from school, it’s so cold, so. And I actually have to go outside later, so I’m kind of dreading it. But cozy now, right?

[00:04:11]  Chris Panteli 

 Yeah.

[00:04:11]  Megan Porta 

 Yes. Well, we’re going to talk about digital PR today and link building, which I think is super important for content creators and food bloggers. So your company is Linkifi. Correct. I’ll ask you to tell a little bit about Linkifi in just a minute, but first, do you have a fun fact to share with us?

[00:04:32]  Chris Panteli 

 Yeah, well, it’s fun-ish. I suppose. Fun. Now, looking back, I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at the ripe old age of 33, which is a very unusual thing to get and have to deal with when you’re like, you know, you’ve been through your teenage years, your drinking years and whatnot, and then all of a sudden I’m shooting up with insulin like three or four times a day.

[00:04:54]   

 But yeah, it’s all good.

[00:04:57]  Megan Porta 

 Yeah, it’s helped to shape you in good ways. I’m sure it has.

[00:05:01]  Chris Panteli 

 Oh yeah, I found the positive in it. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty quickly. It’s, it’s no issue for me. And yeah, I go to the gym every morning and all. All good.

[00:05:10]  Megan Porta 

 Awesome. You’ve adapted.

[00:05:10]  Chris Panteli 

 But it’s odd, odd to get. Normally it’s as a kid you, you get, you know, type one.

[00:05:15]  Megan Porta 

 Oh, so okay, so it’s a something you get in your. Is it like childhood or teen years or what’s more typical?

[00:05:23]  Chris Panteli 

 Yeah, I think like Children going into teenagers. I think it gets rarer and rarer to get it later, later on.

[00:05:30]  Megan Porta 

 Oh wow. So you’re an anomaly in the best way. You’re unique. Well, thanks for sharing. And then as I alluded to, Linkifi is something that you know, you’re bringing to the table today. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about Linkifi.

[00:05:46]  Chris Panteli 

 Yeah, sure. So we’re a digital PR link building agency with an SEO focus. So for us the, the key like the link from editorially earned media coverage. So rather than doing guest blog exchanges, you know, three way link swaps or niche edits or guest posts from marketplaces, what we do for our clients or what I teach people to do themselves is to earn coverage on tier one media sites.

[00:06:18]   

 So high DA, high trafficked, highly trusted websites and earn that coverage. So at zero exchange of payment, just engaging with journalists. And there’s a number of ways you can do that in order to get your website featured and quoted and then have that link going back to your website in order to drive primarily SEO authority building and more organic traffic.

[00:06:42]   

 But as we’ve seen in recent months, the benefits are far above and beyond that. So it helps with getting into LLMs. So if you’re searching on perplexity, chatgpt, then I think it’s becoming, it’s a brand building exercise that’s going to become even more prevalent and important as time goes on.

[00:07:03]  Megan Porta 

 Yeah, we know this. Food bloggers know that getting those links are so important right now. And I think for newer sites it’s really hard to get that link building going. If you have an older site, it’s kind of like that momentum is flowing but it is super important. And I’m curious to hear what other benefits. So you mentioned obviously like SEO authority and all of that we already know about and then did you say so getting that, is it like the feature for AI, does it help that as well, the overview?

[00:07:37]  Chris Panteli 

 Yeah. So yeah, so primarily it’s the, it’s you getting these, these links from huge trusted sites. So what like Google views is like those seed sites that it will never devalue. So you think like the New York Times or allrecipes.com those, those hugely authoritative sites. If you, if you’re able to get them to link to your site, then that is like an algorithmic like handshake or nod of the head to your site from this bigger site which passes like some theoretical link juice from, from that authoritative site back to your site.

[00:08:11]   

 So that’s then going to lift the overall domain authority of your, of your website. And over time the more of these links that you build and the more good content that you also produce alongside the building of those links, then the more that your, all of your keywords will rise in rank rankings and the theoretically the more organic traffic you should get to your pages.

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 But outside of that you also get the benefit that you, you’re on big websites that drive tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands and millions of visits. And especially if you’re in tier one media, these guys, they push their, their content on social which drives referral traffic to your website so you can reach a new audience.

[00:08:53]   

 It also gives you the ability to tell your audience where else you’ve been featured. So if you’re a food blog and you’ve been featured in allrecipes.com or foodandwine.com and you can have those three or four logos on your homepage, it’s like a press badge, then that first of all instills trust with your readership.

[00:09:10]   

 If you’re selling digital products or you know, courses, anything like that, then telling your audience that, look, you can trust me, you know, I’ve been featured in these huge websites that you’ve heard of and then also from like a non algorithmic Google perspective. So at some point a human quality rate will hit your website and come and do an actual manual inspection on your site.

[00:09:31]   

 As you know, recently we had a lot of like manual de indexations of websites because of like quality issues or concerns. So somebody will come and look at the site and if they can see that you’ve been featured in allrecipes.com or foodandwine.com and they can quickly check that you have, you’re not lying, then that’s another trust signal.

[00:09:51]   

 And then we’re also seeing that the large language models, so OpenAI the Deep seek now the new Chinese model Perplexity Claude all of these large language models that they’re being trained on huge amounts of data and in order for these models to produce content that can be trusted then that they’re being trained on data that they can trust.

[00:10:15]   

 Which is often we’re seeing coming from like tier one sites. So the more you can get yourself, your brand, your, your narrative within mainstream media, the more chance you have of injecting that into an LLM. So if somebody’s looking for a pot pie recipe or something, if you’re, if you’ve got a good pot pie recipe that’s ranking in Google and then you’re also being Talked about in Tier 1 media, then you know, the large language models, they’ve got to put spit information out as Google’s got to put, you know, 10 results on, on the page one. So the benefits are multifaceted.

[00:10:49]  Megan Porta 

 Yeah, no, that was a great explanation. I’ve never heard anyone say it quite like that. So thank you. And then for those media placement. So you talked about all recipes, did you say food and wine? I think. And then I see in your notes you have other, you know, like well known publications like the Guardian, Forbes, New York Times.

[00:11:06]   

 How do we get our links in there without paying for them?

[00:11:11]  Chris Panteli 

 Okay, great question. So we, we look at digital PR in two buckets. So outbound and inbound. Outbound is where we come up with the stories or you come up with a story that’s going to resonate with the current news cycle. You might include some data, some expert advice, something that’s going to react to a current event in the news.

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 So let’s say Beyonce was photographed coming out of the movie theater eating a plate of nachos. That might be a great way to put a quick story together where as a food expert you give your five tips to make the perfect nacho dish. And then because that’s in the news, nachos is trending on social.

[00:11:55]   

 Because Beyonce’s been snapped eating nachos. You’ve got a good chance of the all of the mainstream publications, well, the ones that talk about food at least would be interested in running that because they know it’s going to do well because of reacting to something that’s happening in the news that is all quite involved and not the easiest way to get started.

[00:12:15]   

 So the other fantastic way is from inbound requests. So rather than us dictating the narrative and taking the stories to the journalists, instead we’re going to wait for journalists that are proactively looking for X experts to include in their articles that they’re existing, currently working on and looking to quote someone in. So there are many places where you can find these requests.

[00:12:40]   

 We call them like expert quote requests. The biggest sort of platform that connected journalists with experts was Haro or help a reporter out that was originally owned by a guy called Peter Shankman. Haro turned into connectively. There was loads of drama. He got bought out by like private equity and just went but so anyway, anyway, Peter’s now launched a new service called SOS, Source of sources.

[00:13:04]   

 And there is a plethora of other places as well. So Quoted, I think gives you five free pitches per month and multiple free opportunities as well. You can also use a platform called Press Flow. And then you can also use a low cost option is Editorial. So you’re paying for access to the queries.

[00:13:23]   

 Press Plugs is another good option. And then Response Source, bit more expensive but. But again they’re really, really good platforms that are aggregating these journalist requests. So that might be a food writer for Allrecipes.com is right. Working on an article about whether or not you should keep butter in a fridge and they’re looking for an expert to give their opinion or a comment.

[00:13:46]   

 And you can reply to that query. And if the journalist likes your comments, then you’ve got a good chance that they’ll include your comments within the article. And then fingers crossed, the way that they would attribute that quote is by naming you, your position and your website. And the last thing that you’re hoping for is that they link to your website.

[00:14:05]   

 So it’s a bone of contention because journalists aren’t SEOs. They don’t really care about like links. So they’ll often forget or they won’t bother or like that just didn’t do it. But if you email them and say, oh, you didn’t link, is there any way you could. They’d be like, oh yeah, sure.

[00:14:21]   

 And like it’s done within a minute. Other times, you know, it’s editorially like mandated by the publication that they don’t link. Afraid. Yeah. Which can be annoying.

[00:14:30]  Megan Porta 

 Yeah.

[00:14:31]  Chris Panteli 

 Especially if you do a really good quote. But yeah. So and you can also follow journalists, your favorite food journalists, let’s say, on social. So Blue sky is becoming very popular. X and then Threads as well. So I’d say these are the three main places and they will use hashtag journo request. So hashtag and then journo request.

[00:14:51]   

 And they’ll, they’ll often source on those platforms just for free. Those social media platforms as well as the. All the other platforms as well.

[00:15:00]  Megan Porta 

 Oh wow, that’s so much information. So the SOS and the other platforms you mentioned, they operate much like Haro. Haro did. Okay. So you get an email, you get on an email list. I think that’s how Haro worked. Right?

[00:15:15]  Chris Panteli 

 Yeah, that’s. SOS is almost identical.

[00:15:19]  Megan Porta 

 Okay.

[00:15:19]  Chris Panteli 

 And then press flow, I think is email, email based as well. Quoted has got like a dashboard which you log into, so it’s free to, to sign up and then you create a profile on there and then you can pitch five like normal queries or premium queries per month. But they also have like lots of daily free opportunities as well.

[00:15:42]   

 So I’m not quite sure how they do that, but yeah. And then anything that you see a journalist posting on social media is just, you know, they’ll often they’ll include their email in their social post and you can just email them directly.

[00:15:53]  Megan Porta 

 Yeah. Oh, that’s great. Yeah. Staying on top of that I think is so important, especially if you need those backlinks and want to increase your domain authority. Is there any way to kind of set your website up for success, do you think? So that I don’t know journalists or anyone else looking to include your links is like, oh yeah, this is a prime place to put a link.

[00:16:16]  Chris Panteli 

 Yeah, absolutely. So, and this has changed quite dramatically, I would say, in the past 18 months. And it’s because of the onset of AI. So journalists and I think this is one of the reasons that Haro probably shut down is they try to combat the AI spam by moving to like a dashboard which was connectively and then they turned to like a low cost pay to play model and then I think they just gave up.

[00:16:43]   

 So I think this is probably reduced a little bit now because it’s, it almost had like the opposite effect. So people were sending pitches with like no thought, just one click in, one click out. ChatGPT crap. And you know, you send 100 pitches, maybe you’re gonna land one or two links, maybe. So it was almost worth the zero effort for that small reward.

[00:17:05]   

 And now journalists are very, very cottoned onto this AI spam. They can spot it, as I’m sure you can as well, you know. Yeah, all of these like, it’s a game changer. These like, like sentences, you can spot the structure, you can just smell it from a mile off. So journalists are really wise to it.

[00:17:22]   

 But what they’re doing now much, much more religiously than, than they probably did, you know, two years ago, is check who’s pitched them. And that’s not going to be like a CIA level, sort of investigate your whole backstory and family. But they will do what the AI spammers fail to take the time and effort to do.

 A nice looking website to begin with. Okay. So it needs to look like a real website, which the food blogging industry is pretty damn good at. So I think most people have that covered. But you’ve got to have a good about page and that about page has got to be clearly visible in the navigation.

[00:18:05]   

 So if a journalist gets two good pitches, they’re going to go and check if the first one they click on, they look at the site and they can’t easily see where to click about. They’re just going to go and check the other one. So clear about page link in the navigation. The about page link needs to then can be laid out or formatted in any way that you want, but it’s either got to have a secondary link to the person behind that website or have that really visible somewhere on that about page so that the journalist can quickly verify.

[00:18:34]   

 Okay, I’ve been pitched by Megan Porta. I’ve clicked on a website. Okay, there’s the about page. Am I seeing who this Megan Porta is? Or have I got to go through six more layers of links in order to see who is. So that’s really, really important. Really quickly get to who you are and make it visible with a good profile picture.

[00:18:53]   

 Ideally, if you can have more than one image as well, because that gives a cursory effort for the journalist to verify that it’s not like an AI image persona. So it, I mean it’s, it’s not like foolproof on the journalist side, but it’s almost just, it’s like more than enough to satisfy their, okay, oh, there’s like a picture of her with a dog and there’s a picture of her like a completely different set of clothes on and she did that.

[00:19:19]   

 It’s like, it’s enough to instantly make them stop digging, as it were. Not that any of us are trying to pretend to be, you know.

[00:19:26]  Megan Porta 

 No, I get it. Yeah.

[00:19:28]  Chris Panteli 

 Then you want to make sure that you, your about page or your bio is as highly reflective of your niche, relevant credentials, experiences, awards, accolades as possible. And this unfortunately is something which is becoming more difficult to do. So if you are just a food enthusiast who likes to cook, even if you’ve got a very successful website, you will find that most inbound food queries are looking for that level of verifiable credentials.

[00:20:01]   

 So that would be something like a chef, or even if you were previously trained as a chef or you know, a professional cook, food scientist, food expert. And then you can, you can get some really, really nice opportunities if you go even more qualified.

[00:20:18]  Megan Porta 

 What about cookbook author, would that be a credential?

[00:20:21]  Chris Panteli 

 Yeah, I’d say the other, the other thing which can negate that clear credential is everything else, everything outside of that. So awards, accolades, appearances and then wider web visibility. So you need to have a LinkedIn profile. Now, LinkedIn, there are a few caveats to that as well, which is outside of the niche.

[00:20:42]   

 So LinkedIn is like your default where the Journalists are going to go, okay, I’ve been pitched by this person. Have they got a LinkedIn profile? And then that LinkedIn profile needs connections, activity needs to look real and look like it was created yesterday. The few niches that fall outside of that are niches like food, where LinkedIn isn’t sort of the be all and end all.

[00:21:02]   

 Like there are actual more important social platforms for food bloggers. So if you’ve got a very high, highly visible Instagram social profile as well, and then again, if you’ve done things like authored a cookbook, you can also include, include that as well on the about page. And then also the, your response to the journalist, your name, you want your website.

[00:21:23]   

 And then you can also link to the journalist, like your book on Amazon, let’s say, and everything else. So you’ve got to do all of that. And it’s not difficult because most of you have got all the pieces. It’s just make sure you put it together in a coherent way.

[00:21:39]  Megan Porta 

 And I think we are mostly on top of that. The about page has been talked about a lot in our space from SEO experts and other experts. So that is something that we are collectively working on. But if we reach out to a journalist, so what exactly do we need? Is there anything that you haven’t mentioned yet that we would need to include in a pitch that would push it over the edge and just make them like, okay, yes, this is a person that I want to look into.

[00:22:08]  Chris Panteli 

 Yeah. So really, so who you are, your website address so that they can click on the website and then have that about page link visible in the navigation. Then in that opening paragraph, state who you are and what qualifications you’ve got. So if you are, if you aren’t a qualified chef or an ex chef or a food scientist, so like something which is an actual qualification, then really beef up what it is that you are.

[00:22:39]   

 So if you are, I mean you should all be food experts at a minimum. So that’s like, yeah, the baseline and then anything that you can put on top of that. So you’d say, you know, I’m Megan Porter, I’m a food expert, I’m third time county champion barbecue grill master and I’ve written three award winning books on Amazon.

[00:23:00]   

 Okay. So I don’t lie, but beef it up as much as possible so that instantly the journalist goes, okay, this person’s good. And then have that reflective across everything that you’re doing. So when they go to your social handle or they go to the website, the about page, I mean you don’t have to have it verbatim, you know, on, on each profile bio.

[00:23:22]   

 But don’t be, you know, don’t also be on your social media handle like, I don’t know, mommy and parenting expert. Because then they’ll be like, I thought this person was like a cook. Like, you’ve got to have that clear delineation between that. If you’re going to be a food expert, then you’ve got to be positioned as a food expert in everything that’s going out to the media.

[00:23:46]  Megan Porta 

 Yeah. And the more platforms, the better, I assume. So YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, all the places and just being very consistent with who you are on all of those platforms.

[00:23:59]  Chris Panteli 

 Yeah. And video is great as well because obviously they can just quickly click on YouTube.

[00:24:03]  Megan Porta 

 Right.

[00:24:04]  Chris Panteli 

 They can see the person. So yeah, they love that.

[00:24:06]  Megan Porta 

 Right. And then how much pitching should we be doing? Is this something do you think we should be doing, like checking in once a week or how often.

[00:24:16]  Chris Panteli 

 I got a cheat sheet, which I can say at the end of the podcast if you want. And on there I talk about getting your first five links. I teach you how to get your first big five media links. So what I would do, first of all, have you got any big links?

[00:24:28]   

 Like if you’re a really, really well established food site and you’ve got like. I mean, I would always do digital PR link building, but if you’re personally going to take the time to do it and you’ve already got a huge authority and you’ve got links from every website you can imagine, then, then I don’t imagine it would be worth your time to do it on your own.

[00:24:48]   

 I would definitely outsource at that point because you’re obviously doing great and more links means you can keep that traffic going. If you’re an individual who wants to either to do this, then first of all look at the big links that you’ve got. Maybe you haven’t got any, maybe you have won some links historically, previously.

[00:25:05]   

 But I would look at your competitors and look at the ones that have got press badges. So the ones that have got that featured in on the, the front page of their website. So that’s. First of all that’s going to tell you that those links have almost certainly been one from inbound PR requests or outbound, but more, more than likely inbound, which means that if your competitors have got them then, then so can you.

[00:25:31]   

 So I would, then you could use a combination of the cheat sheet which I give you, which has got some like domains on there which are fantastic, which you’re always sourcing on on like broad topics. And then you can also look at the ones that your competitors have got. And you can also just take a look at let’s say each email on the S.O.S.

[00:25:49]   

 they come out twice a day, I think three times a day. And just have a look at what publications are sourcing. If you see food and wine on there, if you see allrecipes.com if you see foodinstitute.com forbes let’s say, or let’s say go banking rates asking for seasonal recipes or best places to buy ingredients or whatnot. You can get a sense of those first 2, 3, 4, 5 links that you that you could win because they’re continually being sourced for. Then I would allocate either a period of time per day each day or a block of time a couple of days to sit down and look through the queries and find something which is hyper relevant to you.

[00:26:32]   

 So perfect publication looking for an expert that matches your credentials. So if they say they are looking for a qualified and certified food scientist and you’re not a qualified and certified food scientist, don’t waste your time and do it because there will be qualified and certified food scientists that answer that journalist and they’re definitely going to link to them rather than you because that’s what they asked for.

[00:26:56]   

 If they say I’m looking for food experts or food scientists, then you’re a food expert. So that’s one you could do. Sit down, put the time in to do it and give it time as well. Because you may not win your first one and you may feel like you’re bashing your head against the wall.

[00:27:13]   

 But I promise if you’ve got everything else set up like I said, and you give it, you know, a couple of months, I think you’d at least get that first bite where a journalist replies to you and says, you know, I really enjoyed your comments. I’m going to try and include them in my next article or thank you so much for replying.

[00:27:29]   

 Unfortunately I’m not going to use it this time, but I’ keep you on my on my radar let’s say. So you’ll definitely get I think some validation in a within a couple of months.

[00:27:39]  Sponsor 

 Hey there food bloggers. Check out our new finance supercut. This is a bonus 15 minute episode capturing highlights from finance episodes that we have recorded recently on the podcast. Head to eatblogtalk.com/financesupercut to listen today. 

[00:27:52]  Megan Porta

Do we follow up if we haven’t heard back from a pitch. Is that appropriate?

[00:28:03]  Chris Panteli 

 Not if you haven’t heard from them. There’s no point. They’re so busy and they don’t reply to you even if you want. So you need to be tracking this stuff, which I can tell you how to do. But that is a nice surprise when you are tracking and then you get like an alert, let’s say.

[00:28:16]   

 Or you’re on your own Google Discover and you see an article and you click in it and you’re like, oh my God, I’ve just been quoted in this article, here I am. But yeah, they’ll rarely message you to say either. Thank you. They’ll ready message to say I’m going to use your comments, look out for the article.

[00:28:33]   

 And they’ll almost never message you to say here is the article with your quotes in. So.

[00:28:38]  Megan Porta 

 Oh wow, okay. So it’ll be a surprise. So talk about tracking a little bit.

[00:28:42]  Chris Panteli 

 Yeah, so you most, you most definitely want to track because like I said before earlier on, those unlinked mentions are the scourge of this whole process. Especially when it’s on like a site which you’re dying to get, like allrecipes.com let’s say they’ve included your recipe, they’ve included a picture of you as well holding the thing that you’ve cooked.

[00:29:04]   

 Maybe the journalist asked for that and then you’re like, oh my God. I’m like, maybe the journalist has told you you’re going to be in it and you think oh my God, I’m so excited. And like they then the journalist doesn’t email you and then all of a sudden you get an alert and you look and you think, oh my God, they haven’t linked to me.

[00:29:18]   

 They used my picture and half the articles, the stuff that I said and you’re like shaking. So, so you want to be tracking because you first of all, you don’t want to miss the opportunity to go back and sort of ask them to put it in. Yeah. So tracking Google Alerts and Talk Walker Alerts, both free, which is great.

[00:29:36]   

 And you want to put in as the alerts your name with exclamation marks around. So Megan Space Porter. Then you want your business name. So if your website is Riverside, then you want river open quotation marks, river space side close quotation marks. And then you want another version of that, which is open quotation marks, Riverside, all one word close quotation marks.

[00:30:03]   

 So you don’t know how the journalist is going to quote. They may misquote. If your business is, let’s say three Three words. The crazy cook dot com, let’s say then you’ll want to do three versions. You want the space crazy space cook, open quotation, close quotation. And you want it the crazy space cook.

[00:30:21]   

 And just do all the variations because you don’t know how the journalist is going to do it. And the, the alerts will often miss stuff. So the alerts will only pick it up once it’s indexed, which it will get indexed because we’re publishing tier one sites here. But it can sort of miss stuff if it gets indexed after the 24 hour cycle or blah blah, blah.

[00:30:39]   

 So add all those variations into Google Alerts, get it to check in real time. I think the option is check include everything. Basically just include everything. And every time you get an alert just look through everything and then Talk Walker alerts as well works the same way. And then I would also recommend to do a manual Google search.

[00:30:59]   

 And I would do that in house. We do that like daily, twice daily, weekly, monthly. But I would do that at least, at least weekly. So that’s where you go into Google. And you can also add Bing as well because sometimes bingo picks stuff up that Google doesn’t. And then my other tip as well.

[00:31:16]   

 So for the manual search you just go to the browser on the right. There’s search tools, drop that down to past 24 hours or past week or this week or this month. You can also do a date range as well. And yeah, do search all of those variations with those open closed quotation marks.

[00:31:33]   

 And then the final thing is if you see an alert and you see like a site that looks really weird, let’s say it’s got like loads of Russian symbols and stuff but you can see your name, Megan Porter is like in the text. And then like you click in it, but it still looks really weird.

[00:31:46]   

 And this picture of food, and it looks like the picture of some food that you did do a quote about like three months ago and you can’t remember, like dive into those weird articles because sometimes for whatever reason all of your alerts and your check in hasn’t picked up that, that allrecipes.com article.

[00:32:07]   

 But all of these weird sites, they just scrape the main sites and for some reason these weird sites will get indexed with like a weird translated version of this article that you’re actually in. So if you could, if you find that then sort of translate it, dig into the HTML code, just see if you can figure out where this has been taken from.

[00:32:27]   

 And often you will see like all recipes, maybe in the top or maybe you’ll see if you translate it, the title’s really obvious, like, I don’t know, best pumpkin recipes this winter. And then you can like Google that and then maybe you’ll find the article. So yeah, really be very investigative when you’re trying to hunt down your potential links.

[00:32:50]  Megan Porta 

 I would never think to sort through something weird like that, but I see what you’re saying. You can maybe find some clues buried in there.

[00:32:59]  Chris Panteli 

 Yeah. And then obviously if you find it and there’s no link, that’s when you want to then initiate your unlinked mention conversion strategy. So you’ve gone to all that time and effort you’ve done, you’ve crafted a brilliant pitch. Maybe you’ve exchanged multiple emails with the journalists. They asked a follow up question, they asked if you could provide a photo.

[00:33:18]   

 You’ve gone through all of these hoops. They’ve, they’ve put your quotes into their article and they haven’t given you a link. First thing to do there, is there an existing email thread or exchange with that journalist? That’s the most obvious place to go. If there is, go and tack on another email. Be super polite, don’t threaten because they do not respond well to threats.

[00:33:42]   

 We’ve tried that. Hey, you used, you know, you used my image. It’s copyright. You have to link to me. They’ll either just ignore you or they’ll.

[00:33:50]  Megan Porta 

 Just say, that’d be nice. Yeah, yeah.

[00:33:51]  Chris Panteli 

 So be really nice and just say, hey, look, look, I’m really grateful. This article’s fantastic. I noticed that you did use my picture. I’m just wondering, you know, is there any way you could also include a link for by way of attribution, like word it like that. If you struggle to word stuff that’s a bit uncomfortable to ask for, then utilize AI just to help you because it really doesn’t matter at that point.

[00:34:14]   

 Yeah, say write in a friendly way. I’m a bit embarrassed to ask for a link, but I really want a link. So AI, can you give me a response to this email? AI will be your best friend there. If you can’t, if you haven’t got an existing email thread because some of these response platforms are like anonymized the email so you don’t actually have the journalist.

[00:34:34]   

 Direct email goes through like an anonymization process. The first thing to do is click on the journalist’s name on the article and see if there’s an email address. Often there is, often there isn’t. If there isn’t, then search the journalist’s name in Google. 50% of the time they are freelancer writers which means that they are writing for multiple publications and they’ll have a freelance writing webpage and they’ll have an email address.

[00:34:59]   

 Outside of that you can try the like the free email finder tools like Hunter IO or Apollo, Muck Rack. That’s a paid platform but sometimes it lets you see the email for free. Rocket Reach is another good free one. Five monthly searches. It’s a really good Chrome extension called Lusha which gives you loads of free searches per month that interconnects with LinkedIn.

[00:35:21]   

 So it’s often really easy to find a journalist LinkedIn because they’re prevalent on LinkedIn. And then if you just turn on the Chrome extension for Lusha it lets you like reload that journalist’s LinkedIn page and the little pop up will come up and it will. It’s really good at finding emails that way.

[00:35:37]   

 So use all of those tools to your sort of advantage to try and track them down and then again if you get the email, still be nice to them. So I’ve just spent like a month trying to find your email address.

[00:35:49]  Megan Porta 

 Oh, and then you’re going to be a jerk. Yeah, no, this is gold, Chris. These, I mean seriously, this is all gold. So thank you for sharing all of this. I can see people listening to this over and over and over, just trying to get all those little details. You mentioned AI. Do you think it’s okay to use AI to create a pitch in the first place?

[00:36:10]  Chris Panteli 

 I’m not going to say to not use AI because we use AI and the, the way of the, the world is going is AI but, but you’ve got to use it in a way that is adding to your pitch process as opposed to like being your pitch process. So for it varies from sort of niche to niche for food experts as I’m sure most of your community are the way that I would do it and I teach this as well and it’s a brilliant hack that saves so much time is because you’ve already got a lot of the knowledge yourself for, for any knowledge gap apps use AI as quick research.

[00:36:44]   

 So if they’re, if the journalist is asking for like a, a recipe let’s say or like a replacement ingredient tip and you know you’ve got a couple of ideas but you’re not quite sure then like 100 use AI for clarification, fact checking, even some like original ideas that you can interject with your own ideas.

[00:37:01]   

 Once you’ve done all of that then I 100% think that you should just have your thoughts and your answers in your mind with any like additional notes that you need and just speak into a voice note on your phone and speak with complete autonomy and freedom. Don’t worry about your ums and ahs.

[00:37:23]   

 Just make sure you maintain your own like linguistic flurry, your own tone of voice, interesting turns of phrase and put your answer together as like a huge block of text. Then a really simple prompt, you just copy and paste all of that underneath a prompt in ChatGPT stating to maintain your linguistic tone and flurry your style any interesting turns of phrase, but please correct for spelling, grammar, logic and flow.

[00:37:56]   

 And then AI will, will rework that so it completely makes sense and looks great. But it’s gonna pass all the AI detection tools because it is almost exactly your words and the way that you speak. But it’s, it’s taking you. No, I mean for most people it’s a lot easier just to speak out ideas, throw in the odd interesting sentence or word and then AI will just turn it in and boom, you can send in. The journalist is going to love it.

[00:38:24]  Megan Porta 

 Wow, that’s a great tip too. Thank you. Because yeah, you can recognize those AI generated emails pretty quickly. Like oh, that, that was not a person writing that. So it is good to have a little human in there. You have to see mistakes that people make when it comes to trying to link build. Do you have any that you want to mention for pitching journalists?

[00:38:45]  Chris Panteli 

It’s not reading the, the journalist question. So we, we had a course, so we interviewed a couple of the big journalists that were sourcing on HARO as part of our like masterclass and then as a PR agency as well. So we’re like doing outbound will often source for expertise in the pieces that we’re doing for clients where we might need additional expertise.

[00:39:08]   

 So we’ve seen it on the other side as well. And the biggest mistake is just people just don’t read the journalist questions or requirements. So it’s like, it’s like being at school. I remember when I was at school and like we had this one teacher who used to tell us the, the exams is all the, the clues, everything is in the question.

[00:39:27]   

 They are asking you for what you want want. You’ve just got to give it them. As soon as you go outside of that, that’s when you get into trouble. And that’s the same with, you know, if the journalist is asking for three sentences explaining the point of using an onion. If you send them three paragraphs, you haven’t done what they’ve asked and you’re going to annoy them and you waste their time.

[00:39:48]   

 Likewise, if they ask for, you know, a barbecue expert from the southern states and you’re an Englishman from, you know, wet old England, then I haven’t done what they’ve asked. So not only have you like wasted your time, your time, their time, you’ve also potentially like flagged yourself to them and missed what could have been like the next day’s perfect opportunity for you, looking for an Englishman who, who does digital PR to comment on X, Y and Z that might have been coming the next day.

[00:40:23]   

 And I’ve gone and piss them off by saying that, follow the instructions, do what they ask and don’t use one click chat GPT. Just, just, they can smell it, like you said with those emails that you just know. Yeah, delete, delete, delete. So that’s what they’re doing as well.

[00:40:40]  Megan Porta 

 Okay. Any other mistakes we should avoid?

[00:40:43]  Chris Panteli 

 Terms of link building this way? This sort of link building?

[00:40:46]  Megan Porta 

 Yeah.

[00:40:47]  Chris Panteli 

 Not seeing the opportunities. So you do need to be very mindful of journalist specific requirements. You also need to be conscious that not all journalists are the same and some articles will be much broader in scope in terms of what they’re looking for, the expertise, the people they’re prepared to include. So as a food blogger, I, and if I was, you know, doing this and I’d built those sort of like foundational press links, like I’d gone after all recipes or whatnot, but I wouldn’t limit myself to that.

[00:41:21]   

 So if, if there was a journalist writing for bestlifeonline.com let’s say, or GQ magazine or ELLE.com and they were doing like a roundup piece or ideas for Christmas parties for children or stay at home mom quick hacks and stuff, you can really see there how you can, how you can, can be those things as well, which is sort of a step away from food.

[00:41:48]   

 But how you can 100, like get food or something tangentially related to food into that, like stay at home hacks, fridge hacks, time saving hacks, even like all of these sort of broader topical things are there for you as long as you don’t take the mick and like you, you don’t say something which isn’t.

[00:42:09]   

 So you’ll see loads of good stuff around Christmas, Halloween and especially if you’re like a parent as well. There, there will be publications like parents.com which is a huge, huge website where they’ll be looking for like much broader stuff. But you have the opportunity to answer that and win like amazing coverage. So yeah, don’t completely pigeonhole you yourself for fear of all the things I said before about like annoying them.

[00:42:34]   

 But, but I think it’s really obvious from those inbound requests like the journalists are pretty blatant now if they’re writing for allrecipes.com and they want a food scientist and they say I want a food scientist, they’ll put, don’t pitch me if you’re not a food scientist. They sort of be that blunt. Whereas if they’re doing, you know, I’m doing a piece about how, how parents can, can get the kids active before dinner time, then, you know, that’s.

[00:42:57]   

 If that’s all they’ve asked, then why not, why not go for that?

[00:43:00]  Megan Porta 

 Yeah. Yeah, that’s great. If somebody is like, yes, I definitely want to dig into PR more in 2025 and beyond. Obviously all the sites that you talked about so SOS, Qwoted, you know, finding the journalist that way. Is there anything else we should know about just strategizing with this if we want to kind of take things on ourselves and really prioritize it.

[00:43:25]  Chris Panteli 

 I would start with the, the three places that I said. I would also make sure that your email system is good. So this is, this is going to be more of an issue as time goes on. It’s already an issue and I am by no means an expert in this and I hate it.

[00:43:45]   

 But you can check your email deliverability using free tools like mxtools.com this is going to check things like your DKIM and your DMARC records. It’s going to tell you, I think there’s a, there’s a couple of other free tests you can do which will like simulate a Gmail box and show you which top you do want to stimulate your, your Gmail account.

[00:44:06]   

 Show you what tab your email. Yeah. So this is something which you should really be aware of and you don’t want to pitch for like six months only to find that every email that you’ve been sending is in your spam.

[00:44:19]  Megan Porta 

 Right.

[00:44:19]  Chris Panteli 

 Also if you run in a business and you’ve got not client maybe in the food space, but certainly like you know, maybe you’ve had people buy your courses or your recipe books and they’re trying to get in touch with you. Like your email is important. So yeah, look into that, that start answering and engaging with journalists and don’t be afraid as well to especially in your guy space.

[00:44:38]   

 Don’t be afraid to network leverage. So this is something else that I teach as well, especially for tightly defined niches and groups and this works amazingly well. So personally we’re of the SEO thought that multiple, multiple links from the same domain is a good thing because if you’re getting linked to from BBC Food Guide, you know, every week for a year, that is every week for a year telling Google the BBC likes your website every time you get a really big link, then that means Google recrawls your site.

[00:45:10]   

 It like looks, really looks at your pages, possibly re indexes or puts higher in its index your existing ranking keywords. However, if you are looking for some link diversification, let’s say you’ve impressed a journalist. What is happening now more than ever is journalists will come directly back to you. So they’ll say, Megan, your quotes last week were fantastic.

[00:45:31]   

 Thank you so much. Here is a link to the article. I’m working on another article this week. Would you like to provide quotes for it? You might say yes I would and you’ll give them quotes and then you get featured again in the article. Now they will keep coming back to you because they’re lazy.

[00:45:44]   

 They don’t want to have to sift through a billion emails that is potentially AI spam. When they know that they’ve got the lovely Megan Porta who can write them a wonderful pitch and they can just include you, you. But when you have done this a few times, then is no harm in saying to the journalist, I’m super busy this week.

[00:46:00]   

 You caught me at a really busy period. I’ve got loads of friends in this space. Is there any way you’d be interested in me putting you in touch with a friend? And then if you’re in a community and you’re all doing that, then you have the ability to, to pass those opportunities alongside along to each other.

[00:46:16]  Megan Porta 

 That’s really great too. Okay, I’m curious about trends. Last question. What do you see in the world of link building? Is this, this going to continue to be very important? Is it going to fade away? What are your thoughts?

[00:46:28]  Chris Panteli 

 I think it’s, it’s still important now. I think it’s still going to be important in the near future. From an SEO perspective, I think Google’s dominance will fade slightly. Having said that, they are sitting on all of the data. So even with all of these AI models and whatnot like Google holds more data than, than, than anyone.

[00:46:53]   

 So I don’t think it’s game over for Google. However, I think brand building and visibility in other platforms and building and positioning any business that we do from now going into the future is going to, is going to be super dependent on one’s ability to build and maintain a brand. And therefore I think digital PR and appearing in the media and in tier one publications is going to be important for reasons outside of just SEO.

[00:47:21]   

 So while I don’t think it’s for now, I think digital PR link building is killer for SEO. I think as we progress, if you’ve got a food website and you’re also, you’re getting traffic from Google but you’ve also got like a really active TikTok account, Instagram account and you’re selling a book on Amazon and you’re doing courses, then you are already doing a great job at building a brand.

[00:47:41]   

 And to build and maintain a brand you need to be doing digital PR and wider PR. So I think it’s going to be important but for maybe differing reasons, but also have no idea. I mean if you’d have asked me 12 months ago, might have given you a different.

[00:47:56]  Megan Porta 

 I don’t know.

[00:47:56]  Chris Panteli 

 Yes, too fast changing, right? Yeah.

[00:48:00]  Megan Porta 

 Now if somebody doesn’t want to do the DIY thing and they want help with all of this, does Linkifi help to do all of the PR?

[00:48:09]  Chris Panteli 

 Yeah, I mean we, we could do it all for you. Like I said, you can 100% do this yourself but it is very well, the more time you give to it, the more in time intensive it becomes. But that is not to say you can’t do on your own. You 100% can go and do it on your own.

[00:48:25]   

 If you do all the things that I said and if you dedicate that sort of weekly or monthly time to pitching and you handle the rejection knowing that it’s not you, it’s just, it’s stiff, it’s stiff competition and you just keep going then eventually you will get, get what you’re trying to build.

[00:48:42]   

 But if you don’t want that pressure and that your time is better spent elsewhere, then we do it for you. That’s what we do. We will pitch the media as you and win the links for you going back to your website. So yeah, I’ve also got a cheat sheet which basically covers everything that I just went through.

[00:48:58]   

 So anyone can go and get that for free. Linkifi.io/cheat-sheet. And yeah, I mean if you want to, I think in there actually I do offer like a free strategy call. So if you get that cheat sheet and you did want to just have like a chat for me to look at your website and just sort of give you some pointers, it’s 10 minute free call, no obligation, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[00:49:18]   

 I can happy to do that as well.

[00:49:20]  Megan Porta 

 Awesome. Anything else you think is worth mentioning, Chris, before we say goodbye? This was amazing.

[00:49:26]  Chris Panteli 

 Now I’m hungry. Now we’ve been talking about food blogs.

[00:49:30]  Megan Porta 

 That usually happens when you talk to food bloggers. People get hungry pretty quickly. Well, thank you so much.

[00:49:36]  Chris Panteli 

 I’m intrigued to ask you how everyone is doing, how the space is?

[00:49:40]  Megan Porta 

 Yeah, I think the food space got hit pretty hard. Some people got hit pretty hard, some people did not in 2024. So it was kind of hit or miss. And it did seem to be people who didn’t have as well established sites and maybe had. I hate to say this because it’s like, it’s kind of a slap in the face because we’re all writing such quality content.

[00:50:05]   

 So to say, to imply that somebody isn’t writing quality content is like. No, I’m not saying that. But yeah, it just seems to be like newer ish sites that got hit and those sites have had to go back and kind of like go through their about pages and you know, go through their content and make sure that their expertise was established and like really writing through posts.

[00:50:30]   

 And then things have rebounded for those people. That’s good for the most part. But I would say overall, compared to other industries, it sounds like we’ve done fairly well. Like you said, people are still wanting food information and they want that information from humans, it seems like, which is great for us.

[00:50:49]  Chris Panteli 

 Yeah, well, I’m. I mean we’re all, especially in this industry, I suppose we’re. We’re seeing our own habits change. And like I have got Perplexity on my phone and I will ask Perplexity certain stuff, but I’ve got a Thai wife and I will often try and find like different recipes and stuff to.

[00:51:04]   

 Or like I’ll try and cook us something like that’s like an English dish or I’m also half Cypriots, like a Greek dish and stuff. I will always go to a website. I want to see like a website by, by a blogger who’s got pictures and they’re like, that’s what they do. And I go, oh, okay, I’m definitely gonna do this.

[00:51:20]   

 So it’s interesting to see. But I think search habits will. Will change. But I don’t think search will change. It’s just where we search. So it will be interesting to see the events. But yeah, but thank you so much for having me on, Megan.

[00:51:31]  Megan Porta 

 Yeah, it was so great. And then I want you to mention quote or words of inspiration. Do you have something to end with?

[00:51:37]  Chris Panteli 

 No. You did mention this for. I haven’t. I don’t know what to say. Just keep on going. Can I say that?

[00:51:42]  Megan Porta 

 Absolutely. Don’t give up. Don’t let the Google madness keep you from. 

[00:51:50]  Chris Panteli

Keep cooking. 

[00:51:51]  Megan Porta

Keep cooking. There you go. And then mention one more time where people can find that cheat sheet that you mentioned.

[00:51:57]  Chris Panteli 

 Yeah. Linkifi.io/cheat-sheet.

[00:52:02]  Megan Porta 

 And Linkifi is spelled L I N K I F I.

[00:52:05]  Chris Panteli 

 That’s it. Yep.

[00:52:17]  Megan Porta 

 Okay. Awesome. Well, thank you, Chris, so much. It was such a pleasure. And we appreciate all of the value you shared today. 

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Eat Blog Talk. Don’t forget to rate and review Eat Blog Talk on your favorite podcast player. Thank you. And I will see you next time.